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Former Breitbart editor challenges media coverage of Trump

"One thing Trump has benefited from is that the left is constantly reacting to everything he says with an enormous level of passion," Ben Shapiro said.

Ben Shapiro.

The intensity of President Donald Trump's public remarks on controversial issues has ratcheted up alongside the collective indignation some media personalities have expressed in response to it.

That's what former Breitbart News editor Ben Shapiro asserted in a CNN interview on Wednesday night.

"One thing Trump has benefited from is that the left is constantly reacting to everything he says with an enormous level of passion, and I think that's actually a negative," Shapiro told CNN host Don Lemon.

Shapiro was discussing the reaction to Trump's freewheeling rally in Phoenix a day earlier, when Trump relitigated his remarks about the deadly white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month.

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While conservative media outlets largely applauded Trump's remarks on Tuesday night, other commentators called the president's behavior "unhinged," a "disaster," and "downright scary and disturbing."

Trump began his remarks by reading from a script before he lashed out at the journalists and news outlets that covered him. After the Arizona rally, some commentators questioned Trump's fitness for office and his mental health.

Shapiro argued that "the media" tended to take an emotional stance on Trump when the president strays from the teleprompter.

"Instead of doing objective analysis of where he was not telling the truth, they jumped to extraordinary critiques of his mental health and talking about how he was crazy and how he was morally bereft," Shapiro said.

"All that does is it plays to his crowd. His crowd thinks that the media is out to get him. His crowd thinks that the media have a particular emotional animus for him, personally."

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Shapiro pointed to Lemon's own Tuesday-night response to Trump as an example.

Lemon defended his choice to take a position on Trump's fiery remarks at the Phoenix rally but insisted that having a point of view was not the same as being biased or harboring personal hostility toward Trump.

"Whether it's true or not," Shapiro responded, "that's the way a lot of his followers are going to take it."

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