As soon as it was announced that CNN had invited Donald Trump on for a town hall, critics immediately and harshly blasted the network, wondering why in the world it would hand a megaphone to a former president who is known to lie, twist history, undermine democracy and is facing a slew of legal troubles.
Turns out, those fears were realized. Fully realized.
This wasn’t a town hall. It was a Trump rally.
A defiant Trump — playing all of his greatest hits of a rigged 2020 election and revisionist history about practically everything involving his presidency — steamrolled over CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday night and basically gave a 1 hour, 9 minute long infomercial in front of a very supportive and boisterous crowd of Republican and undeclared voters in New Hampshire.
This was no fault of Collins. She tried. She was poised and obviously prepared. She pushed back often. She did her job.
It made no difference. Trump ignored Collins, dismissed her questions, vaguely danced around the facts and was often bailed out by an enthusiastic audience that laughed at his jokes and clapped at most everything he said.
When Trump said that 2020 was a “rigged election,” Collins snapped back, “It was not a rigged election. It was not a stolen election.”
When she asked him to admit he lost the election, he refused to do so.
At one point, when pressing Trump about his role in Jan. 6, Collins said, “There's no evidence of that election fraud."
Trump said, “You're supposed to say that."
Collins said, “It's the truth, Mr. President.”
At another point, Collins said, “The election was not rigged, Mr. President. You cannot keep saying that all night long.”
There were a couple of moments when Collins clearly got under Trump’s skin. She called out his false claims about the border wall, causing him to blurt out, “This is what she does.”
Then, late in the town hall, he called her “a nasty person” — to which many in the audience laughed and applauded.
Collins didn’t back down and the remark didn’t seem to phase her at all. But, overall, Collins was barely a speed bump. As much as she tried, Trump would not stop his cavalcade of lies and ducking of questions, and he seemed bolstered as the night wore on, realizing that Collins and only Collins — and not a single person in the audience — was going to push back on his outrageous claims.
Audience members asked about the economy, immigration, Roe v. Wade, guns and Ukraine. Collins followed up when he didn’t fully answer the audience’s softballs, and she pushed him on his legal issues, including the documents found in his Mar-a-Lago home and the news Tuesday that a Manhattan jury found him liable of sexual assault and defamation. Even when there were legitimate questions, Trump didn’t really answer them.
Such as? When asked about the war in Ukraine, he said he would end it in one day. The crowd applauded, but he never said exactly how, even after Collins asked him.
On the vast majority of his answers, Trump said something that wasn’t true and, practically every time, Collins was prepared with pertinent follow ups. She wasn’t afraid to interrupt and talk over him, but it really made no difference. Trump just plowed forward.
In the end, this was a mess. But it wasn’t a mess of Collins’ doing.
This is all on CNN.
To be clear, I supported CNN’s choice to have Trump on the air. He’s the former president and the leading candidate to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. If a legitimate news network can’t ask him tough questions, who will? I wrote that CNN absolutely should have him on its air.
But the critics were right. This turned out even worse than what I thought a worse-case scenario would be.
When you have someone who doesn’t play by the rules of truthfulness and honesty and fully answering questions, there is no chance for accountability or productive conversation.
For example, that time when Collins told Trump that he couldn’t keep saying all night long that the election was rigged, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple tweeted, “Oh yeah? Just watch him. Just watch him.”
Many of the dozen — yeah, that’s a real number — commentators that CNN had on in its “postgame” coverage repeated the same talking points that this is the Trump they knew and expected. Yet not one pointed a finger at CNN for airing this mayhem, at least in the immediate aftermath.
According to The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona, a CNN staffer told him, “One of the worst hours I've ever seen on our air.”
In the end, it was a great night for Trump. It wasn’t a bad night for Collins. In fact, she performed well. She showed her journalism chops.
For CNN? It was a disaster.
They — and I — should’ve known better.
