It a curious business strategy. I’ll give CNN that.

Despite coming in a distant third in the cable news ratings, a CNN host invited two guests on his Saturday show where the trio smugly set about mocking those who support the president.

Um, last time I checked, almost 63 million Americans voted for President Trump. You would think the struggling network wouldn’t want to alienate that many potential viewers.

CNN doesn’t care. It’s clearly chasing the rabid Trump-hater vote.

Host Don Lemon and his guests discussed a dust-up between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and some NPR reporter no one’s ever heard of because public radio has a microscopic audience, smaller even than CNN’s.

Which is how Wajahat Ali, who helped launch Al Jazeera America, and Rick Wilson, a Trump-loathing Republican strategist, came to bookend Lemon. The trio gleefully embarked on a racist rant aimed at white Americans who support the president.

They used mock Southern accents to ridicule Trump voters. Accused them of being ignorant. Unable to read and write. It was clearly scripted, the hilarity was forced.

By the end of the show, the three CNN stooges were in hysterics, literally wiping tears from their eyes. At one point, Lemon collapsed in laughter.

“I needed that,” he gasped.

Here, see for yourself in case you need a reminder of why you never watch CNN:

Boomer rubes. Nice.

Imagine for a moment a Fox news anchor inviting guests to mock African Americans or Hispanics with similarly ignorant accents and slurs. There would be calls for heads to roll.

The segment was so over the top that a former CNN producer, Steve Krakauer, took to Twitter.

This cringe-inducing clip will make it into many GOP campaign ads this year, giving voters a peek at how the anti-Trump Mensa members view their fellow Americans.

It’s one thing to attack the president. He’s fair game. It’s quite another to lob grenades at the president's supporters. That’s dumb. They’re the very people the left needs to win over if they want to unseat the president in November.

This was reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s regrettable “deplorables” remark that made her look like an out-of-touch snob.

Last week, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin - once that paper’s token conservative, who’s now moved way to the left - used Twitter to insult the millions of folks who watch America’s number one cable news network, Fox.

“R arguments are so patently dumb and easy to refute,” she Tweeted during the impeachment trial. “They say them for Fox News zombies. The rest of us should call them out as obvious lies”

Fox news zombies. Sigh.

Word of advice for those on the left: Ridiculing ordinary voters can backfire.

Just ask Hillary.

Postscript: At about 10 p.m. Tuesday, Lemon took to the airwaves with something that looked like a hostage video to offer an apology of sorts: “I don’t believe in belittling people,” Lemon said, adding that he laughed at the jokes, not the people being mocked. “In the moment I didn’t catch everything that was said.”

Nice try.