On Friday night, Mediaite Editor-in-Chief Andrew Kirell went trolling. Unable to go an hour without having his ego stroked, real estate mogul Donald Trump bit. It all started when Trump started attacking CNN, a network on which he has appeared countless times, especially in The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.
“I can’t believe that @CNN would waste time and money with @smerconish – he has got nothing going. Jeff Zucker must be losing his touch!” wrote Trump on Twitter. He later continued, “I hate what has happened to the once great @CNN.”
“Oh good,” Kirell replied to Trump. “You have opinions.”
Two minutes later, Kirell dropped the bait.
Kirell was referring to Matthew Boyle of Breitbart News, who interviewed (and I use that word loosely) — more like took dictation from — Trump on BuzzFeed‘s McKay Coppins and quoted him saying that the married Coppins behaved flirtatiously toward a waitress at his Mar-a-Lago resort and remarked on a number of women there.
But I digress.
Trump, as you can see below, oozes confidence and thinks his late-show would go over smashingly well.
Just two minutes after Kirell’s fake compliment, success! (For the confused, Trump forgot the last set of quotes. His reply is the last sentence.)
“@AndrewKirell: Hey @realDonaldTrump do you think Les Moonves will give you the Late Show? I would get the best ratings of all!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 5, 2014
At 10:15 p.m. Kirell couldn’t help but take a victory lap.
That time I trolled Trump and he turned it around to come off as praise.
— Andrew Kirell (@AndrewKirell) April 5, 2014
The Mirror asked Kirell about feeding Trump’s ego.
“That was lots of fun,” he said by email. “It was only a matter of time before he made some sort of claim that he’s a potential successor, according to sources who gave a quote to Matt Boyle. “I figured I’d expedite the process by trolling him into that self-aggrandizement, saving us all the time of clicking into a Breitbart EXCLUSIVE.”
Kirell explained that Trump’s response to any media news generally boils down to this: “This other person or thing sucks, and I would obviously be better at it. I’m sure if you asked him, he’d tell you he’d make a better novelist than Cormac McCarthy; a better outfielder than Mike Trout; and a better NSA leaker than Edward Snowden. He definitely knows it’s an impossibility, but the sad part is that he might be self-deluded enough to genuinely believe he’d be a great choice to succeed Letterman.”
Note to Mirror readers: Last week, I too, fed Trump’s ego. Could this be a new pastime? See what happened.