CNN Hosts Twitter Troll Comfortably Smug, Who Peddled Hurricane Sandy Lies

CNN anchor Dana Bash on Thursday faced some backlash online for prominently featuring a conservative Twitter troll and podcaster who first rose to prominence by peddling disinformation during Hurricane Sandy.

During Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s Inside Politics, Bash welcomed the hosts of Ruthless, a conservative political podcast, to discuss the news that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will step down from GOP leadership this fall.

The Ruthless hosting crew consists of four political operatives, three of who have worked for McConnell: the GOP leader’s former chief of staff Josh Holmes, longtime GOP communications strategist Michael Duncan, and John Ashbrook, their partner at conservative PR firm Cavalry. The fourth host is a Republican operative who goes by the pseudonym Comfortably Smug.

Smug, whose real name is Shashank Tripathi, donned wraparound sunglasses throughout his Thursday appearance on Inside Politics—his modus operandi during Ruthless episodes. Bash notably referred to him only by his social-media pseudonym.

For the most part, Bash spent her two segments with the Ruthless team asking their thoughts on McConnell’s legacy and the future of the GOP, as well as the recent criticism he’s received from far-right senators including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), whom the group described as “classless.” The CNN anchor at one point joked about one of the podcast hosts potentially replacing McConnell as the GOP’s Senate leader.

During the second segment, Bash addressed the various “theories” about the origins of the podcast’s name, saying that “we have the facts right here.” While it has been speculated that the name of the “variety progrum” was a shot at the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as it debuted days after her death, the hosts said it actually came from a 2019 broadcast of Inside Politics. During a panel discussion in that particular episode, New York Times correspondent Carl Hulse said “McConnell and his people are ruthless.”

At the end of the broadcast, Bash turned to Tripathi to gently needle him about his pseudonym while offering him the opportunity to return as a panelist. “Smug? That’s your—I’m guessing your parents didn’t give you that name?” Bash asked with a chuckle.

“That’s what I’m known as, and it makes me and everyone else happy,” Tripathi replied.

“Okay, and you have to come back because we’re running out of time to get into a discussion about the sunglasses,” the CNN host concluded.

Following the chummy sitdown, media observers and Smug’s liberal critics criticized Bash and CNN for giving a friendly platform to the notoriously combative social-media personality.

“CNN could use his real name. We’ve known for it over a decade. His name is Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund analyst/political consultant who moonlights as a vicious far right internet troll,” elections analyst Drew Savicki tweeted after Tripathi’s CNN appearance.

“Just straight-up amplifying right-wing trolls now. Dang that liberal bias,” former Vox staff writer David Roberts added.

“Shashank Tripathi spread misinformation during Superstorm Sandy in New York, which sent more people into a panic,” The Independent’s White House bureau chief Eric Michael Garcia noted. “And he runs a podcast with Mitch McConnell's former chief of staff. He’s not a kid. He’s a hedge fund guy.”

Tripathi deliberately disseminated false rumors in the fall of 2012 that Sandy had caused a total blackout of Manhattan and the New York Stock Exchange to flood, prompting ConEd and local media to refute them. Unfortunately, the rebuttals came after his false claims had already been picked up on news broadcasts. The hedge-fund analyst and GOP political consultant was eventually identified as the man behind the Smug account. He later apologized for the tweets and resigned as campaign manager for then-congressional candidate Christopher R. Wight.

Since then, however, “Comfortably Smug” has only seen his popularity grow. He is largely credited with helping bring the “owning the libs” ethos into the conservative mainstream. Over the years, his targets have included liberal politicians and pundits, as well as media outlets including CNN.

“CNN is very fake news,” Tripathi tweeted last spring. He also quipped in 2021 that Ruthless was “beat[ing] CNN so hard that they’re giving up on opinion,” reacting to an X post claiming the network was focusing solely on news. “Must hurt CNN knowing @RuthlessPodcast has more listeners than they have viewers,” he added.

In October 2022, Tripathi mockingly tweeted that “most CNN journos should be jailed at this point” in response to a liberal Twitter user demanding CNN stop with the “bothsiderism.”

Tripathi’s CNN appearance was widely celebrated by conservatives, who wrote that there was “finally someone worth watching on CNN” and the network was “now MAGA country.”

“Hahahahaha this is awesome,” Newsbusters managing editor Curtis Houck declared. “Get wrecked, libs.”

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