I didn’t watch the CNN town hall with Donald Trump, and I’m glad I didn’t. Watching #45 is like having dental surgery. Painful for sure. And, it sounds like this one was an unmitigated disaster.
Savannah Guthrie got pretty good marks when she moderated a town-hall style debate with Trump back in October of 2020. That one happened after Trump caught Covid, refused to participate in a virtual presidential debate, after which Joe Biden scheduled a solo town hall debate for himself. In case you forgot.
Kaitlyn Collins did not have nearly the same luck. For one thing she was working with an almost universally pro-Trump crowd. And having been schooled once by a female CNN moderator, #45 was apparently more ready to just steamroll over her.
Trump was back to his old ways. He lied and lied and lied, breaking out most of his greatest hits:
- Trump continued to claim the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”;
- Trump continued to claim that former Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to stop the counting of election ballots;
- Trump continued to claim that Pence wasn’t under threat on January 6th;
- Trump claimed that he requested 10,000 troops to secure the Capitol on Jan. 6th;
- Trump continued to claim that he had the right to take classified documents to his Florida home (he didn’t) and more.
Oh boy.
Some other “highlights” from the town hall included the following:
- Trump was unable to criticize Russia or its leader Vladimir Putin;
- Trump was unable to or say whether he wants Ukraine or Russia to win;
- Trump could not say whether he would sign a federal abortion ban;
- Trump said the debt ceiling should be used as leverage to negotiate spending cuts;
- When asked why it wasn’t when he was in office he said that it’s “different now” because he’s not President;
- Trump defended people who participated in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, saying he’ll pardon many of them;
- Trump doubled down on his crude Access Hollywood comments about stars being able to do what they want with women;
- Trump continued to claim that he didn’t know E. Jean Carroll and had never met her, despite the massive lawsuit she just won the day before.
There was some discussion yesterday that maybe E. Jean Carroll should sue Trump again, since he can’t help himself but to defame her.
You know, one of the ironies from 2016 is that a lot of Trump supporters voiced the opinion back then that he “tells the truth” and asked the question “how bad can he be?”
Well, Trump has been proven over and over again to be a Guiness World Record holding liar. I think what they meant was “he voices our grievances,” not that he tells the truth.
And we know exactly how bad he can be after having had four years of him.
In any case, CNN did itself no favors yesterday, and probably lost a bunch of viewers, which the network can ill afford to do.