Trump’s Ridiculous CNN Town Hall Proves They Have Learned Nothing

Forty-seven minutes into CNN’s town hall with former President Donald Trump on Wednesday, midway through a debate whether or not Trump really has what it takes to build the wall, Kaitlan Collins had had enough. 

“The election was not rigged, Mr. President. You cannot keep saying that all night long,” the CNN host protested. “You cannot keep saying the elections were rigged.” 

“OK, good, I know,” Trump said. “I’m glad you are saying it.” 

Just one day after a jury found that he defamed and sexually abused E. Jean Carroll and ordered him to pay her $5 million, CNN gave Trump 70 minutes to riff directly to America on national television, with the assistance of a town hall audience of Republican primary voters that effectively operated as Trump’s personal laugh track. Trump played the hits—even calling Collins a “nasty person” at one point late in the town hall—and the crowd ate it up. 

Trump started the night by lying about the 2020 election being rigged, and by the time Collins told him he had to stop it, he had already repeated the lie roughly a dozen times, between general statements about vote-rigging and specific claims about illegal voting in places like Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta—all minority-majority cities that are Democratic strongholds—that have repeatedly been proven false.  

This is basically how the entire thing went: the former president would tell an obvious lie, and Collins would either let the lie go unchallenged or protest briefly before quickly giving up and moving on to another question, realizing the futility of such an exercise. 

Collins, like so many others before her, got steamrolled. At one point, she reminded that Trump had once said raising the debt ceiling to avoid default shouldn’t be used for negotiations, and asked “why is it different now when you’re out of office?” Trump replied: “Because now, I’m not president.” 

“The U.S. defaulting would be massively consequential for everyone in this room,” Collins said, after the laughter and cheers had stopped. 

“Kaitlan Collins exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist,” CNN told VICE News in a statement. “She asked tough, fair and revealing questions. And she followed up and fact-checked President Trump in real time to arm voters with crucial information about his positions as he enters the 2024 election as the Republican frontrunner. That is CNN’s role and responsibility: to get answers and hold the powerful to account.”

The former president used the time and platform CNN gave him to repeatedly, falsely claim that the lawsuits and investigations into his conduct are “election interference”; said again that Carroll was lying in her account of Trump’s assault and alleged that she called her former husband an “ape”; said he had “every right” to take classified documents from the White House; suggest that no one in D.C’s Chinatown speaks English; suggested he might pardon the Proud Boys who were just convicted of seditious conspiracy for Jan. 6; and brazenly lied about a whole host of things, from Democrats wanting to “kill a baby” in the ninth month of pregnancy to the suggestion that he offered Speaker Nancy Pelosi and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser 10,000 troops before Jan. 6. 

CNN did an online fact-check of Trump’s claim in a story that would likely be read by a fraction of the people who watched the town hall. In the immediate aftermath of the town hall, CNN’s Jake Tapper told a bewildered panel of reporters and commentators that there wasn’t “enough time to fact-check every lie he told.” 

That was the whole problem. The first mistake, and really the only one, was doing this thing in the first place.

There were a few newsworthy moments on Wednesday, such as when Trump refused to say that he wanted Ukraine to “win” against Russia and when he made the literally unbelievable claim that he “doesn’t think in winners and losers.” Trump also may have gotten himself into even more legal hot water. The aforementioned claims about Carroll could have been more defamation of the kind he was just found guilty of. And his statement that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “owed me votes” could have ramifications in that state, where he’s currently under investigation for his attempts to persuade Republican officials to help him steal the 2020 election. 

But these newsworthy moments were few and far between, and something Trump would otherwise have blasted out on Truth Social—certainly not worth the damage last night did to CNN’s credibility as a news organization. 

It is insulting to claim CNN’s decision here was about anything other than money. Like most news organizations, CNN’s ratings have taken a massive hit since Trump left office, which Trump has gleefully and repeatedly pointed out. There’s also the rare opportunity to cut into Fox News’ viewership, as the network is on shaky ground with its conservative viewing base after it canceled Tucker Carlson’s show and revelations from the Dominion lawsuit drove the network to settle with the voting machine company for nearly $800 million. (Whether Fox viewers would actually switch to CNN or to a more extreme right-wing network is another story entirely.) 

CNN President Chris Licht, who took the reins of the network last May following the abrupt resignation of Jeff Zucker, has dismissed claims he’s attempting to re-orient the network’s politics, telling the Financial Times last year that suggestions he wants CNN to be more centrist are “bullshit.” Rather, Licht and other top officials like Warner CEO David Zaslav and board member John C. Malone, a libertarian billionaire, have said they want CNN to re-focus on news rather than opinion. 

“I want people leading and stacking their shows in a way based on journalism and what’s important,” Licht told Kara Swisher last year. “Let me worry about the ratings. Chase stories, not ratings.”

This is, apparently, what letting Licht worry about the ratings looks like. During a Thursday morning news meeting, Licht reportedly sneered at critical “opinions-slash-backlash,” claiming that “you do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say we didn’t get them.” 

Giving one of the most consequential liars in American history more than an hour of free TV time to do exactly what he’s done for the last eight years is not offering viewers a balanced perspective, and it’s not some kind of brave truth-telling exercise. It’s a desperate plea for relevance. The only way to not screw this up was to have never done it in the first place; on that point, Licht and CNN failed spectacularly. 

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