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- Trump was back on CNN primetime during a town hall appearance on Wednesday night.
- CNN allowed him to bluster on for nearly 70 minutes in an apparent effort to reach conservative viewers.
- Advisers to the former president were thrilled by his free-wheeling performance, The New York Times reported.
Donald Trump was back in the spotlight on Wednesday evening, steamrolling CNN and setting the internet ablaze during his chaotic return to the network — his first appearance since 2016 — in a performance filled with the former president's signature half-truths, blustering boasts, and full-out lies.
CNN's Kaitlan Collins piloted the 70-minute town hall amid reports she may soon be offered the network's top anchor spot after a whirlwind ascent from Trump White House correspondent to primetime face, a role bolstered by her conservative media background, which CNN CEO Chris Licht hopes may help the wayward network appeal to Republicans ahead of the 2024 election, according to Puck News' Dylan Byers.
CNN and Trump were looking for a symbiotic relationship, per The Wall Street Journal and Puck's Byers: Trump gets primetime and branches out beyond core MAGA voters, and CNN works to burnish their politically balanced credentials, and, after flagging viewership, gets a night of big ratings.
And CNN certainly seemed to be eager for conservative buy-in during the Wednesday town hall, filling the room with a mixture of New Hampshire Republicans and effectively independent voters. Their responses included clapping and cheering the former president as he joked about being found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll.
The former president's appearance comes during a high point in the early campaigning long before actual voting begins. Trump's lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has grown over recent months as DeSantis struggles before his expected announcement. The former president's advisor told other outlets that the town hall was an effort to underline Trump's 2016 strategy of reaching beyond the traditional GOP coalition.
Trump began the evening by falsely claiming several times that the 2020 presidential election was rigged as Collins struggled to silence his ongoing lies.
"The election was not rigged, Mr. President, you cannot keep saying that all night long," Collins said to little effect.
The former president repeatedly criticized Carroll, just one day after a Manhattan jury found him civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming the former Elle writer, awarding her $5 million in damages. During the Wednesday town hall, Trump called Carroll a "whack job," echoing the very falsehoods that landed him with a defamation charge this week.
Trump refused to say whether he wants Ukraine to win in its ongoing war against Russia, which invaded the country without provocation last February, nor would he contend that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal.
He pledged to pardon a "large portion" of Jan. 6 rioters, doubled down on his previous claims that former Vice President Mike Pence should have overturned the 2020 elections results, dodged specifics about whether he would institute a federal abortion ban, and fought back-and-forth with Collins over the size of his administration's border wall.
And while it's too soon to tell if Trump resonated with independents or moderate Republicans outside of his die-hard base, or if CNN boosted its ratings without alienating left-leaning viewers, Trump reportedly left the town hall feeling like a winner.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Trump's advisers were "thrilled" with how the appearance went in front of a vocally supportive crowd.
—Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) May 11, 2023
Multiple journalists wrote that Collins — who Trump called a "nasty person" during the event — was given an almost impossible and thankless task.
"Props to @kaitlancollins who was in an impossible position but did a heroic job of fact-checking Trump throughout the town hall," the New York Times's Peter Baker wrote on Twitter. "No easy task given how many factually untrue things he said in such a short time."
CNN argued that as the 2024 GOP frontrunner Trump is newsworthy, but ahead of the town hall, critics were lining up with their worries about giving so much air time to a man just found liable for sexual abuse, who is accused of inciting an insurrection on January 6, 2021, and has shown time and time again to play fast and loose with the truth.
And during the event, critics in the industry were clearly frustrated by how CNN organized the event — and what they pointed to as predictable results.
CNN did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
"The predictably disastrous @cnn town hall was indeed disastrous," former broadcast exec and current dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, Mark Lukasiewicz tweeted. "Proving again: Live lying works. A friendly MAGA crowd consistently laughs, claps at Trump's punch lines - including re sex assault and Jan 6 - and the moderator cannot begin to keep up with the AR-15 pace of lies."
"CNN set up a format in which the audience just cheered when Trump called moderator 'a nasty person' for pressing him on the issue of the documents he took from the WH, now under investigation," the Times' Trip Gabriel added.
MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan, who was weary about the event before it began, said, "It is hard to watch."
"What did CNN think would happen?" Hasan wrote on Twitter.
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