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      Five Takeaways From Trump’s Unruly CNN Town Hall

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      Donald Trump is still Donald Trump.His 70 minutes onstage in New Hampshire served as a vivid reminder that the former president has only one speed, and that his second act mirrors his first. He is, as ever, a celebrity performance artist and, even out of office, remains the center of gravity in American politics.CNN’s decision to give him an unfiltered prime-time platform was a callback to the 2016 campaign, even as the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, persistently interjected to try to cut him off or correct him.Mr. Trump was so focused on discussing and defending himself that he barely touched on President Biden’s record — which people close to Mr. Trump want him to focus on. But he was disciplined when it came to his chief expected primary rival.Here are five takeaways.Trump won’t let go of his lies about 2020 or Jan. 6If viewers were expecting Mr. Trump to have moved on from his falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, he demonstrated once again, right out of the gate, that he very much hasn’t.The first questions asked by Ms. Collins were about Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept his loss in 2020, and his false claims of fraud.“I think that, when you look at that result and when you look at what happened during that election, unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happens,” Mr. Trump said, calling the election he lost “rigged.”Mr. Trump later said he was “inclined” to pardon “many” of the rioters arrested on Jan. 6, 2021, after the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob during certification of President Biden’s Electoral College win. His avoidance of an unequivocal promise pleased people close to him.He also came armed with a list of his own Twitter posts and statements from that day — an idea that was his, a person familiar with the planning said. He lied about his inaction that day as Ms. Collins pressed him about what he was doing during the hours of violence. And he said he did not owe Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was threatened by the mob, an apology.As time has worn on, Mr. Trump has increasingly wrapped his arms around what took place at the Capitol and incorporated it into his campaign. Wednesday night was no exception.“A beautiful day,” he said of Jan. 6.It was a reminder that embracing the deadly violence of that day — at least for Republicans — is no longer seen as disqualifying. Privately, Mr. Trump’s team said they were happy with how he handled the extensive time spent on the postelection period during the town hall.The G.O.P. audience stacked the deck, but revealed where the base isThe audience’s regular interruptions on behalf of Mr. Trump were like a laugh track on a sitcom. It built momentum for him in the room — and onscreen for the television audience — and stifled Ms. Collins as she repeatedly tried to interrupt him with facts and correctives.No matter how vulgar, profane or politically incorrect Mr. Trump was, the Republican crowd in New Hampshire audibly ate up the shtick of the decades-long showman.He would pardon a “large portion” of Jan. 6 rioters. Applause.He mocked the detailed accusations of rape from E. Jean Carroll as made up “hanky-panky in a dressing room.” Laughter. No matter that a New York jury held him liable for sexual abuse and defamation this week, awarding Ms. Carroll $5 million in damages.Calling Ms. Carroll a “wack job.” Applause and laughs.Flip-flopping on using the debt ceiling for leverage, because “I’m not president.” More laughs.The cheers revealed the current psyche of the Republican base, which is eager for confrontation: with the press, with Democrats, with anyone standing in the way of Republicans taking power.It made for tough sledding for Ms. Collins, who was like an athlete playing an away game on hostile turf: She had to battle the crowd and the candidate simultaneously.“You’re a nasty person,” Mr. Trump said to her at one point, echoing the line he used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.The town-hall format felt like a set piece for Mr. Trump that he leveraged to cast himself as both the putative Republican incumbent — “Mister president,” he was repeatedly addressed as — and the outsider, recreating conditions from his two previous campaigns.Republicans cheered, but so did Democrats looking to the general electionPresident Biden’s team had changed the televisions on Air Force One from CNN to MSNBC as he returned from New York on Wednesday evening. But that didn’t mean his political team was not eagerly watching the town hall unfold, and cheering along with the Republican audience.Mr. Trump defended Jan. 6 as a “beautiful day.” He hailed the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a “great victory.” He wouldn’t say if he hoped Ukraine would win the war against Russia. He talked again about how the rich and famous get their way. “Women let you,” he said. And he refused to rule out reimposing one of the most incendiary and divisive policies of his term in office: purposefully separating families at the border.Mr. Trump’s answers played well in the hall but could all find their way into Democratic messaging in the next 18 months.Late Wednesday, the Biden campaign was already figuring out what segments could be turned quickly into digital ads, seeing Mr. Trump staking out positions that would turn off the kind of swing voters that Mr. Biden won in 2020.Shortly after the event ended, Mr. Biden issued a tweet. “Do you want four more years of that?” it read. It was a request for donations. It was also a reminder how much of the Biden 2024 campaign is likely to be about Mr. Trump.Trump aggressively dodged taking a stance on a federal abortion banMr. Trump is perhaps the single Republican most responsible for the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year. He appointed three of the court’s justices who powered the majority opinion. But he has privately blamed abortion politics for Republican underperformance in the 2022 midterms and has treaded carefully in the early months of his 2024 run.Before the town hall, his team spent considerable time honing his answer to a question they knew he would be asked: Would he support a federal ban, and at how many weeks?His repeated dodges and euphemisms were hard to miss on Wednesday.“Getting rid of Roe v. Wade was an incredible thing for pro-life,” he began.That was about as specific as he would get. He said he was “honored to have done what I did” — a line Democrats had quickly flagged as potential fodder for future ads — and that it was a “great victory.”Mr. Trump’s Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, recently signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, getting to Mr. Trump’s right on an issue that could resonate with evangelical voters. Mr. Trump did not even mention Mr. DeSantis until more than an hour into the event, and only after prodding from a voter. “I think he ought to relax and take it easy and think about the future,” Mr. Trump urged.In refusing to say if he would sign a federal ban, Mr. Trump tried to cast Democrats as radical and pledged that he supported exemptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. “What I’ll do is negotiate so people are happy,” he said.“I just want to give you one more chance,” Ms. Collins pressed.He dodged one final time. “Make a deal that’s going to be good,” he said.He deepened his legal jeopardy with comments on investigationsThe most heated exchange that Mr. Trump had with Ms. Collins was over the special counsel investigation into his possession of hundreds of presidential records, including more than 300 individual classified documents, at his private club, Mar-a-Lago, after he left office.And it was the area in which he walked himself into the biggest problems.“I was there and I took what I took and it gets declassified,” said Mr. Trump, who has maintained, despite contradictions from his own former officials, that he had a standing order automatically declassifying documents that left the Oval Office and went to the president’s residence.“I had every right to do it, I didn’t make a secret of it. You know, the boxes were stationed outside the White House, people were taking pictures of it,” Mr. Trump said, intimating that people were somehow aware that presidential material and classified documents were in them (they were not).In what will be of great interest to the special counsel, Jack Smith, Mr. Trump would not definitively rule out whether he showed classified material to people, something investigators have queried witnesses about, in particular in connection with a map with sensitive intelligence.“Not really,” he hedged, adding, “I would have the right to.” At another point he declared, “I have the right to do whatever I want with them.”He also defended himself for a call he had with Georgia’s secretary of state in which he said he was trying to “find” enough votes to win. “I didn’t ask him to find anything,” Mr. Trump said.There are few issues that worry the Trump team and the former president as much as the documents investigation, and Mr. Trump wore that on his face and in his words on the stage in New Hampshire. 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      Trump’s ‘Stupid,’ ‘Stupid’ Town Hall

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      Given all the attention to President Biden’s cognitive fitness for a second presidential term, it seems fair, even mandatory, to assess Donald Trump’s performance at a televised town hall in Manchester, N.H., on Wednesday night through the same lens:How clear was his thinking? How sturdy his tether to reality? How appropriate his demeanor?On a scale of 1 to Marjorie Taylor Greene, I’d give him an 11.He was asked to respond to a Manhattan jury’s verdict the previous day that he had sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.He said that Carroll once had a cat named Vagina.He was asked about his failure to deliver on his signature promise to voters in 2016 — that he’d build a wall stretching across the southwestern border of the United States.“I did finish the wall,” he said, just a few beats before adding that Biden could have easily and quickly completed the stretch that still hasn’t been built if he’d cared to. The statements contradicted each other. They made no sense. They were his entire performance in a nutshell.He was asked about his role in the Jan. 6 violence and whether he had regrets.He reminisced mistily about addressing the rally before the riot — “It was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to,” he boasted — and about how they were there “with love in their hearts.” The problem, he said, was “Crazy Nancy,” meaning Pelosi, whose fault all of this really was.It’s never Trump’s — not on this score, not on any other, not when a jury rules against him, not when voters pick someone else to be in the White House, not when he’s indicted, not when he’s impeached, not when he’s impeached a second time, not when he’s caught hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, not when he’s caught on tape.He was grilled about such a tape, the one after Election Day 2020 that has him ordering the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, which Biden narrowly won, to overturn that result by finding him more votes.“I didn’t ask him to find anything,” Trump insisted, incorrectly. “I said, ‘You owe me votes.’” Whew! I’m glad that’s cleared up.In response to question after question, on issue after issue, Trump denied incontrovertible facts, insisted on alternative ones, spoke of America as a country swirling down the toilet, spoke of himself as the only politician who could save it, framed his presidency as one that outshone all the others, projected his own flaws and mistakes on his critics and opponents, expressed contempt for them and claimed persecution.He was, in other words, a font of lies keeping true to himself, ever the peacock, always cuckoo. The evening made utterly clear — just in case there was a scintilla of doubt — that his latest, third bid for the White House won’t be any kind of reset, just a full-on rehash. And that was inevitable, because someone like Trump doesn’t change. His self-infatuation precludes any possibility of that.The town hall, hosted by CNN and moderated heroically by the anchor Kaitlan Collins, played like a kind of Mad Libs of hundreds of Trump’s public appearances and interviews since he jumped into the presidential fray back in 2015. Some of the proper nouns were different. Some of the dates had changed. Almost everything else was the same.Instead of complaining about the insufficient financial contributions of NATO’s member countries, he complained about the insufficient financial contributions of European nations to Ukraine’s war effort. His descriptions of the evil, dangerous hordes poised to stream into the United States from Mexico right now sounded like a remix of his descriptions, on the day he announced his first presidential campaign nearly eight years ago, of the evil, dangerous hordes supposedly streaming in then.In an ugly echo of the 2016 presidential debate when he called Hillary Clinton “nasty,” he called Collins “nasty.” The “very stable genius,” as he once pronounced himself, has a very static vocabulary.And he has no acquaintance with a thesaurus, dignity or maturity. “Stupid,” “stupid,” “stupid” — he kept using that word, I guess because it’s so presidential. He applied it to anyone who doesn’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen and rigged. He applied it to everything about the Biden administration and Democrats in Washington.“Our country is being destroyed by stupid people — by very stupid people,” he said. He never ascended to an altitude of eloquence above that.A word about CNN: Its decision to give Trump this platform was widely attacked, but the network was correct to recognize that he is a relevant, potent political force who cannot be ignored and must be thoroughly vetted. Collins was clearly and rightly encouraged to challenge every false claim that he made, and she did precisely that, demonstrating great knowledge and preternatural poise.But where CNN went wrong was in the audience it assembled, a generally adoring crowd who laughed heartily at Trump’s jokes, clapped lustily at his insults and thrilled to his every puerile flourish. When several of them had their turns at the microphone, their questions were air kisses, which is why Collins had to keep stepping in to slap Trump around with her own. The contrast — her righteous firmness, their star-struck flaccidity — was disorienting and repellent. Between now and November 2024, we’re in for a stranger and scarier ride than in any other presidential election in my lifetime, and there’s no telling how it will end.That was the moral of the much-discussed poll by The Washington Post and ABC News that was released last weekend. It not only gave Trump a six-point lead over Biden in a hypothetical matchup but also showed that voters deem Trump, 76, more physically and mentally fit for the presidency than Biden, 80.I’ll grant Trump his vigor. During the town hall, he spoke emphatically and energetically.But vigor isn’t competence, and that brings me back to the start. I myself have observed that Biden often doesn’t seem as clear and focused as he did in the past, but next to a man who insouciantly brags that he could end the war between Ukraine and Russia in 24 hours, as Trump did on Wednesday night?Next to a man who also reprised his claims of some godlike power to declassify documents by simply staring at them and thinking unclassified thoughts?Next to a man who sires his own reality, comes to believe in that fantasy while it’s still in diapers, considers himself omnipotent, fancies himself omniscient and replaces genuine reflection with disingenuous navel gazing?That was Trump at the town hall. That was Trump for his four years in office. That would be Trump if he gets back to the White House. And it’s no display of superior cognition. Just a reminder of the madness that this country can’t seem to put behind it.For the Love of SentencesPool photo by Stefan RousseauIn the prelude to last weekend’s coronation of King Charles III, Helen Lewis visited and considered royals less fussed over. “One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts,” she observed. “It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians.” She has to pass through a gate “guarded by an elderly manservant for whom the term ‘faithful retainer’ might have been invented. Because I am British, his thinly disguised irritation at my presence makes me feel right at home.” (Thanks to Lizzy Menges of Garden City, N.Y., for drawing my attention to Lewis’s excellent article.)Rachel Tashjian in The Washington Post weighed in on the ostentation of Charles’s coronation: “The red velvet robes trimmed in ermine, the five-pound crown, the gold robes on top of gold robes dragging over gold carpets — the regalia often made it feel like a Versace fashion show staged in an assisted-living facility.” (Ann Kolasa Zastrow, Evanston, Ill., and Merrio Morton, Lancaster, S.C., among many others)And from Tom Holland in The Guardian: “Watching a coronation is the constitutional equivalent of visiting a zoo, and finding a Triceratops in one of the enclosures.” (Dot McFalls, Charlottesville, Va.)In The New Yorker, J.R. Moehringer, the ghostwriter of Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” reflected on the impossibility of walking entirely in this particular man’s shoes: “I’d worked hard to understand the ordeals of Harry Windsor, and now I saw that I understood nothing. Empathy is thin gruel compared with the marrow of experience.” (Sara Klemmer, Charlotte, N.C., and Susan Kochan, Brooklyn, among others)In The Times, Ligaya Mishan celebrated the infinite textures of food: “What of the coy half-surrender that the Italians venerate in pasta as ‘al dente’ and the Taiwanese in noodles and boba as ‘Q’ (or ‘QQ,’ if the food in question is exceptionally springy); the restive yolk threatening to slither off a six-minute egg; the seraphic weight of a chiffon cake; the heavy melt of fat off a slab of pork belly, slowly liquefying itself? What of goo, foam, dust, air? What of the worlds that lie between slime and velvet, collapse and refusal, succulence and desiccation?” (Judy Cress, El Cerrito, Calif.)Also in The Times, Robert Draper profiled William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director: “His ascent is an unlikely turn for a tall, discreet figure with wary eyes, ashen hair and a trim mustache, a sort you could easily imagine in a John le Carré novel whispering into a dignitary’s ear at an embassy party that the city is falling to the rebels and a boat will be waiting in the harbor at midnight.” (Jefferson M. Gray, Baltimore, and Ed Lyon, Cincinnati)And Michael Levenson reported on the odd dumping of hundreds of pounds of pasta alongside a creek in Old Bridge, N.J. “When photos of the discarded pasta were shared on a Reddit discussion about all things New Jersey, it became fertile ground for puns and dad jokes,” he wrote. “Someone commented: ‘We should send the perpetrators to the state penne tentiary.’” Town workers cleaned up and disposed of the pasta in under an hour. “It was not clear if a large fork had been used.” (Pat Reneman, Kettle Falls, Wash., and Margaret Koziel, Cambridge, Mass., among others)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m ReadingA red-eyed tree frog in the Costa Rican rainforest.Getty ImagesI was a few months late to The New Yorker article “Is Artificial Light Poisoning the Planet?” by Adam Gopnik, but I’m glad I didn’t miss it altogether. It springboards off the book “The Darkness Manifesto” by the Swedish ecologist Johan Eklof, and it’s a fascinating glance at one of the less discussed ways in which human activity and advancement have badly harmed the fauna around us. It’s also a mini-tutorial on the evolution of animal vision, and it’s rich with artful prose. (Harry Gerecke, Vashon, Wash.)If you, like me, are a dog lover, but you, unlike me, missed Sarah Lyall’s delightful profile in The Times of the fluffy canine cloud that is Striker, you should remedy that right away.There’s a reason the world seems so much scarier now than at many points in the recent past: It is! Or at least the perils come in newly diverse forms. That’s one of the takeaways from a new book, “Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons and New Threats,” co-written by my former Times colleague Thom Shanker, who now runs the Project for Media and National Security at George Washington University, and Andrew Hoehn of the RAND Corporation. It was published Tuesday, and it’s a sobering, intelligent analysis from two experts who know whereof they write.On a Personal NoteLiz Holmes, left, as she looks today, many years after she went by Elizabeth Holmes, right.Philip Cheung for The New York Times; Lisa Lake, via Getty ImagesMany of my friends were abuzz last weekend about Amy Chozick’s profile in The Times of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced and convicted founder of the fraudulent biotech start-up Theranos. The incarnation of herself that Holmes presented to Chozick — loving spouse, nurturing mother, known to her husband and friends as Liz — was a far cry from the Silicon Valley sorceress who spoke so affectedly, rose so astronomically and fell so spectacularly, and my friends puzzled over the same question Chozick did: How much of Liz was real?I’m betting quite a bit, and that’s not because I’m credulously accepting that she has traveled some profound moral arc, from a thicket of want to a clearing of altruism and authenticity. I don’t believe in personality transplants any more than I do in head transplants, and life isn’t tidy that way. But just as I suspect that Elizabeth lives on in Liz, I suspect that Liz was always lurking in Elizabeth. Life is messy that way.We love to assign people types, fold them into taxonomies, put them in discrete categories. You’re an introvert, but your partner is an extrovert. He’s codependent, but she has commitment issues. Many of us are all of the above. Most of us indeed contain multitudes, even if — for a short period or forever — we manage to wear and show the world just one face, which reflects the circumstances in which we find ourselves as much as it does some unalloyed and immutable truth.Elizabeth or Liz? It’s not a binary, and the more relevant and answerable question is whether Elizabeth-cum-Liz acted badly, hurt people needlessly and should pay a price. I believe so, as did a jury and a judge: She has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for her reckless and ruinous fictions, be they consistent with her priorities now or not.On the far side of her incarceration, she won’t be a different person. But she’ll surely be a reassembled, reapportioned one, with parts more or less prominent than in phases of her life when they got less tending or when they had less use. More

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      Toe-curlingly bad television: Trump’s torturous town hall backfires on CNN

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      The nausea came gradually, then suddenly, and with disconcerting familiarity. We had been flung back in time to the political hellscape of 2016. Only the second time around, it was somehow worse.Donald Trump, the former US president appearing on CNN for the first time since that fateful election year, lied and lied and lied. He was a leviathan of lying, a juggernaut of junk, an ocean liner of mendacity that left little boats of truth spinning and overturning in its wake.Trump called a Black police officer a “thug”. He made racist comments about Chinatown in Washington. He described host Kaitlan Collins as a “nasty person”. He made fun of a woman he sexually abused as a “whack job”. He refused to say whether he wants Russia or Ukraine to win the war.Given the 45th president’s inability to change, it was the definition of shocking but not surprising. What may have come as a rude awakening to the pundit class is that many in the audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, were lapping it up and cheering him on. Some gave Trump a standing ovation as he walked in. Some clapped and hollered at his responses. Some laughed or put their hands to their mouths, visibly thrilled by his “Can he really say that?” taboo-busting.Anyone taken aback by these reactions has not been paying attention to Trump rallies, where being outlandish and outrageous and cruel is the point. Although CNN’s decision to devote more than an hour of prime time to Trump backfired horribly, it did perform the service of forcing the American public to look at itself in the mirror.The vocal support for Trump made this feel like a home fixture. CNN political commentator Van Jones likened Collins to a white suited matador against Trump’s bull in familiar blue suit, white shirt and red tie. It was less town hall than a debate, Trump versus Collins, lies versus truth. Truth didn’t stand a chance. Trump, 76, was like a child with crumbs around his mouth repeatedly telling a parent (Collins, 31) that he didn’t take the last cookie.The pair began perched on white chairs on a shiny stage floor that had a big CNN logo against a backdrop of blue and red. Two CNN mugs were perched on small tables beside them. Trump dived straight into his “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. Collins corrected:“It was not a rigged election. It was not a stolen election. You and your supporters lost more than 60 court cases on the election. It’s been nearly two and a half years. Can you publicly acknowledge that you did lose the 2020 election?”Trump barged on with bogus conspiracy theories, talking too fast to be fact checked and too shamelessly to be interrupted. He gave a long-winded and false defence of his actions on 6 January 2021, earning laughter from the audience with a reference to “Crazy” Nancy Pelosi.Asked why it took him three hours to respond to the riot, Trump pulled out pages of notes to more cheering and clapping. Collins: “Over 140 officers were injured that day.” Trump: “And a person named Ashli Babbitt was killed. You know what? She was killed, and she shouldn’t have been killed. And that thug that killed her, there was no reason to shoot her at blank range … And he went on television to brag about the fact that he killed her.” Collins: “That officer was not bragging about the fact that he killed her.”Trump said he is inclined to pardon “many” of the January 6 rioters. Again, applause from the audience. The base loves him for the precise reasons that others despise him. Stuart Stevens, author of It Was All a Lie: How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump, tweeted: “Democracies end when autocrats master the use of the freedoms of democracy to kill democracy.”Collins turned to Tuesday’s verdict, by which a New York jury found that Trump sexually abused magazine writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her by branding her a liar. They awarded her about $5m in compensatory and punitive damages.Even seasoned Trump watchers were disgusted by what came next. Trump said of Carroll: “I have no idea who she is. I had a picture taken years ago with her and her husband, nice guy John Johnson. He was a newscaster, very nice man. She called him an ape, happens to be African American. Called him an ape – the judge wouldn’t allow us to put that in. Her dog or her cat was named vagina, the judge wouldn’t allow to put that in.”Asked if the case will deter women from voting for him, Trump gave a sneering and meandering version of Carroll’s account of being assaulted by him in the 1990s. “What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes, you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room, OK? I don’t know if she was married then or not. John Johnson, I feel sorry for you, John Johnson.”It was toe curling, not-knowing-where-to-look bad television reminiscent of Trump appearing with women who accused Bill Clinton of rape and unwanted sexual advances before he debated Hillary.As the torture continued, Collins could have been forgiven for thinking her bosses have got it in for her: first a morning show with Don Lemon, now a dark night of the soul with Caligula. She held her own at some moments but was overwhelmed by the geyser of deceit and missed follow-ups at others. At one point she objected: “The election was not rigged, Mr President. You can’t keep saying that all night long.” He might have replied: just watch me.One of the side-effects of all the shock and horror around Trump is that sometimes gets off the hook on policy. Asked five times, he refused to say whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if reelected, merely arguing that leaders of the anti-abortion movement are “in a very good negotiating position right now” because of the supreme court overturning Roe v Wade.When Collins asked if he wants Ukraine to win its war against Russia, he replied: “I don’t think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people.” When asked if Russian president Vladimir Putin was a war criminal, he demurred and insisted: “That’s something to be discussed at a later date.”Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor who ran for president in 2016, tweeted: “Donald Trump says he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours tonight on CNN. Despite how ridiculous that is to say, I suspect he would try to do it by turning Ukraine over to Putin and Russia. #Putin’sPuppet.”If this had indeed been a debate, Trump’s camp claimed victory. It was a warning to potential 2024 Republican primary candidates who may have to face him on the debate stage: how do you take on a motormouth entirely unencumbered by factual reality?When the ordeal was over, the ghosts of 2016 were everywhere and the grim expressions in the CNN studio said it all. Host Jake Tapper admitted: “We don’t have enough time to fact check every lie he told.” More

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      CNN’s Donald Trump Forum Was a Preview of Political Coverage to Come

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      Criticized for handing Donald Trump a live prime-time platform, CNN faced a divisive response to an occasionally bewildering broadcast.David Zaslav, the chief executive of CNN’s parent company, recently defended the network’s decision to host a live town hall with former President Donald J. Trump, calling the event “important for America.”So it proved to be, but perhaps not for the reasons Mr. Zaslav intended.In a bracing and at times bewildering broadcast on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump — appearing on CNN for the first time since 2016 — unleashed a fusillade of falsehoods, sometimes too quickly for his interlocutor, the anchor Kaitlan Collins, to intervene.Again and again, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that the 2020 election was rigged. He called E. Jean Carroll a “wack job” and attacked her in misogynist terms. He defended the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.Ms. Collins, composed in the face of Mr. Trump’s turbulence, interrupted, interceded, corrected and called out the former president on his lies. He often responded by talking right over her. When Mr. Trump finally lost patience and derided Ms. Collins as a “nasty person,” some in the live audience applauded.This was a preview of what American journalism can expect from a 2024 campaign featuring Mr. Trump, who despite his ubiquity in political life has rarely appeared on mainstream TV outside of Fox News since leaving office.If the 2016 campaign showed that many Americans could not agree on common facts, the Babel-like nature of Wednesday’s New Hampshire town hall suggested that voters now occupy wholly different universes. Mr. Trump repeated a web of conspiracies about a stolen election and the “beautiful day” of the Capitol riot, language that was likely to befuddle half the viewing audience and resonate as gospel with the rest.“The election was not rigged, Mr. President,” Ms. Collins said at one point. “You cannot keep saying that all night long.” (He kept saying it.)Ms. Collins, a rising star at CNN who is being considered for a prominent 9 p.m. slot at the network, was an able choice as moderator. She has covered Mr. Trump for years, knows his idiosyncrasies, and was not intimidated when Mr. Trump tried to bully her.Even Mr. Trump looked stumped when Ms. Collins asked, succinctly, “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” (He would not give a straight answer.) She relentlessly pressed him on whether he would sign a federal ban on abortion, pointing out, “You did not say yes or no.” (Again, Mr. Trump would not say.)Still, Ms. Collins could do only so much as the sole journalist on the stage. It quickly became apparent that the crowd of Republican and Republican-leaning independents was deeply skeptical of her efforts to rein in Mr. Trump. The town hall format, where many cheers could be heard as the former president taunted Ms. Collins, made it all the more difficult for her to perform her assignment. (CNN said it assembled the audience in consultation with community groups, faith-based organizations, local Republicans and the Saint Anselm College student government.)When the broadcast ended — after Mr. Trump briefly shook Ms. Collins’s hand and uttered, “Good job” — the cameras cut to a panel of unusually subdued CNN analysts.“We don’t have enough time to fact check every lie he told,” said the anchor Jake Tapper. Some CNN critics had made the same point before Wednesday’s broadcast, and again after it: that it was reckless to allow Mr. Trump to speak live to millions of people in prime-time.Mr. Trump’s inclination to spread falsehoods is well-established. Even Fox News, which has provided the former president friendly forums with conservative stars like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, has not taken Mr. Trump live for many months.He is also the de facto leader of the Republican Party, meaning his remarks are inherently newsworthy to voters on the cusp of a new presidential campaign. CNN said in a statement late Wednesday that its town hall reflected the network’s “role and responsibility: to get answers and hold the powerful to account.”Producers and journalists at the other major television networks watched CNN on Wednesday with curiosity, skepticism, and maybe a bit of trepidation.If Mr. Trump remains the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, he will be appearing on their airwaves soon enough. More

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      Trump repeats conspiracy theories and election lies in CNN town hall

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      Donald Trump appeared at a CNN town hall on Wednesday night to unleash a litany of lies about the 2020 election and E Jean Carroll’s lawsuit, just one day after a New York jury found the former president liable for sexual abuse and defamation.Trump took questions from a friendly crowd of Republican and undeclared voters in New Hampshire, who often greeted the former president’s divisive comments and gestures toward moderator Kaitlan Collins with laughter and applause.Trump offered his thoughts on everything from the debt ceiling to abortion access and the war in Ukraine, but he frequently deflected when asked to outline specific policy objectives if he takes back the White House next year.The town hall turned combative as soon as it began, with Trump reiterating his lies about the 2020 election as Collins repeatedly interjected.Pressed by Collins on whether he would acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, Trump refused to do so. When Collins later asked if he would accept the results of the 2024 election regardless of the outcome, Trump replied, “Yeah, if I think it’s an honest election, absolutely.”Collins appeared to grow exasperated as the 70-minute town hall drew on, telling Trump at one point, “The election was not rigged, Mr President. You can’t keep saying that all night long.”Turning to Trump’s many legal liabilities, she asked the former president for his message to voters who argue that the verdict in Carroll’s lawsuit should disqualify him from seeking office. On Tuesday, a New York jury concluded that Trump had sexually abused Carroll 27 years earlier, ordering the former president to pay her $5m in damages for her battery and defamation claims.Trump responded by attacking Carroll as a “whack job” and raising baseless doubts about the objectivity of the judge who oversaw the case. The New Hampshire crowd welcomed Trump’s offensive and often untrue statements, and some audience members laughed when Collins noted that the former president had been found liable for sexual abuse.The verdict in Carroll’s case came a month after Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges of falsifying business records in connection to a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election. He also faces potential criminal charges in Georgia and Washington over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged mishandling of classified documents.Asked why he had refused to voluntarily deliver the requested documents to federal authorities, Trump replied by calling Collins as a “nasty person”, echoing his characterization of former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as a “nasty woman” in 2016.Meanwhile, Trump often shied away from offering a direct response to policy questions. Asked whether he would sign a federal abortion ban, he replied, “I’m looking at a solution that’s going to work. Very complex issue for the country. You have people on both sides of an issue, but we are now in a very strong position. Pro-life people are in a strong position to make a deal that’s going to be good and going to be satisfactory for them.”Trump would similarly not state whether he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Russia, which launched an unprovoked invasion last year. “I want everybody to stop dying,” Trump said. “Russians and Ukrainians, I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done. I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”The few policy positions that Trump did clearly articulate may be unpopular with a wide swath of the American electorate. Trump said he was “inclined to pardon many” of those convicted for their participation in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. He also discouraged congressional Republicans from approving an increase in the government’s debt ceiling, which could soon cause a disastrous federal default.“I say to the Republicans out there – congressmen, senators – if they don’t give you massive [spending] cuts, you’re going to have to do a default,” Trump said. “I don’t believe they’re going to do a default because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave.”Trump’s position represents a reversal from his stance during his presidency, when he repeatedly suspended the debt ceiling to allow the government to continue borrowing money. Asked why he had changed his tune, Trump replied, “Because now I’m not president.”The flippant comment was met with laughter and applause, underscoring the former president’s enduring hold on the Republican base. Despite his many legal challenges, Trump remains the frontrunner in polls of the Republican primary field.A number of commentators who had criticized CNN for agreeing to host the town hall cited the contentious nature of the conversation and the audience’s positive reaction to Trump’s lies as confirmation of the network’s poor judgement.“CNN should be ashamed of themselves,” progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter. “They have lost total control of this ‘town hall’ to again be manipulated into platforming election disinformation, defenses of Jan 6th, and a public attack on a sexual abuse victim. The audience is cheering him on and laughing at the host.”But CNN defended its decision, arguing voters deserved the opportunity to hear from the current frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary.“Our job, despite his unique circumstances, is to do what we do best,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday morning. “Ask tough questions, follow up and hold him accountable to give voters the information they need to sort through their choices. That is our role and our responsibility.”Biden appeared to have watched the town hall, as he sent out a fundraising request once the event concluded.“It’s simple, folks,” Biden said on Twitter. “Do you want four more years of that?” More

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      in Elections

      Trump Camp Sees CNN Town Hall as Calculated Risk

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      Follow for live updates on the Trump CNN town hall meeting.No questions will be off-limits on Wednesday night at the CNN town hall with Donald J. Trump. He can put 15 people of his choice in the audience but none are allowed to ask questions. And his team has not had a hand in guiding how the event will go, according to two people briefed on the discussions.All of this adds up to no small amount of risk for the former president during the prime-time event, his advisers say — a risk they see as worth taking.They expect tough questions from the CNN anchor and moderator, Kaitlan Collins — and have been anticipating questions about abortion, investigations into Mr. Trump and a civil jury’s finding him liable for defamation and sexual abuse in the lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll in Manhattan, a verdict handed down a day before the town hall.But they also know he will mostly be facing questions from an audience of Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters in New Hampshire, the state hosting the first primary of the 2024 Republican presidential contest. It was the first state Mr. Trump won in 2016 and a place where he still enjoys popularity among Republicans.Mr. Trump’s advisers say he needs to seek a broader audience as he campaigns for the Republican nomination.Doug Mills/The New York TimesSince the end of his presidency, Mr. Trump has largely been relegated to appearing on right-wing networks and podcasts. He has taken reporters aboard his plane now that he’s a candidate, but his team recognizes that he needs to start venturing beyond the fringe to gain access to a broader audience, particularly as a contrast to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who avoids the mainstream media. And CNN was willing to provide him that opportunity, several advisers said. The town hall will be Mr. Trump’s first appearance on CNN since the 2016 campaign.“You can’t just stay on certain channels all the time,” said a person close to Mr. Trump who was not authorized to speak publicly about the town hall planning. “You’ve got to start venturing out. And that’s a clear contrast to what other candidates may or may not do.”The town hall has been months in the making.Earlier this year, Mr. Trump’s team had wanted to participate in a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity, a popular pro-Trump anchor. But Mr. Hannity ultimately did an interview with Mr. Trump instead, and the town hall never materialized. Through a Fox News press officer, Mr. Hannity denied there was any obstacle to a Fox town hall, insisting Mr. Trump “preferred to do an interview on this occasion and said he would do a town hall as his campaign progressed.”Several weeks after Mr. Trump declared his candidacy in November, CNN was in touch with the former president’s team about a possible interview, as the network has held with other presidential candidates, said two people familiar with the discussions who requested anonymity to describe the talks. As the conversations about a Fox News town hall fizzled, the Trump team began negotiating with CNN in earnest.“There is no change to our format because of the unique nature of Donald Trump’s candidacy,” said David Chalian, CNN’s political director. “CNN’s role of bringing a candidate into direct touch with voters in this town hall format has been and continues to be a staple of our presidential campaign coverage.”Mr. Trump is not prone to practice sessions. His debate preparations during his two previous presidential campaigns often devolved into him telling old war stories or yelling at aides. For this occasion, Mr. Trump held an informal session with a handful of aides, including his speechwriter, Vince Haley, on Monday in his office at Mar-a-Lago, according to multiple people briefed on the gathering. No one was assigned to play Ms. Collins. Aides have instead discussed questions that might arise.The Trump team has spent considerable time discussing the politics of abortion. Mr. Trump is more responsible than anyone — with the possible exception of the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell — for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.Yet Mr. Trump himself has at times been privately ambivalent about the consequences of the decision, and has blamed abortion politics for Republicans’ dismal performance in the 2022 midterm elections. He discussed the subject as if he were a pundit or bystander rather than the architect of Roe v. Wade’s demise. And he has troubled some prominent anti-abortion activists in the way he has handled questions about abortion policy since the midterms. Mr. Trump has refused to say he would support a national abortion ban, instead saying abortion policy should be left to the states.On Monday, Mr. Trump met at Mar-a-Lago with leaders of the anti-abortion movement who were worried about his recent comments, including Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. In the meeting, Mr. Trump said his position on abortion was the same as it was when he first ran for president and the same as what he endorsed in office, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversation. Back then, Mr. Trump supported a national ban on most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. As a result of Mr. Trump’s comments in the meeting, Ms. Dannenfelser released a statement praising him.But in the CNN town hall, Mr. Trump might not stipulate a number of weeks at which abortion should be illegal, according to two people familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking. Instead, he is expected to take credit for keeping his anti-abortion promises in office and mention that he supports “the three exceptions”: when necessary to save the life of the mother or when the cases involve rape or incest. He may then turn to attacking Democrats by describing horrific images of late-term abortions, similar to what he did in a 2016 debate with his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. More

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      in Elections

      Donald Trump to Appear on CNN Town Hall

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      Wednesday’s town hall has already proved divisive — and it could be an unsettling preview for the TV news industry as it prepares to cover a presidential contest that is likely to feature Mr. Trump.Should a leading presidential contender be given the opportunity to speak to voters on live television?What if that contender is former President Donald J. Trump?Mr. Trump is set to appear on CNN on Wednesday night for a town hall in New Hampshire — his first live appearance on a major TV news network (besides those controlled by Rupert Murdoch) since 2020 — and a torrid media debate is swirling.Joy Reid, an anchor on rival MSNBC, derided the event as “a pretty open attempt by CNN to push itself to the right and make itself attractive and show its belly to MAGA.” Her colleague Chris Hayes called the town hall “very hard to defend.” Critics asked why CNN would provide a live platform to someone who defended rioters at the United States Capitol and still insists the 2020 election was rigged.Those objections intensified on Tuesday after Mr. Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E. Jean Carroll. “Is @CNN still going to do a town hall with the sexual predator twice impeached insurrectionist?” Alexander S. Vindman, the Army colonel who was a witness in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, wrote on Twitter.Mr. Trump is also, at the moment, the highest-polling Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential campaign and the de facto leader of his party. Some veteran TV journalists wonder: What’s the alternative?“So no more live political events, because politicians can be nasty? Because politicians can tell lies?” Ted Koppel, the former “Nightline” anchor, said in an interview. “I’m not sure that news organizations should necessarily be in the business of making ideological judgments. Is he a legitimate object of news attention? You bet.”Wednesday’s town hall, where Mr. Trump will field questions from Republican and undecided voters, is in some ways a stress test — and an unsettling preview — for the television news industry as it prepares to cover a presidential contest that is likely, in its early stages at least, to prominently include Mr. Trump.Any telecast featuring the former president is bound to be divisive. Were anchors too harsh? Too lenient? How quickly did they react to false claims? And foes of Mr. Trump will cringe at seeing him on air at all.But Bob Schieffer, the longtime CBS anchor, said that interviews of important political figures were necessary. “There’s no question he might well get the nomination,” he said of Mr. Trump. “We’re in the business of telling people who’s running for what and what they stand for.”CNN faced criticism in 2016 for granting Mr. Trump hours of unfettered airtime during the Republican primary. Jeff Zucker, the network’s president at the time, later acknowledged he had overdone it.Mr. Trump then spent years vilifying the network, leading chants of “CNN sucks” and barring its correspondent Jim Acosta from the White House. A YouGov poll last month found that CNN was the country’s most polarizing major media source, with the widest gap between the portion of Democrats who trust it and the portion of Republicans who don’t.Mr. Trump last appeared on CNN in 2016, and since then much has changed. CNN was acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery, and Mr. Zucker was replaced; his successor, Chris Licht, pledged to broaden the network’s appeal. He is backed by David Zaslav, the Warner chief executive, who has batted away objections to Wednesday’s Trump town hall.“The U.S. has a divided government; we need to hear both voices,” Mr. Zaslav said last week on CNBC, where he was questioned repeatedly about the decision to host Mr. Trump. “When we do politics, we need to represent both sides. I think it’s important for America.”Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has soured on Fox News, irked by Mr. Murdoch’s support for a potential Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. And he has taken notice of Mr. DeSantis’s aversion to appearing on mainstream outlets like CNN.Mr. Trump and CNN are not exactly reconciled. There is the awkward fact that Mr. Trump still has a pending $475 million defamation lawsuit against the network. And in a missive on Truth Social on Tuesday, the former president told fans that CNN was “rightfully desperate to get those fantastic (TRUMP!) ratings once again.” He added: “Could be the beginning of a New & Vibrant CNN, with no more Fake News, or it could turn into a disaster for all, including me. Let’s see what happens?”As olive branches go, it felt a bit spindly. But David Chalian, CNN’s political director, shrugged it off. “We never stopped covering him as president despite everything he said about us,” Mr. Chalian said in an interview. “We never stopped doing our jobs.”CNN executives will air Mr. Trump’s remarks live, without any time delay. That means if Mr. Trump makes a false claim, it will be up to the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, or an onscreen graphic to correct him in real time. Mr. Trump’s last three interviews on Fox News were prerecorded. (Fox recently paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems, after several of its anchors amplified Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the company.)In the interview, Mr. Chalian said that CNN was “in the business of live news events — that’s what we do.” He added, “I obviously can’t control what Donald Trump says, but what we can control is our journalism.”CNN did not agree to preconditions for the town hall, Mr. Chalian said — “No question is off the table” — and Ms. Collins has spent several days preparing for the broadcast. Selecting Ms. Collins to moderate is in keeping with Mr. Licht’s emphasis on reporting over punditry; Ms. Collins is best known for day-to-day White House coverage and previously worked at The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet.Mr. Koppel, in the interview, said Ms. Collins was a “tough and able” journalist who could handle Mr. Trump in a live setting. He said CNN had many reasons to go forward with the event.“Has Trump pushed the boundaries of honesty, good taste, decency, humanity, to such a degree that we should not put him on the air at all, unless we’ve had the chance to sanitize what he has to say?” Mr. Koppel said. “I can understand that’s a reasonable question to ask. But it puts a very heavy burden on the shoulders of the people who run our networks. Because it means we are going to let them decide who gets on the air, and who doesn’t.” More

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      in US Politics

      Dear CNN, giving Trump a town-hall platform is the height of irresponsibility | Siva Vaidhyanathan

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      With 18 months to go before the next US presidential election, it’s already clear that – barring a physical collapse or two – Joe Biden will represent the Democrats and Donald Trump will carry the hopes of Republicans.This will be the first presidential election after one of the candidates, the president at the time, tried to foment a violent insurrection to overturn the last election. It will be the first election since 1912 in which a former president (in that case Theodore Roosevelt) challenges a sitting president (in that case William Howard Taft). It will be the first election in American history in which one candidate has already been impeached – twice, in fact. It will be the first election since 1800 in which one of the major candidates can reasonably be called a threat to or disloyal to the United States of America (Aaron Burr in 1800 was the first). And Burr had not yet revealed his propensity for treachery in 1800. It will be the first election in which one of the candidates has been indicted on state criminal charges (and possibly federal charges by the time of the election).In other words, it will be a weird election in every way. Yet, despite staring at a growing, violent, nativist, fascist-like movement that doggedly supports Trump, the mainstream American news media seems poised to treat both candidates as if they are viable, reasonable representatives of the traditions their political parties have grown to symbolize.It’s as if they have learned nothing.CNN, the leading 24-hour news network, will host Trump for a “town hall” forum in New Hampshire on Wednesday, as if he were a regular candidate leading the race for the nomination of a regular party. Of course, CNN will probably do the same for the three or four others who are likely to challenge him for the Republican nomination (so far, the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are the only viable non-crank candidates).A few more might jump in, but the more challenges Trump faces, the more likely he will lock up the nomination on the first primary day, rather than a month later.Putting a microphone and three cameras on Trump as if he were just another candidate and not an instigator of the violent disruption of American democracy and leader of a conspiracy to overthrow the results of a national election is the height of journalistic irresponsibility.The conservative columnist Alyssa Farah Griffin defended CNN by saying that the host, Kaitlan Collins, is “tough” and won’t let Trump “get away with lying without being called out”. That’s exactly the problem. CNN is in the business of performing toughness and balance, not primarily producing journalism that serves to enlighten citizens and enhance democracy. CNN seems to exist to create tweetable moments of anchor “toughness”, through which the celebrities who appear on air make events and interviews all about them. The CNN faces are tough enough to stand in the wind and rain of a hurricane, and tough enough to call out a politician – even a bully like Trump – for lying. But that’s easy and shallow. Ultimately, it hurts democracy.The issue is not whether Trump gets caught in a lie or “gets away” with something. Trump doesn’t care when that happens and neither do Republican supporters. We have 40 years of Trump shamelessness to demonstrate that – seven years of Trump as a political figure. He has been “called out” time and time again. It makes no difference to his support or to his habits. Exposing Trump as a liar changes no minds about anything.But he will receive the imprimatur of respectability for warranting this platform in the first place. CNN and all journalists must concede that they perform that work, despite wishing and pretending they did not. They have just been too lazy to question doing things the way they had always done things. Every major news organization has done the same. No one has wanted to admit it is a dangerous moment or new environment.So how should mainstream journalistic organizations like CNN cover Trump – or any candidate – through the election? All plans and policies should be based on the realization that democracy is under direct threat from many small factions in the United States, supported by at least one foreign power (Russia), and that they all support the return of Donald Trump to power. Trump himself is immune to shaming and exposure. So that 20th-century assumption about shining a light or exposing or embarrassing a wrongdoer is not appropriate now. The situation is more dire and the political climate in the United States is beyond such tepid, genteel moves.News organizations should do everything differently. No more “town halls” for any candidate, not just Trump. No more interviews in comfortable chairs and good lighting intended to demonstrate both access to power and a certain toughness in approach. No more unfiltered coverage of rallies and speeches as if they constitute “news” before they are ever broadcast or rendered in text.Coverage should be driven by clear editorial choices. Journalists should decide what the candidates will respond to. They should approach each story based on an issue at hand, in the country, in the world, rather than whatever the candidate chooses to say that day. Every report should be couched in deep context, with every quote encased in statements and reminders of the candidate’s record, the facts about the issue, and what the choice is for voters.Reports should be delivered as multimedia packages, accompanied by deep research just a click away from the video, audio or text that invites the citizen into the story. Organizations should begin planning such coverage now so that nothing they do gets hijacked by shenanigans or games by any candidate – with full knowledge that hijacking the normal practices of 20th-century political journalism was precisely Trump’s strategy from 2015 through today. Steve Bannon told us so. Editors and reporters chose not to take it seriously.If a potential story does not serve to inform voters about what is at stake, it should never make it to publication or broadcast. That’s a simple test: does this story enlighten and enable the electorate? Or does this story merely serve to enrage and entertain the electorate? The moment when news organizations began gathering deep and sophisticated data about audience engagement, they began competing for attention against games and pornography and sitcoms and YouTube clips. That’s a fact of the business and a fact of life. But pandering to that fact instead of resisting it is rendering journalism incapable of functioning because journalism can never win the entertainment game.News organizations must accept that they make news by virtue of their choices. They don’t cover things that already exist as “news”. They are political actors. They must choose democracy or risk being used for free by the forces that oppose democracy. The stakes are too high to continue doing business as usual. The stakes are high in a business sense, of course. But they are higher in the sense of our survival as a democratic republic in a world in which democracy is in danger. More