Elizabeth Nolan Brown watched Donald Trump’s CNN town hall so you didn’t have to:
Was there any way last night’s televised town hall with former President Donald Trump wasn’t going to turn into one long, free advertisement for his 2024 campaign? Trump lied about the 2020 election and about classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, told the female journalist interviewing him that she was “nasty,” and insulted the woman he was just found liable for sexually abusing (“what kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?”) while insisting he’s never met her. But he did it with his characteristic humor, bravado, and showmanship, a say-anything shtick that many Americans—even those who may not agree with all of his policies or personal decisions—find appealing. And he was given the opportunity to do all this uninterrupted by opposing candidates.
This was CNN giving Trump a chance to put on a nice one-man show—and if that’s what the network wants do to, so be it. But one imagines that’s not actually what folks at CNN wanted to do. It just goes to show how little the media have learned about Trump since he burst into the political arena in 2015.
Complaints from pundits about the very premise of the town hall aren’t hard to come by. The audience was composed of people who plan to vote in the Republican primary who laughed and applauded easily at Trump’s antics. He steamrolled CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins, whom some are criticizing for her trouble pushing back against Trump. (Not everyone agrees, though; Collins was “in an impossible position but did a heroic job,” New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker said.)
Most of the complaints boil down to one underlying thing: CNN simply handing Trump a megaphone to campaign in front of a nationwide audience, for free.
With that megaphone, Trump dared anyone to object that he had changed in the past eight or so years. There was no mistaking in Trump’s performance anything like reflection about his role in the whole Capitol riot fiasco (“one of the big problems was that Nancy Pelosi—crazy Nancy as I affectionately call her, crazy Nancy and the mayor of Washington were charged as you know of security, and they did not do their job,” he said) or less bombast about sexual antics in light of the recent verdict finding him guilty of sexual abuse.
During the trial, he had defended his Access Hollywood tape comments about women letting stars grab them “by the pussy.” He told Collins yesterday, “You would like me to take that back. I can’t take it back because it happens to be true.”
For Trump supporters, it was a lot of red meat. But for swing voters, Trump’s same-old act could backfire. There are a lot of folks who aren’t totally opposed to Trump, or at least really don’t like President Joe Biden, who are also turned off by some of Trump’s excesses—his continued fixation on the 2020 election, for instance. The way he resorts constantly to personal insults. His continued defense of crude comments about women.
The kind of stuff that his base loves is the kind of stuff that makes many moderates wary.
“It was kind of the same old thing, the same old regurgitation. He had a chance to move on from 2020, he didn’t do it,” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper after the town hall. “So if you’re an independent voter, if you’re a suburban mom, all these voters that Republicans are trying to bring back into the mix, I don’t see any of them being convinced.”
“Whenever he was asked about the economy, he gave one brief response on energy policy, but really didn’t address the broad range of things we have in our economy to get it going again,” commented former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is challenging Trump for the Republican nomination.
To the extent that substantive issues came into play, Trump was his usual grab bag of idiosyncratic positions—not all of which are at odds with limited government or libertarian thought. He said Republicans were “going to have to do a default” on debt if Democrats wouldn’t agree to “massive cuts” in spending. He promised—though it’s unclear how this would be accomplished—to end the war in Ukraine “in one day, in 24 hours” if elected president, saying that his position was “I want everyone to stop dying.”
He also promised to bring back migrant family separations at the border. And he said he would only accept the 2024 election results “if I think it’s an honest election.”
Interestingly—and probably shrewdly—Trump would not say whether he would sign into law a federal ban on abortion. Rather, he promised to “make a determination what he thinks is great for the country and what’s fair for the country.”
So did Jim Geraghty:
Last night’s “town-hall meeting” turned into a nationally televised live Trump rally, with intermittent questions from moderator Kaitlan Collins that the former president brushed off, mocked, and ignored. Instead, Trump offered the live audience and those at home an auditory version of his Truth Social rants, bulldozing over Collins’s objections.
Meridith McGraw of Politico reported that the audience “was mostly made up of Republicans who offered cheers and a standing ovation to Trump tonight. Last week, CNN invited the New Hampshire GOP and other state groups to help fill the audience per an email that was passed along.”
The result was an extremely pro-Trump audience at Saint Anselm College. Trump won the New Hampshire primary back in 2016 by almost 20 percentage points more than the second-place finisher, son of a mailman John Kasich. In 2020, 365,654 New Hampshire voters cast their ballots for the incumbent, and the people who showed up last night appeared to rank among Trump’s most ardent fans in the state. I suppose if you’re skeptical or not a fan of Donald Trump, you don’t drive somewhere on a Wednesday night to watch him answer questions for an hour.
This meant that when Trump mocked E. Jean Carroll, the audience laughed and applauded.
Every time Collins challenged Trump, the audience was on his side. When he sneered, “You’re a nasty person, I’ll tell ya,” the audience whooped and applauded.
When Trump insisted he didn’t owe an apology to former vice president Mike Pence for January 6, “because he [Pence] did something wrong. He should’ve put the votes back to the state legislatures and I think we would’ve had a different outcome,” there was no sign anyone in the audience had any objection to the contention that Pence had it coming to him.
Thus, Trump’s “win” was more or less assured the moment he walked through the door.
I’m not going to pick on Collins because she had a tough job — perhaps an impossible one — and a lot of other people are going to rip her today. But CNN wildly underestimated the challenge that seemingly everyone else could see coming. This newsletter, just yesterday: “We all know how much Trump loves being challenged and corrected, so tonight’s town hall could turn into something akin to his first debate with Biden in 2020 — lots of crosstalk, interruptions, and maybe even shouting or heated exchanges.”
With that said, I’m not sure what the value was in asking Trump whether he would commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. He didn’t accept the result of the 2020 election! Last night, he still insisted he had truly won that election and that the presidency had been stolen! Trump accepts election results when he wins, and he rejects them when he loses. Why would anyone expect him to change? And if we know he’s not going to change, what’s the point of asking him that question?
Afterwards, on-air and online, CNN fact-checked Trump . . . for a much smaller audience.
The post-town-hall panel on CNN looked miserable. Our old friend Isaac Schorr scoffed, “Furrow your brow all you want, Mr. Serious Anchor — the same guy who signs your checks just made a multimillion-dollar contribution to Trump 2024 MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
And there’s the rub; it is obvious that within the institution of CNN, Donald Trump is widely seen as a menace to the Constitution, the law, American values, and good sense. The network invited him for a town hall, no doubt relishing the ratings his appearance would generate, but also convinced it could challenge him, keep him in check, expose him, and somehow leave him worse off.
It is likely that the audience at home wasn’t as enthusiastic about Trump’s answers as the Saint Anselm College crowd. And the clips from last night will reach a wider audience than those who were watching live. Non-Trump fans are not likely to be wowed by Trump’s answers, many of which were as much free-association word salad as Vice President Kamala Harris’s ramblings. Here’s how Trump handled a question about gun control:
COLLINS: — in 2023. If you are reelected, are there any new gun restrictions that you would sign into law?
TRUMP: I would do numerous things. For instance, schools, we would harden, very much harden — and also, I’m a very believer — I believe in teachers. I love teachers. I think they’re incredible and they love the children, not quite like the parents, but they love the children in many cases almost as much. Many of these teachers are soldiers, ex- soldiers, ex-policemen. They are people that really understand weapons and you don’t need — 5 percent of the teachers would be more than you could ever have, if you’re going to hire security guards.
But in addition to that, have security guards, you have to harden your entrances. You have to make schools safe. And you can make other places safe, but it is a big mental-health problem in this country more than anything else. And remember, we have 700 million guns — 700 million. Many people, if they don’t have a gun, they’re not going to be very safe. I mean, if they don’t have a gun, it gives them security. Now, you need them for entertainment. You need them for hunting. You need them for a lot of different things. But there are people, if they didn’t have the privilege of having a gun in some form, they — many of them would not be alive today. You know, there’s a certain country that had a very strict policy on guns, very, very strict.
But in the end, Trump got to spend an hour and change gleefully trashing CNN’s questions, counterarguments, attempted fact-checking, and moderator, to the roar of a rapturous crowd. That’s a big win for him.
Meanwhile, it is not really overstating it to say that much of the rest of the mainstream media is apoplectic at CNN this morning.
Politico: “To call it a s***show would be generous.”
Rolling Stone: “One CNN insider who spoke to Rolling Stone called the evening ‘appalling,’ lamenting that the network gave Trump ‘a huge platform to spew his lies.’ The town hall was ‘a f***ing disgrace,’ in the words of another network insider. ‘1000 percent a mistake [to host Trump]. No one [at CNN] is happy.’ ‘Just brutal,’ added one of the network’s primetime producers.”
Slate: “The discussion, moderated poorly by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, was simultaneously a triggering flashback to the bad old days of Trump’s presidency, a frustrating preview of what we can likely expect over the next 18 months, and a conclusive repudiation of CNN CEO Chris Licht’s doomed plan to restore the network’s fortunes by tacking to the imagined middle.”
James Fallows: “This is CNN’s lowest moment as an organization.” Man, nobody remembers Eason Jordan belatedly revealing how the network covered up Saddam Hussein’s brutal abuses to maintain government permission to broadcast from Iraq, huh?
In fact, get a load of this scathing assessment of CNN’s decisions:
It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening. . . .
CNN aired it all. On and on it went. It felt like 2016 all over again. It was Trump’s unhinged social media feed brought to life on stage. And Collins was put in an uncomfortable position, given the town hall was conducted in front of a Republican audience that applauded Trump, giving a sense of unintended endorsement to his shameful antics. . . .
CNN and new network boss Chris Licht are facing a fury of criticism — both internally and externally over the event.
How Licht and other CNN executives address the criticism in the coming days and weeks will be crucial. Will they defend what transpired at Saint Anselm College? Or will they express some regret?
That’s from . . . (checks notes) Oliver Darcy of CNN.
One last thought: Did Trump — deliberately or inadvertently — give House Speaker Kevin McCarthy a whole lot more leverage in the debt-ceiling negotiations? Here’s how Trump addressed the issue of the debt ceiling:
TRUMP: I say to the Republicans out there, congressmen, senators, if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default and I don’t believe they’re going to do a default before because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave, because you don’t want to have that happen, but it is better than what we’re doing right now because we’re spending money like drunken sailors, you know the expression.
COLLINS: So just to be clear, Mr. President, you think the US should default if the White House does not agree to the spending cuts Republicans are demanding?
TRUMP: Well, you might as well do it now, because you’ll do it later, because we have to save this country. Our country is dying. Our country is being destroyed by stupid people — by very stupid people.
You can argue this weakens McCarthy, by giving congressional Republicans an incentive to reject any deal and let the country default.
Or McCarthy can go to Biden and say, “You heard him. I’ve got a maniac who’s arguing that a default wouldn’t be so bad, and that we should go ahead and default if you won’t agree to ‘massive cuts.’ If you don’t throw me a bone on IRS agents or something, there’s no way I can get my caucus to pass a deal, and if we can’t pass a deal, both you and I are out of a job in January 2025.”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 