CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta on Thursday reiterated how safe it is in McAllen, Texas, after he faced mockery on social media for inadvertently making the case for President Donald Trump’s border wall.
Eventually, Trump himself weighed in.
The brouhaha began when Acosta took to Twitter showing video of himself walking alongside a steel barrier and saying how the area was “pretty tranquil.”
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“Here are some of the steel slats that the president’s been talking about,” Acosta told his 1.16 million Twitter followers. “But, as we’re walking along here, we’re not seeing any kind of imminent danger.”
Many conservatives on Twitter pointed out that Acosta unintentionally boasted that walls actually work. Some, including Donald Trump Jr., called his remarks a “self-own.”
That led to a fiery back and forth between the CNN reporter and the president’s son, over whether the barriers already in place were enough to provide safety.
Later on, Acosta appeared on his network and doubled down on how safe McAllen was, refuting President Trump’s claim that the southern border was “under attack.”
“Here in McAllen, Texas, this community’s consistently been ranked one of the safest communities in the country. So, the president picked sort of a curious spot to make that case,” Acosta told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. “There’s not a wall all along McAllen, Texas. There are various spots where there’s no wall at all. There’s fencing, there’s chain-linked fencing, I went to an RV park this evening where there are RVs right along the river where people can play shuffleboard and drive around in their golf carts and they’re not being besieged by convoys and caravans of migrants coming in and causing all kinds of crime and mayhem.”
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Meanwhile, President Trump had some fun of his own, trolling Acosta on Twitter.
The “Dear Diary” meme emerged last year in reaction to a tweet Acosta made about Trump not responding to his plea not to be called the “enemy of the people.”
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