I had no plan to watch the Trump town hall on CNN yesterday. But it was still going when I drove home from a Tai Chi class around 6 pm, so I listened to it on satellite radio for about half an hour.
It was ugly. Really ugly. Trump lied incessantly. He talked over the moderator, Kaitlan Collins. He called E. Jean Carroll, who had just won a civil lawsuit where Trump was found guilty of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, a "wack job" and said the trial was "a rigged deal."
The New Hampshire audience, mostly Republicans and a few independents, laughed at Trump's insults. Collins did her best to get Trump to answer her questions without lying, but she failed. Mostly the town hall seemed more like a Trump campaign rally than a forum for learning about his views.
I couldn't help but think, "This guy is utterly unqualified to run for president."
Of course, I already knew that, having suffered through four long years of Trump in the White House. But I'd expected that Trump would tone down his bullshit somewhat in the CNN town hall, since he must know that he can't win in 2024 without appealing to voters who aren't his MAGA devotees.
Not surprisingly, CNN has come in for lots of criticism for giving Trump over an hour of air time to blab about his usual grievances. A right-on story in The Bulwark by Charlie Sykes, "The Moment That You Knew," starts off this way.
Critics had worried that giving the indicted, twice-impeached, coup-plotting, chronically lying sexual predator an unedited, live television forum might turn out badly.
The reality, however, was far ghastlier: a sh*tshow for the ages, and a moment that captured the thorough degradation of both our politics and the media. “It was a f**king nightmare,” remarked one savvy observer, “and it was programmed to BE a f**king nightmare.”
Trump was, of course, thrilled.
For her part, Kaitlan Collins was poised, prepared, and determined, but she never stood a chance. She raised all of the key questions and tried (not always successfully) to ask followups.
But Trump just rolled over her with a torrent of invective, jibes, and bullsh*t. The fact-checkers were reduced to asterisks. “He declared war on the truth,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper said afterward. “And I’m not sure that he didn’t win.”
Where to start?
-
-
Trump called a black law enforcement officer a “thug.”
-
He repeated baseless conspiracy theories about 2020.
-
He lied about losing the 2020 election. (CNN’s Oliver Darcy tweeted: “I've lost count of how many times Trump has lied about the election. Collins keeps fact-checking him, but he keeps lying.”)
-
He lied about calling for “terminating” the Constitution so he could be returned to power.
-
He lied about his role on January 6th.
-
He suggested that he would pardon many of the January 6th insurrectionists.
-
He insisted again that Mike Pence should have overturned the election.
-
He endorsed letting the country default on its debt, even if it would bring on an economic cataclysm.
-
He claimed that residents of the Chinatown neighborhood in Washington, D.C., “did not speak English as part of an allegation that Biden stored boxes there after his vice presidency because he had nefarious ties to Beijing.”
-
He refused to back Ukraine against Russia.
-
He lashed out at Collins as “nasty woman” — and the audience CHEERED.
-
But this was hardly the worst of it. Actually, not even close.
The day after a federal jury found that the ex-president had sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, Trump turned the episode into a joke, mocking and insulting his victim.
CNN's own employees are disparaging the town hall. However a Politico story, Enough With the Bellyaching Over CNN's Trump Town Hall, makes some good points about the value of what happened last night. I like Jack Shafer's writing style.
The captains who steer the SS CNN sent first mate Kaitlan Collins into the bilge Wednesday night to bail out the sinking ship with a thimble, while Donald Trump used the town hall format to blast a hole in CNN’s hull with a torpedo barrage of lies.
Collins, a resourceful journalist who thinks as fast on her feet as Muhammad Ali did on his, couldn’t keep up. That’s no reflection on her. Nobody practiced in the art of the interview has ever been able to stop this lying chatterbox in a live session. As scholar Michael Socolow points out, Chris Wallace, Lesley Stahl and Jonathan Swan successfully tamed him, but all of those Trump interviewers were taped and edited, which neutered his predictable and exuberant filibustering.
Plus, those interviews were conducted without an audience. Trump’s CNN town hall, on the other hand, was stocked from stem to stern with cheering acolytes who rewarded his every insult and evasion with laughter and applause. It’s hard to conduct an interview when rotten fruit and vegetables are being hurled onto the stage.
So was it a “mistake” on CNN’s part to give Trump such a forum? No. The town hall’s results could have been predicted — in fact, they were predicted by about a million commentators in the days leading up to the event. The chorus observed that Trump can lie faster than any real-time interviewer can fact-check him, so the immediate advantage of the arena will generally accrue to him.
CNN could have armed Collins with a centrifugal pump to siphon the Trump deluge, and she still would have been swamped. If it was all a ratings ploy, it wasn’t a very good one, as it attracted fewer viewers than six previous Trump town halls on Fox.
But in principle, a Trump interview was a good idea because it’s never a mistake for the press to confront newsmakers, even if the newsmaker lies about the integrity of the 2020 election, which Trump did.
Even if he mocks the justice system because it has held against him, which Trump did. Even if he uses the rhetorical devises of ad hominem, ad populum, ad baculum to savage his foes, as Trump did. Even if he insults the interviewer, which Trump did (“You’re a nasty person,” he said to Collins). Even if he refuses to answer simple questions about his stand on abortion, which Trump repeatedly did. And even if he offers his self-serving hallucinations about the events of January 6 as the truth, which Trump did.
...The lessons taught by Collins and CNN Wednesday night are not to fear Trump or to actively suppress his ideas but that the best format for tangling with him is a taped one, where he can’t chomp scenery and eat up the clock with non-answers, and one where the audience is at home in front of their televisions, not in an auditorium cheering him on.
We should all look forward to the next Trump TV interview, for all the good and bad it will surely deliver.
Comments