We know you’ve all been watching CNN a lot more lately now that April Ryan’s on there.

But, given that she was at Sean Spicer’s daily briefing today, suffering through people wasting questions by about hockey while a $16 million dollar MOAB killed God knows how many people in Afghanistan, you might not have tuned in for Alisyn Camerota’s show.

Luckily for you, we did.

The contenders today were Symone Sanders, former Bernie Sanders press secretary, and Jeffrey Lord, a former aide to Ronald Reagan.

A Reagan aide and a Sanders aide: the drama writes itself. Which, is, one images, why some bright young CNN producer paired them against each other.

The topic? Trumpcare.

Lord started things off blaming Democrats for any potential losses in coverage Trumpcare could result in. 

Sanders wasn’t having any of that. “The president sees millions of people that are benefiting from health insurance that are on the ACA, and he sees bargaining chips. He doesn't see lives. He doesn't see that he's putting people in danger.”

Camerota jumped in to play devil’s advocate, “How do you know that the president sees these people as bargaining chips? This is how he does it. He says something, generally inflammatory or at least it gets a lot of people's attention … and then he backs off it.”

Sanders had a quick rebuttal, “What he's saying is, ‘Look, if you don't give me what I want, I'm withholding stuff from everybody.’ And that is going to actually hurt people. I don't think we can use this inflammatory rhetoric, Alisyn, when we're dealing with people's lives.”

And then we get to the meat of it. The crazy part. Lord jumped in with this gem, “Think of President Trump as the Martin Luther King of healthcare.”

Yes, yes, yes. You read that right.

Now, I’ve no words, so, if you don’t mind, I’d like to call up our collective Greek chorus for some input.

 

Sounds about right, sounds about right.

And wait. We didn’t even address Sanders’ response. How did she react to this foolishness?

Well, she proceeded to jump down Jeffrey’s throat and do a tap dance on his liver. “Jeffrey, you do understand that Dr. King was marching for civil rights because people that looked like me were being beaten. Dogs were being sicced on them. Basic human rights were being withheld from these people merely because the color of their skin. So let's not equate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winner, to the vagina-grabbing President Donald Trump.”

You tell him, Symone.

Lord tried to save himself with some quickly gathered argument, saying that what he meant was that Trump is trying to put pressure on politicians like King did. “President Kennedy did not want to introduce the civil rights bill because he said it wasn't popular, he didn't have the votes for it, et cetera. Dr. King kept putting people in the streets in harm's way to put the pressure on so that the bill would be introduced.”

How Trump doesn’t more closely compare to Kennedy in that scenario, we’ll probably never know.

If you want to see the exchange for yourself, check out the video below.

Alisyn Camerotaapril ryanBernie-SandersCNNDonald trumpJeffrey LordMLKSymone-Sanderstrumpcare