Leave it to CNN to find a way to blame the guy trimming government fat for terrorism.
Thursday night, Erin Burnett sat behind her anchor desk — earnest as ever — and connected two dots that have absolutely no business being on the same map. The topic was a rising terror threat linked to potential hostilities with Iran. Real, serious stuff. The kind of thing that makes intelligence veterans sweat through their dress shirts.
And what did Burnett decide was the root cause? DOGE. Obviously.
“Yeah, but it’s time, of course, with so much chaos, of course, after DOGE and other things,” she said, nodding like she’d just cracked the Da Vinci Code with a crayon.
Let that marinate for a second. Iranian-linked terror networks — organizations that have been plotting against American soil for decades — apparently woke up one morning, saw that Elon Musk was cutting redundant federal contractors, and thought, now’s our shot.
It would be funny if the subject matter weren’t so deadly serious.
The Expert in the Room
To be fair, the actual expert on the panel — CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe — didn’t embarrass himself. He gave a measured, professional assessment of what a heightened Iran threat actually looks like operationally.
“It’s been considered, for many, many years, that we might come to the point of hostilities with Iran,” McCabe said. “And, for that reason, the FBI developed a plan, years ago, of exactly how they would go about assessing the threat climate across the country relative to if hostilities broke out. Well, we’re there. It’s time to take that plan off the shelf and start making sure that we’re doing some of those things that we thought about doing many years ago — contacting sources, reviving old cases, finding people from cases that are over, people who had served their time, and recontacting them. So, this is the sort of activity that we expect, and we hope that the bureau’s engaged in right now. I’m sure they are. And we are likely to see more of this.”
Solid. Sobering. Professional. The kind of answer that makes you glad someone in the room has spent time actually doing the work.
Then Burnett grabbed that perfectly reasonable analysis and drove it straight into the DOGE ditch.
The Liberal Terror Excuse Factory Is Running Overtime
This is the move now. Every bad thing — inflation, crime, instability abroad, your aunt’s bad knee — gets quietly traced back to Trump or something adjacent to Trump. It’s the media’s version of a participation trophy. Something went wrong? Slap a DOGE sticker on it and call it journalism.
The Old Dominion shooting was also raised. Burnett noted the shooter was “on the FBI radar for years,” with one special agent saying the shooter’s ties to ISIS “kept him up at night.” So — the FBI knew. Had eyes on this person. For years.
But sure, Erin. The chaos to blame here is a spreadsheet audit at the Department of Education.
The left can’t have it both ways. They spent years screaming that the FBI was weaponized, bloated, and unaccountable. Now the same institution they wanted to defund-adjacent is suddenly the gold standard — and its failures are DOGE’s fault. The mental gymnastics required for that routine would earn a perfect ten in Paris.
Where This Goes
Here’s the predictable next chapter: if any terror-adjacent incident occurs in the next twelve months, every CNN chyron will read some variation of “Experts Warned DOGE Cuts Created Vulnerability.” The narrative is already being poured into the mold. They’re just waiting for something to pour it over.
Trump streamlined government. He cut the deadwood. He forced agencies to justify their existence with a spreadsheet instead of a sob story. That’s not chaos — that’s called running something like an adult.
Iran’s been a state sponsor of terror since 1979. That’s not a DOGE problem. That’s a forty-seven-year problem that three administrations refused to solve.
But don’t worry — Erin Burnett figured it out in a single toss to commercial.
