If there’s one thing CNN anchor Abby Phillip wants you to know, it’s that she “understands” the MAGA movement — because she talks to its supporters “every single day.” At least, that’s the claim she made during her recent appearance on the Pod Save America podcast, where she attempted to bridge the chasm between legacy media and a political base it has spent the better part of a decade misunderstanding, misrepresenting, and — let’s be honest — mocking.
But what Phillip sees as a revelation, millions of voters see as a patronizing, late-stage media epiphany.
According to Phillip, MAGA supporters live in “information silos” — closed-off echo chambers that make it hard for them to “see outside” their own worldview. It’s a familiar trope, recycled endlessly by pundits who still believe the problem is that Trump supporters aren’t getting enough CNN, enough NPR, or enough legacy journalism approved by academia and Twitter blue-checks.
Let’s be clear: Trump voters know full well what’s being said about them. They just don’t buy it. That’s not ignorance — that’s rejection.
Phillip went on to suggest that Trump supporters are mostly just interested in “winning” and that they’re “willing to gloss over a lot of conduct” to stay on the winning team. This isn’t a new line of thinking — it’s the old “they’re too tribal to care” explanation, dressed up in polite language. And she didn’t stop there. She even pointed to CNN’s own Scott Jennings as an example of a conservative voice who, in her view, gives Trump a pass because “he keeps winning.”
But the irony of Phillip’s comments is hard to miss.
Here is a CNN anchor — working for a network that spent years inside its own airtight information silo, pumping out narratives that collapsed under the weight of reality — now lecturing Trump supporters for being too insular. This is the same network that breathlessly pushed the Steele dossier, treated the Mueller report like gospel, and clutched pearls over Russian Facebook memes while ignoring stories that didn’t align with its worldview until they were impossible to deny.
And now, in 2025, we’re supposed to believe that the problem is that Trump voters aren’t curious enough?
Even more tone-deaf was Phillip’s promotional tour for her new Jesse Jackson biography, during which she defended the inclusion of conservative guests on her show by telling Charlamagne tha God: “Just so you know, half the country voted for Trump.”
That line — “just so you know” — says it all. It’s not a statement of inclusion; it’s a concession of defeat. After years of dismissing Trump voters as fringe extremists and “deplorables,” the legacy press is slowly beginning to acknowledge that, yes, these Americans exist, and no, they’re not going anywhere.
Phillip deserves some credit for at least attempting to engage with the movement on air — CNN NewsNight has hosted more right-leaning voices than some of its competitors — but her analysis still leans on the same outdated assumptions: that Trump supporters are emotionally reactive, ideologically rigid, and too stuck in their own silo to understand nuance.
What she and others in her position consistently miss is that the Trump base has seen the alternatives — and rejected them precisely because of what they saw. They’ve watched decades of bipartisan corruption, endless wars, forgotten middle-class towns, open-border chaos, rising costs, and media narratives that treat them like a problem to be solved rather than citizens to be served.
If anyone’s still stuck in an information silo, it’s not the Trump base.
