CNN’s Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon got positively giddy at the prospect of President Donald Trump doing a live TV “fireside chat” readout of his infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “It would be so amazing.”

The unorthodox, to say the least, ideas came from Trump himself in a new Washington Examiner interview, in which the president slammed the impeachment inquiry as a “con job, a sham” and pledged zero cooperation. As part of the White House counter-programming strategy, Trump floated the idea of a live TV retelling of the call summary.

“At some point, I’m going to sit down, perhaps as a fireside chat on live television, and I will read the transcript of the call,” Trump told the Examiner, while also teasing the idea of selling T-shirts with “Read the Transcript” printed on them, as a way to fight back against the House Democrats’ impeachment investigation. Trump did not elaborate if, in this potential fireside chaat, he would also be reading Zelensky’s portion of the call.

But just the idea was absurd enough for Cuomo and Lemon to lose their composure during their Thursday night on-air handoff.

“Can we please have a fireside chat? I want a fireside chat,” Lemon begged, putting his hands together as if in prayer.

“What is the president’s ability to read the whole transcript without pausing to comment?” Cuomo chimed in, giggling.

“You’re reading my mind. It would be so amazing,” Lemon said while laughing.

Breaking into a terrible, (Italian?) Trump impression, Cuomo parodied the president’s rambling speaking style: “And I say, I would like you to do us a favor. You know, a favor, a favor, I didn’t expect anything. Let me go on…”

“What I meant there, when I wrote this book, by the way, I wrote 12 books and they were all great,” Lemon said, matching Cuomo’s horrendous impersonation of Trump with one of his own, while Cuomo cracked up.

“This is where we are right now. It’s crazy,” Lemon said.

“So I said to him, Z, cuz you know I call him that because he loves me, they all hated Obama, they love me,” Cuomo continued as Trump, sending Lemon in a fit of laughter. “And I said, Z, you know, you don’t do much for us, we do a lot for you. But now, you should, you got bad problems there.”

“So I said to myself, ‘Self,'” Lemon replied, as Cuomo broke up yet again.

 

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/2puQewD