Exclusive: Lunch and Conversation with Former CNN Anchor Jim Acosta

How a Veteran Journalist Walked Out of CNN One Day to Find More Fame and Fortune the Next

Last Wednesday, I got to have lunch with a journalist I’ve admired for decades at a restaurant I’ve longed to visit. Since people describing the meals they’ve had is almost as tedious as describing the dream they had last night, the details are in a box on the side. I’m sparing you the sound of my mother playing in my frontal lobe while eating at a restaurant where the napkins don’t shred. “You know there are children starving in China, don’t you?”

Margaret Carlson and Jim Acosta at Le Diplomate in Washington, D.C.

It was in the line of duty (Mom) that I was at La Diplomate. I came to interview veteran journalist Jim Acosta, who distinguished himself at three networks over three decades and just went rogue. It turns out the restaurant is not a judgy place that offers a Dad tie to the underdressed. No brows furrowed when I entered in yoga pants and clogs. No Ladies Who Lunch but a roomful of people happy to still have jobs in Trump’s Washington. Tomorrow, like tens of thousands of others, anyone of them could be pouring boiling water over ramen noodles at their kitchen counter.

Acosta’s been making news in addition to reporting it. He left CNN at the end of January when the show he anchored was moved to a decidedly inferior later hour. He left amicably and surprised himself by quickly launching a podcast. A bigger surprise: he loves it, and podcasting loves him.

Acosta is not to four-star-dining born. He’s the son of a Cuban refugee who came here as a child in the 60s when the country didn’t track down 10-year olds fresh from removal of a brain tumor and return them to Mexico. Acosta’s father grew up in a Virginia suburb where teachers gave him extra help after class and churches provided warm coats in winter. Acosta Sr. got a job at Safeway, married, and raised his precocious son to graduate from James Madison University and report for the local radio station. The graduate crisscrossed the country working at network affiliates until landing at the CBS mothership in New York, where he had mentors like Bob Schieffer and Dan Rather.

CNN noticed the kid covering the 2004 Kerry campaign and lured him to Washington, where he rose from lead correspondent covering presidential campaigns to senior White House correspondent to a show of his own. He became that face you turn around in the airport to look at, muttering, ”Don’t I know that guy?”

For 18 years, he flourished until journalism hit the skids and the days of broadcasters flying reporters to cover wars and hurricanes and campaigns were winding down. CNN boasts of being ‘the most trusted name in news’ but it takes trusted names like Acosta to give meaning to a slogan cobbled together on Madison Avenue. He showed up, broadcast by broadcast, for three decades, “telling it like it is” as Dan Rather would have it.

Acosta is one of the lucky ones. He left CNN with nostalgia for a day gone by, a box of his kid’s pictures, and two decades worth of press passes he’d always meant to frame. Walking out, he was proud of the corners he hadn’t cut–he called out Trump’s lies when he told them (the Washington Post tabulated 30,000). Asking a second follow-up question annoyed Trump so much one day, he ordered Acosta out of the White House and to leave his credentials behind. It wasn’t until a judge ordered that he be reinstated that Acosta was in the press room again. That was in the day when Trump followed the orders of unelected judges.

Now as Patient Zero in the new media landscape, Acosta gets a lot of calls asking him how he made it out alive in such a bleak environment. “It’s a very scary time, people are getting laid off and media companies are afraid of the current occupant of the Oval Office. I can’t think of a journalist in Washington, with a few exceptions, who doesn’t have Job Fear. It’s an epidemic.”

Acosta hoped, like Kevin Costner, that if he built it, they would come and then Substack called and he built “it” quickly. Before he got to spend more time with his family, he was working full time in a studio in his house, “so user-friendly, even I could handle it.” It was a Brave New World. “At my old place, the rule was ‘never let the anchor touch the equipment. Here, every day, I touch the equipment.”

Gear is one thing, like a new set of Calloways to improve a slice, but it takes a quick mind, a memory of Iowa caucus results from decades ago, and a sense of humor to succeed in a foreign form. When four o’clock rolled around one recent afternoon, Acosta had potential 2008 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on the show. The question arises how many people can you get to watch an interview of Buttigieg at four o’clock in the afternoon? A New York cartoon captured the challenge. “There are plenty of podcasts out there. But, are there enough podcast listeners?”

Yes and yes. As he walked out the door, as CNN was coincidentally suffering record low ratings, he had two million followers on social media. His college-age son discovered more than seven times that. “‘Dad, there's a video of you leaving your office,” he reported. '“It has 15 million views.’” The Daily Mail calculates that his Substack amassed 282,000 subscribers by the time the lights were adjusted. The paper estimated he’s on pace to earn over a million dollars his first year.

It only took him 30 years to become an overnight sensation. CNN boasts of being “the most trusted name in news” but it takes trusted names like Acosta to give meaning to a slogan cobbled together by Madison Avenue. He showed up, broadcast by broadcast, “telling it like it is” as his former colleague Dan Rather would put it and it turned out he could take it with him..

But in Trump’s second term, telling it like it is has fallen out of fashion. CBS pushed out its president of news, and the renowned executive producer of 60 Minutes left for higher ground when Trump sued over an interview of Kamala Harris he didn’t like. To get rid of a lawsuit, Shari Redstone is willing to pay Trump up to $50 million so she can sell its news subsidiary unencumbered. ABC suits settled a frivolous suit that named George Stephanopoulos to get Trump off their backs.

There’s nothing Trump likes about NBC or its cheeky child, MSNBC. His FCC chair quickly notified parent Comcast that it would be “shutting down any programs that promote invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”

CPJ calls on White House to restore credentials of CNN correspondent Acosta- Reuters

The CNN network that defended Acosta against Trump removing his credentials during his first term warned journalists in the second to “avoid preset assumptions.” He went on, “Typecasting is bad journalism.” In other words, reporters, go to your room.

Acosta has little trouble getting guests, save Republican Senators who are on the take. Like the Judiciary gave Trump blanket immunity for any crime he might commit in office, the Senate gives Trump their scared puppy obedience. Almost every one of them hates tariffs and knows they could never get away with the crypto scam Trump and his sons are running but they head for the hills when they see a reporter coming. Acosta, who covered the place for years finds them “dead inside, how you look when your soul is sucked out of your body by zombies in the Night of the Living Dead, or clones from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Spot on but gross, but I notice he’s not finishing his chicken salad while I’m no longer so sure about dessert. “These guys sold us down the river to get in league with a con artist.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, if you’re reading this, Acosta would like to catch you on a day when your soul is back in your body and you remember the stand up guy you were when John McCain was alive.

Acosta has no attitude, no anchor airs, not a whiff of hairspray an hour from hosting the Democratic Representative from New Mexico, Melanie Stansbury. She’s the one who stood on the aisle at President Trump's address to a joint session of Congress with a sign that read “This is not normal,” as he passed by. Trump devotee Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden wasn’t going to stand for that. He lunged across the aisle, ripped the sign out of her hands, and tossed pieces of it in the air, proving Stansbury’s point.

It’s not normal that Trump won’t agree that his oath requires him to uphold and defend the Constitution. Or taking Vladimir’s side in the Ukraine war and scolding its president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for starting it. Putin bombed the city even harder after, knowing he’d played Trump like a balalaika.

Acosta caught a whiff that Trump wasn’t done with Washington on his flight to Mar-a-Lago. At Joint Base Andrews, Acosta witnessed a farewell befitting “a dictator going into exile. There were cannons firing, Don Jr. and Eric crying, Trump saluting, I don't know who.”

All this because Trump was the sorest loser the country had ever seen. “He refused to go to Biden's inauguration. That's how big a baby he is.” On the plane, an aide came back to brief the press. “I don't think you should rule out any kind of a future for him”. Really, you’re saying this now when Trump is leaving behind a Capitol on fire. The aide went on “he's not very good at sitting still.’” Acosta heard a voice inside of him say, “ Oh, No.’”

It’s hard to remember those days when Trump running for a second term was as unlikely as Elon Musk having a vasectomy. Then Trump was a latter-day Napoleon leaving Elba for Paris. Now he’s softening the ground for a third? That’s a lot of “not sitting still.”

Acosta wasn't born on January 6; he’s seen a president foment a riot to stay in office. “It doesn't matter what the Constitution says. He will say,’ I'm running, and they'll start putting his name on ballots in various states, and the Democrats will say, ‘You can't do that’ and try to take him to court, and he'll play it like he did the last time” Acosta predicts, it will be “Let's go to this court. Okay, now let’s go to that appellate court, now we go to the Supreme Court. Let's see what they say is in the Constitution.” Acosta goes into a semi-trance, “What if it's 7-2 by then?

Some mornings Trump, must ask himself “what would Putin do?’’. The man whose bone spurs kept him out of the military is throwing himself a military parade on his birthday, June 14, that cooler heads than Pete Hegseth’s nipped in the bud his first term. It’s a show of weapons and the soldiers who fire them that will easily cost the taxpayer $45 million. That’s not counting the damage to Washington streets that 28 M1 Abrams tanks weighing 60 tons apiece and Bradley Fighting Vehicles will cause. All to please a president so salute-happy he salutes a stranger.

Acosta loved his years at three networks too much to say that he’s escaped in the nick of time. But I’m not. Many reporters saw their owners standing on the inauguration platform like sheep, wondering how they were going to keep their rambunctious employees in line. Soon after Jeff Bezos sent an order to the Washington Post to cool it, causing an exodus from the newsroom. "Telling it like it is” is a clear and present danger to the bottom line.

The lunch was good, and so is Acosta’s podcast, unshackled from owners now owned by Trump. He has a nearly sold-out live event at the Lincoln Theater this week with Rosie O’Donnell. In addition to Buttigieg, he’s had Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Sen. Adam Schiff, Molly Jong Fast, Michael Steele, and Katie Couric on, and twice Michael Fanone, the police officer who had a heart attack after being dragged down the Capitol steps, beaten with pipes, burned by chemicals, and threatened with his own gun on Jan. 6, lest we forget.

So often, the best guy doesn’t win. As Acosta ran out to warm up his wholly owned and operated equipment, I raised my cup of decaf espresso to the guy who did.