Former President Donald Trump said network President Jeff Zucker's resignation from CNN on Wednesday offered an opportunity "to put Fake News in the backseat."
Zucker announced his resignation after revealing that he had a relationship with a senior network executive.
"Jeff Zucker, a world-class sleazebag who has headed ratings and real-news-challenged CNN for far too long, has been terminated for numerous reasons, but predominantly because CNN has lost its way with viewers and everybody else,"Â Trump said in a statement released by his Save America joing fundraising committee.
"Now is a chance to put Fake News in the backseat because there may not be anything more important than straightening out the horrendous LameStream Media in our Country, and in the case of CNN, throughout the World. Jeff Zucker is gone — congratulations to all!"
Little more than six weeks ago, Trump predicted Zucker's time at CNN was near an end due to "turmoil" and with the network's ratings at "an all-time low."
"Word is that CNN and its new owners want Jeff Zucker out," Trump wrote in a statement, "not only because of the turmoil of Fredo [Chris] Cuomo, the Don Lemon ('the dumbest man on television') escapades, and so much else, but primarily because his ratings have gone to an all-time low, and the so-called 'network' is rudderless.
"In any event, that's great news for America. Maybe CNN can be brought back to what it was in the good old days of the legendary Ted Turner. Jeff will always bomb, just as he did at NBC years before!"
Cuomo was fired in early December due to his alleged involvement in advising his brother, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., amid sexual harassment allegations and a deadly COVID-19 nursing home mandate.
In August 2019, a man accused Lemon of sexual assault and battery after an incident in a Long Island, New York, bar in the summer of 2018. The case is set to go to court this year.
Zucker had "become a liability" to the network’s parent company WarnerMedia, according to some industry insiders, following his firing of Cuomo ahead of the company’s merger with Discovery.
"Jeff isn’t the supreme ruler anymore as was made clear when they made him fire Cuomo," an unnamed media executive told Fox News Digital. The insider went on to claim that Zucker has "become a liability with his embarrassing defense of liberal activists like Cuomo, Don Lemon, and Jim Acosta."
via newsmax