Don Lemon Scoffs at Explosive Kellyanne Interview: ’20 Minutes of My Life’ I Can’t Get Back

“Power is a powerful aphrodisiac, is all I have to say.”

Don Lemon kept Chris Cuomo for a few minutes in between their CNN shows to do a post-mortem on Cuomo’s half-an-hour-long interview with White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.

Lemon summed up the ​unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object interview with a chuckle, “I cannot get these 20 minutes of my life back.”

Cuomo sternly responded, “I hope this was edifying for you and you saw how difficult it is to get even the most obvious falsehoods and proof of lying to be owned and accepted by this White House.”

Both agreed that Conway’s rhetoric dangerously vilifies Trump’s critics in the ​media, and distracts from the growing list of scandals surrounding him.

But Lemon admonished Cuomo for being too charitable with ​Conway on this point:

Towards the end of the interview — and after strongly refusing to concede that any of the president’s statements in regards to the numerous investigations in which he’s currently entangled have proved to be false — Conway asked Cuomo, “Do you think I need to be in the White House?”

“No,” Cuomo answered sharply.

“Why do you think I’m there?” she asked.

“Because I think you think you’re doing the right thing,” Cuomo said.

With this Lemon later took issue.

“We will have to differ on that one,” Lemon told Cuomo. “Power is a powerful aphrodisiac, is all I have to say.”

Cuomo pushed back: “I do believe that [Conway] believes that [she is doing the right thing],” he said. “I also believe that they’re playing lots of bad games. They’e trying to turn things back on us. They’re trying to make us seem like we are a ​problem in this country.”

Cuomo also snapped at Fox News, where Trump received ​kid-glove treatment in the aftermath of a legally challenging week. (​CNN’s senior media reporter Brian Stelter even compiled a full list of the soft-ball questions the president faced in Fox, as his two former close associates — Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen — faced convictions for corruption.)

“I’m sorry the president does get a pass when he goes to the mothership for interviews, and that’s why they go there more,” Cuomo told Lemon. “We will challenge them, because that’s the job. Truth matters. And the mistake is to think you can scare us away from it. Won’t happen.”

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