CNN Insiders Slam Trump Town Hall: “A Disaster, and Totally Predictable”

On Wednesday, CNN persisted with hosting a town hall event with twice-impeached, criminally indicted former President Donald Trump, just a day after he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

And it went about as poorly as literally anyone could have predicted. Trump probably told more lies than truths. He smeared E. Jean Carroll and got audience members to laugh and jeer along. He doubled down on January 6 and lies about the 2020 election. And CNN left its own Kaitlan Collins with the remarkably tall task of trying to fact-check it all, while leaving her vulnerable to be called “a nasty person” by Trump in front of an audience that seemed to have no concern with him doing so at all.

And Team Trump was loving it. “Advisers to Trump are thrilled at how this is going so far for him,” The New York Times’ Jonathan Swan reported. “They can’t believe he is getting an hour on CNN with an audience that cheers his every line and laughs at his every joke.”

Early on during the town hall, one CNN employee told The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr it was “a disaster, and totally predictable.”

Another insider told Rolling Stone the evening was “appalling” and that CNN gave Trump “a huge platform to spew his lies,” while “the audience was stacked with his voters.”

“A fucking disgrace,” another CNN insider said. “1,000 percent a mistake [to host Trump]. No one [at CNN] is happy.”

“Just brutal,” another producer added.

Before the event, CNN commentator and retired Washington, D.C., police officer Michael Fanone (who was assaulted by rioters during the January 6 attack, resulting in a heart attack, severe burns, and brain injuries) openly railed against the network, in a Rolling Stone piece titled, “CNN Is Hosting a Town Hall for a Guy Who Tried to Get Me Killed.”

Oliver Darcy, CNN’s senior media reporter, wrote a very critical piece overnight on CNN’s decision to host the town hall. “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” he wrote. “CNN and new network boss Chris Licht are facing a fury of criticism—both internally and externally over the event.”

What was already a bad idea was made worse by CNN’s tolerance, and therefore affirmation, of a man just found liable for sexual abuse. One could imagine a parallel universe where CNN ideally never hosted Trump at all or at least canceled the event, issuing a strong declaration that the American people are better served with journalism that doesn’t offer open prime time to sexual abusers—far less coup inciters.

Instead, the network dug its heels in, leaving Collins to endlessly parry with Trump’s lies and the rest of America to become even further immersed into the same consent-manufacturing operation that helped lead to Trump’s rise in the first place.

And while many within the walls of CNN appear incensed by what their employer has done, it matters not, unless they make it matter. For their own dignity, and for the dignity of what journalism should aspire toward, these staffers could leave, or strike, or even sabotage the network; make leadership actually feel something other than a stream of reaction articles that only fuel their egotistical presumptions that “if we’re making people mad, we’re doing something right.” Till then, these executives will only further entrench themselves in somehow believing this garbage is good for America. And by then, the opening for the actually good journalists at CNN to make change will be even narrower. The clock is ticking.

Republicans have no evidence that Joe Biden was involved in shady business dealings, and even Fox News knows it.

House Republicans accused the president and his family Wednesday of engaging in business with foreign entities, but they were unable to provide any actual evidence linking Biden to any wrongdoing.

Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy pressed Representative James Comer about the nothingburger of an investigation. Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, alleged in a 65-page memo that the Bidens were involved in influence peddling in Romania for two years, and claimed that Biden’s son Hunter had business deals in China.

“You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence,” Doocy said Thursday morning. “And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is—there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”

Comer gave a long, complicated explanation of how Biden was definitely involved, even though his name didn’t come up anywhere in the financial documents he had subpoenaed. In fact, Comer admitted that Republicans have yet to find any proof of their accusations.

“We’re at the very beginning stages of this, but in talking with the informants that we have … we know that Joe Biden was actively involved,” Comer said. “We’re still looking for more bank records that we believe will implicate Joe Biden’s active participation in this.”

Since taking control of the House of Representatives, Republicans have been obsessed with trying to dig up dirt on the Biden family, particularly Biden’s son Hunter. Even though the United States has just weeks before it could default on its debt, the GOP is apparently more interested in personal vendettas than leading the country.

Twice-impeached, criminally indicted former President Donald Trump had an hour’s worth of exclusive time with CNN—one day after he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.

Despite CNN’s Kaitlan Collins’s valiant effort with the conditions she was given, the fundamental structure of the night was not complementary to what anyone might imagine “good journalism” looking like. The network gave Trump a friendly audience of voters who seemed to largely agree with him on most things; seldom a “battleground of ideas,” the night’s only challenges came from Collins. But Trump sprayed lie after lie after lie, which is difficult for anyone to fact-check in real time.

Here are just some of the lies Trump threw at the wall, with a jeering and laughing audience buoying him throughout.

• Doubled down on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged.
• On pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to find missing votes: “I didn’t ask him to find anything.”
• Then-Vice President Mike Pence “should have put the votes back to the state legislatures, and I think we would have had a different outcome.” The vice president does not have such authority, and numerous Trump allies have admitted that such a process would have been illegal.
• On the January 6 riot: “I offered them 10,000 soldiers.” There is no evidence Trump ever made a request to the National Guard for support, or that Democrats or Washington, D.C., rejected such assistance.
• “The Presidential Records Act is not criminal. I took the documents. I’m allowed to.”
• Documents “become automatically declassified when I took them.”
• President Obama took classified documents from the White House.
• On E. Jean Carroll: “This woman, I don’t know her. I never met her. I have no idea who she is.”
• The judge in the E. Jean Carroll case “allowed us to put nothing in” during the defamation and sexual abuse trial.
• President Obama separated families at the border first.
• Other countries are sending “migrant families” from mental institutions to the U.S.
• People don’t speak English in Chinatown [false, and racist].
• “We created the greatest economy in history. A big part of that economy was I got you the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country, bigger than the Reagan cuts.” Average growth under Trump was lower than in numerous other administrations; moreover, Trump’s tax cut disproportionately benefited the wealthy, rather than low-income or middle-class families. In 2018, after Trump’s tax cuts passed, the richest 400 families in America paid an average effective tax rate lower than what the bottom half of American households paid.
• I finished the border wall.
• “They could kill the baby at the ninth month or after it was born” before the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

This is not an exhaustive list of all the lies, especially the more minute ones, Trump told during the town hall. Just during his four years in office, it is estimated that Trump lied to, or misled, the American people over 30,000 times.

Twice-impeached, criminally indicted former President Donald Trump was asked during the CNN town hall Wednedsay for his response to being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

Trump attempted to discount E. Jean Carroll’s testimony, calling it “crazy,” but the more he went on, the more it seemed like he was imbuing his own fond memories (or fantasies) of what happened with the woman Trump was found liable for sexual abusing.

“This woman said I met her at the front door of Bergdorf Goodman, which I rarely go into other than for a couple of charities,” Trump began.

“I was immediately attracted to her, and she was immediately attracted to me. And we had this great chemistry,” Trump said, as if forgetting that he was trying to discount Carroll’s testimony. “And a few minutes later, we ended up in a room, a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, right near the cash register,” he continued amid laughter from the audience.

“What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing Hanky Panky in a dressing room?” Trump said, musing about whether Carroll was married at the time or not.

Kaitlan Collins also asked Trump about whether he stands by defending the comments he made in the Access Hollywood tape about being able to grab women.

Trump doubled down. “I said, if you’re famous and rich, or whatever I said,” he began. “But I said, ‘If you are a star…’ I said, ‘Women let you.’”

“If you’re a famous person, if you’re a star—and I’m not referring to myself—I’m saying people that are famous, people that are stars,” Trump continued, before Collins interrupted to note that Trump had called himself a “star” during his deposition.

After some cross talk, Trump continued: “They tend to do pretty well in a lot of different ways. OK. And you would like me to take that back. I can’t take it back because it happens to be true. I said it’s been true for one million years, approximately a million years, perhaps a little bit longer than that.”

In a very tellingly simple manner, it’s remarkable that Trump didn’t even pretend to also say something like, “I wish it weren’t true,” or solidly affirm that he himself does not take advantage of this supposed system where “women let you do it.”

Perhaps the laughter and jeering helped Trump ignore the possibility that some people may find what he was saying incredibly disgusting.

During CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump, the twice-impeached, criminally indicted, and sexually abusing former president said he had no regrets about his actions during the January 6 Capitol riots.

Host Kaitlan Collins asked him, point-blank, whether he had any regrets at all. An easy question to express even an ounce of remorse or regret or anything at all, while still maintaining your anti-democratic posture. He couldn’t even do that.

“I’ve never spoken to a crowd as large as this. And that’s because they believed the election was rigged,” Trump replied after a jumbled word salad.

“They were there proud. They were there with love in their heart. That was an unbelievable, and it was a beautiful day,” Trump said about the thousands of rioters. He even lovingly suggested that a lot of the people in the town hall audience “were probably there” too.

Later, when asked by an audience member whether he would pardon January 6 rioters, Trump said he would pardon “many of them.”

Collins followed up, asking if he would pardon the Proud Boys members recently convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Trump said he’d take a look at the cases but that you can’t get a fair trial in Washington, D.C.

The audience started clapping.