My Violent Morning, Whipple v. Clooney & Trump’s Shakedown

An update on George Clooney's 'Morning Joe' Meltdown

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

Wow, did I have a morning. I was walking to the Alice + Olivia store in the Meatpacking District to shop for the White House Correspondents’ Association events next weekend, when I witnessed a swarm of seven to eight young people attacking a single security guard outside of the Lululemon store on West 14th St. It was shocking to see how coordinated the attack was—there appeared to be at least six people taking on one man, with an outer ring of two to three women protecting them while they mercilessly punched him, dragged him, pummeled him, and threw him up against a window. I thought they were going to kill him on the sidewalk. It was so heinous. All over athleisure! Perhaps it’s a personal defect that I would run toward danger, but I couldn’t watch a man die on the street. I tried to intervene and that’s when a woman in the outer ring punched me in the face. Luckily, she couldn’t land a hard one and merely hit the side of my face. (I’m fine, just startled.)

When I realized I couldn’t do anything, and that I wasn’t safe, I called 911, and started recording at a distance so I could hand over evidence to the police and the store. When they noticed I was recording, the outer ring of women got aggressive toward me again. The group fled when the police showed up, and I stayed around to check on the guard who stood back up even though he was disoriented.

I’m sharing this because it was a coordinated attack with an outer ring protecting an inner ring that had greatly outnumbered one man who was just doing his job. Here’s the clip in case you see something like this happening. Unfortunately, I’m sure it wasn’t the first or last time. Be safe.

This is a hard pivot, but I recorded a show with Rikki Schlott—a Gen Z whisperer who is part of Bill Maher’s Club Random network—where we played a game called “Tara Cards,” in which we try to predict the future based on our reporting and analysis. Schlott, who hails from my old stomping grounds, The New York Post, expressed her concerns over how Trump has been shaking down universities like a mob boss and gives her grade for his administration, and it’s low. This was recorded on April 9, so you can judge our clairvoyance for yourself.

Here’s an update on George Clooney’s Morning Joe Meltdown, which was first featured in The Red Letter and on my Youtube channel with the legendary journalist Chris Whipple, who was sharing reporting from his new book Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History. Well, since Clooney has been making the rounds to promote his Broadway show Good Night and Good Luck, Jake Tapper asked if he cursed out a Morning Joe producer after Mika Brzezinski said on the show that President Obama was behind his New York Times op-ed calling on President Biden to drop out of the race. Clooney denied it, but went even further: