Watch: JD Vance Buries CNN as He Discusses ‘The One Thing the President Has Been Unable to Do’

Rarely have an individual and an organization moved along more opposite trajectories than Vice President J.D. Vance and CNN.

For instance, according to The Hill, Vance received a standing ovation on the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday — thanks to a momentous speech he delivered Friday at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

Meanwhile, during a conversation with Newsmax host and CPAC senior fellow Mercedes Schlapp at the same conference, Vance drew more approval from the conservative audience when he joked that the Herculean task of improving CNN’s sagging ratings constituted “the one thing, I think, the president has been unable to do.”

“I don’t even think the press can keep track of all they’re doing,” Schlapp said in a clip posted to the social media platform X.

By that, of course she meant the Trump administration’s breakneck pace of activity.

“Well, speaking of the press, I do think that we’ve had maybe more executive orders than CNN has viewers each night. So, hello to our friends at CNN,” the vice president quipped moments later.

Schlapp and the audience members laughed.

Vance then speculated quite plausibly that CNN had hoped to capitalize on liberal viewers’ hatred of President Donald Trump.

🚨🔥JD Vance just BRUTALIZED Fake News CNN at CPAC:

“We’ve had maybe more executive orders than CNN has viewers.”

“That’s maybe the one thing I think the president has been unable to do — unable to save CNN’s ratings over the last few months.”

He’s so good at this.

😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/zGumRTTj1j

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) February 20, 2025

If CNN did indeed hope to attract new anti-Trump viewers, that strategy so far has failed.

According to the advertising trade publication Adweek, during the week of Feb. 10, CNN saw its overall primetime viewership decline by 4 percent overall and by 11 percent with the crucial age 25-54 demographic.

Moreover, since the same period in 2024 CNN has suffered a 28 percent overall decline in primetime viewership.

Incredibly, CNN’s average of 487,000 primetime viewers ranked a very distant third behind Fox News’s 2,993,000 and MSNBC’s 1,084,000.

Thus, CNN finds itself between a rock and a hard place.

To survive, the network must either attract new viewers or draw from their rivals’ audiences.

In recent months, token conservative commentator Scott Jennings has emerged as a star on CNN.

Unfortunately, Jennings’ common-sense conservatism affects CNN-watching liberals the way holy water affects demons. Those liberals will flee the network, if they have not done so already.

Indeed, perhaps they already have fled. After all, the truly deranged Trump haters already appear on MSNBC. So perhaps CNN could build an audience if its on-air personalities took an even-handed approach and started telling the truth.

That, however, is their problem to solve.

In the meantime, we may enjoy Vance’s ascent to the status of superstar in Trump’s MAGA movement.

The vice president, of course, called out Europe’s authoritarians during his momentous Munich speech on Friday. That speech, judging by subsequent events, signaled the epochal shift in U.S. foreign policy that MAGA has long demanded.

Likewise, internet trolls, hostile establishment interviewers, and Democratic vice presidential candidates have proven no match for the rhetorically gifted Vance.

It is a joy to watch unfold.

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