President has long used late TV mogul’s creation as a punching bag

President Donald Trump on Wednesday paid tribute to CNN founder turned philanthropist and environmentalist Ted Turner, who died at the age of 87, but couldn't resist getting in a shot along the way at the groundbreaking news organization he created.

Writing on Truth Social after news of Turner’s death was broken by CNN, Trump called the late billionaire “one of the Greats of All Time” while claiming he had been “personally devastated” in the wake of his decision to sell the cable network to Time Warner because the owners had taken “his ‘baby’ and destroyed it” by making it “woke and everything is is not all about.”
Trump then pivoted to calling the incoming owners of CNN, right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison, “wonderful people” and expressing hope that the pair “will be able to bring it back to its former credibility and glory.”
Writing once more of Turner, he again praised him as “one of the Greats of Broadcast History” and said he’d been “a friend of mine.”
“Whenever I needed him, he was there, always willing to fight for a good cause,” he added.

Though Trump and Turner both traveled in high-flying media and financial circles in the 1980s, the president’s description of the late icon as something other than “woke” flies in the face of Turner’s own history.

The billionaire mogul, who pioneered cable television in the 1970s and 1980s before devoting his assets to environmentalism and reviving interest in professional sports, was famously liberal and outspoken on numerous political matters.

He once called it a “disgrace” that the U.S.

was “the only first-world country that doesn't have universal healthcare” during one 2016 interview, and at a Reuters event in 2006 he suggested it is hypocritical for the U.S.

to criticize Iran for wanting to have nuclear weapons.

He said at the time: “They're a sovereign state.

We have 28,000.

Why can't they have 10?

We don't say anything about Israel‍—‌they've got 100 of them approximately‍—‌or India or Pakistan or Russia.”
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