Trump Town Hall Called ‘Disaster of the Highest F*cking Degree’
Moderator praised for her intense efforts to fact-check former president in real-time
While objectively it may have quickly become a dumpster fire in the mode of all things Donald Trump, CNN's “town hall” forum with the former president also came to be something of a political Rorschach test as well.
The network, as planned, hosted Trump for an event in New Hampshire Wednesday evening.
And reactions to his performance varied widely depending on political leanings.
Most saw the former president — who is the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in his current run for the White House — using the session predictably to recycle his many lies and falsehoods.
Trump's supporters, however, saw the now-indicted former president who has been found liable for sexual abuse as a hero who “walked into the belly of hell” for spending an hour or so on a cable news network.
And while moderator Kaitlan Collins worked aggressively to fact-check Trump in real-time, Trump at one point called her “nasty,” and his supporters characterized her as merely trying to “dominate” him.
Just as one might have foreseen, Trump attempted to repeat his “Big Lie,” that the 2020 presidential election had been “rigged” against him.
He also, among his litany of outrageous comments, defended people who participated in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, saying he'll pardon many of them; and doubled down on his crude Access Hollywood comments about stars being able to do what they want with women, and more.
Collins, the CNN host chosen to moderate the encounter, gamely tried to keep up with calling Trump out for his many falsehoods, with the former president at one point directly insulting her.
In one case, she attempted to steer the former president back to the matter of the hundreds of sensitive and classified documents he had been keeping illegally at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in defiance of a legal subpoena to turn them over to the US government.
An excerpt:
TRUMP: "They didn’t raid the house of Joe Biden, they didn’t raid Obama — "
COLLINS: "But Joe Biden didn’t ignore a subpoena to get those documents back."
TRUMP: "Joe Biden took 1,850 boxes!"
COLLINS: "That’s the question that investigators have, I think, is why you held onto those documents when you knew the federal government was seeking them and they had given you a subpoena to return them."
TRUMP: "Are you ready? Are you ready? Can I talk?"
COLLINS: "Yeah, what's the answer?"
TRUMP: "Do you mind?"
COLLINS: "I would like for you to answer the question. That’s why I asked it."
TRUMP: "It’s very simple — you’re a nasty person, I’ll tell you."
Rick Wilson, a prominent former Republican political strategist-turned-Trump-critic, excoriated CNN — and network chief Chris Licht by name — for hosting Trump, in an expletive-laden rant.
“You make people giggle and laugh when he jokes about abortion, when he calls an African-American police officer a thug. This insanity should be pulled off the f**king air. Chris Licht, you should be ashamed of yourself,” Wilson said. “This is astoundingly bad for the brand of CNN, it's astoundingly bad for the country, and it's astoundingly bad — honestly, folks — for every other Republican candidate in the primary.
“Wrap that sh*t up. It's done. You saw this tonight. You know you can't beat him on the stage. Everybody else, oars up, time to go to work, because he's going to be the nominee,” Wilson added. “This sh*t is un-f**king believable. I've never seen anything like it. It is a disaster of the highest f**king degree.”
Collins' CNN colleague, commentator Van Jones, praised her efforts at the event.
“Listen, I want to say, on Kaitlan’s behalf, she did a masterful job of fact-checking a lie machine in real time in front of millions of people. It is very, very difficult do what she did,” Jones said. “Nobody’s going to do it perfectly, but it is incredibly difficult to talk to somebody who is going to say things, sometimes they’re true, sometimes they’re not true.
“I don’t think anybody here thinks of Donald Trump as a paragon of truth telling. I thought Kaitlan did a masterful job. She's a matador against a bull,” Jones added.
Trump's appearance on CNN even became fodder over on rival network Fox News, where the personalities had a very different take, as one might expect.
“We all understand why he was able to be so successful, because he takes it straight on. He walked into the belly of hell tonight, faced the devil straight on, and he went in with the firehose and a couple of ribeyes. and before it was over, he grilled the ribeyes, put the hose aside, and walked out with them having to shut the thing down because they ran out of soap,” political commentator and former Republican Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said.
Rep Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican and Trump supporter, was even more harshly critical of Collins’ fact-checking.
“First of all, town halls are for the voters, not for the press, not for the person who is the moderator. Kaitlan spent more time interjecting her own viewpoints or her views on situations — ” Donalds said, before CNN host Anderson Cooper corrected the congressman by interjecting, “Those were actually facts, though.”
Please support our work…
Also, please subscribe…