“Essentially, it normalizes hate and it makes it acceptable,” Mendelson said of the tweets.

Indeed, Spencer shared the CNN segment on his Twitter account shortly after it aired.

“The CNN anchors didn’t understand that Spencer was trying to position Trump as a moderate and to mock other white supremacists who supported Trump,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center. “Spencer was saying that Trump was performing racism on Twitter, but that his policies do not go far enough to be considered support for white supremacists goals.”

CNN and Sidner did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, Tapper tweeted that Sidner “covers racists and white supremacists for us (among other subjects) and does a great job. She did a taped package for cnn about the reaction of white supremacists to the president’s tweets.”