A mea culpa on CNN's Trump town hall

Red Meat For Mushy Moderates

Donald Trump and CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins -CNN YouTube screengrab

I went out early last night to have drinks and dinner with a friend, having nearly forgotten about the CNN town hall event with former President Donald Trump. But when I got home and launched the Hulu app to see what I might want to look at before bed, the event came up prominently as a viewing option. So I clicked on it for the same reason I might rubberneck a crash on I-95.

It was a sobering reminder of how poor a leader our 45th president is and the legal jeopardy he happily puts himself in by commenting on active cases and incriminating himself on live television. As is the case with just about anything concerning Trump, I’ve never seen anything like it. If there’s one thing I can say for certain about 45, it’s that his lawyers were shaking their heads in disbelief this morning.

CNN has not yet made publicly available a full replay of the event, but here are some key video clips:

As the New York Times points out in an analysis this morning, Trump “deepened his legal jeopardy with comments on investigations.” Of the federal investigation into classified documents he took to Palm Beach after he left the White House and initially refused to turn over when subpoenaed to do so, Trump said, “I took what I took,” falsely adding that if he removed classified documents from the White House, he had a standing order that they automatically get declassified — an assertion contradicted by his own advisers. Most troubling for his lawyers, he hemmed and hawed and did not deny that he showed the documents to others.

Of his attempt to get the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” votes and move them from Biden’s column to his, Trump declared, “I didn’t ask him to find anything.” Of his indictment on campaign finance violations by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Trump labeled the prosecutor (without evidence) “hand-picked and funded by George Soros.” These are the kinds of statements that keep defense attorneys up at night.

Trump repeated the usual lies about the 2020 election and — perhaps shockingly — refused to even say whether he wanted Ukraine to prevail in its effort to repel its Russian invaders. He also refused to acknowledge that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, praised the insurrectionists he sent to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and suggested he would pardon most of them as president.

But my keenest interest in the town hall event was as a journalist. I observed Kaitlan Collins, the CNN anchor and moderator of the event. What a thankless job she had. I went into this event with an open mind, even though many of my colleagues felt it was irresponsible for CNN to hold the town hall because it gave Trump a platform to continue to spread misinformation. I insisted that it depended on how well Collins was able to hold him accountable.

In retrospect, I think I was wrong. Collins did a good job of fact checking Trump on the fly but it was always going to be an uphill climb. 1) Trump won’t stop talking, which makes it a battle to get a word in edgewise. 2) He vomited forth such a torrent of lies that it was impossible to challenge every false statement.

And as a colleague observed on Twitter, it often seemed that she completely missed some of Trump’s most egregious misstatements, but that could have been because multiple producers were speaking into her earpiece and she had to digest the advice and listen to the ex-president at the same time — a herculean feat for a journalist even more experienced than the 31-year-old Collins

But the worst part of the event was the audience, whose members, one snarkster on Twitter quipped, “looked like they came from the Mar-A-Lago parking lot.” I understand that currently Trump is running for the GOP nomination, so you would expect that there would be some Trump supporters among the likely Republican voters in the room.

But this audience applauded some of Trump’s most objectionable comments, such as when he mocked E. Jean Carroll, the woman who successfully sued him after accusing Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. And of course they applauded when he called Collins “a nasty person” for pressing him on his false statements.

So mea culpa. The event was mostly a disaster. Collins was faced with the task of battling Trump and the audience simultaneously. My colleague, Northeastern University journalism prof Dan Kennedy has called on CNN to fire Chris Licht, the network’s new CEO who has been trying to remake CNN amid declining ratings and a perception that it has become the anti-Trump network. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest canning Licht, but I do hope he has learned a valuable lesson here. I know I did.

Extra reading on this fiasco if you’re so inclined:

• Dan Kennedy, Media Nation: Congratulations, CNN. You let Donald Trump put a police officer’s life in danger

• Tom Jones, Poynter: CNN’s Trump town hall turns into a Trump rally

• Isabella Simonetti, Wall Street Journal: CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Ascends, as Network Takes Heat for Trump Town Hall (free link)

• Great video thread of the town hall on Twitter by journalist Aaron Rupar. Click image below to see it.