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      Trump Cannot Be Unseen

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      Gail Collins: Hey Bret, good to be conversing again. Heck of a lot going on. Before we get to the border or the budget, though, let me admit I’m shallow and start with the Trump town hall on CNN.Bret Stephens: Not shallow, Gail. But you are depressing me.Gail: Trump lost your Republican vote a long time ago, but if you were still on the fence, was there anything on display that evening that would have had an impact?Bret: I’m not exactly a reliable gauge of how today’s Republicans think: In November, I wrote a column called “Donald Trump Is Finally Finished,” which I may have to spend the rest of my life living down.That said, I would guess that if you’re the sort of voter who liked 80-proof Trump, you’re gonna love 120-proof Trump. And that’s what he was in that CNN town hall: more mendacious, more shameless, more unapologetic, more aggressive, nastier. But also undeniably vigorous, particularly when compared with Joe Biden. My guess is the town hall will consolidate his lead as the Republican front-runner.Your take? Should CNN have given him the platform?Gail: Don’t see any reason CNN shouldn’t have done the interview. Except that it reduces pressure on Trump to show up for any Republican primary debates. Which he naturally wants to avoid, given his ineptitude when it comes to actual policy questions.Bret: I’m of two minds. The media has a responsibility to cover the Republican front-runner, and I thought Kaitlan Collins, the CNN moderator, handled the responsibility about as well as anyone could have. Yet nonstop media attention is the oxygen on which Trump thrives. The more attention we give him — which is what we are doing right now — the stronger he gets.Gail: About the impact: Yeah, if you liked Trump before, you wouldn’t be deterred by his willingness to let the nation default, or his being “inclined” to pardon a lot of the Jan. 6 rioters.Really would like to hear an everybody-in primary debate, though. Without Trump, I guess the only suspense would be whether Ron DeSantis is capable of being … not terrible.Bret: Well, as much as I dislike DeSantis for his views on abortion and Ukraine and free speech, I also have to ask whether I’d prefer him to Trump as the Republican nominee. And there the answer is a resounding yes, much as I’d much prefer a peptic ulcer to stomach cancer.Gail: I’m still not inclined to pick DeSantis over — pretty much anybody. Yeah, Trump is worse when it comes to personal morality, and DeSantis probably wouldn’t be as divisive in the sense of not being exciting enough to really rile up the base.But his position on social issues like abortion is scary: He truly believes in imposing his extremist convictions on the country.Bret: True, but Trump believes in imposing his despotic convictions on the country.I also think it’s imperative that Democrats — and I don’t mean Robert Kennedy Jr. — start thinking about challenging Biden in the primary. That Washington Post-ABC poll showing Biden with a 36 percent approval rating and running 6 points behind Trump should scare the bejeezus out of Democrats — and that’s before we wind up in a recession or a full-scale banking crisis or a shooting war with China (or all three).Gail: Real-life fact is that no Democrat with the standing to potentially win a primary would challenge a sitting president. Especially one like Biden whose performance is … not bad. He’s had some real achievements, particularly in the super-important battle against global warming. Overall yes, he’s unexciting, and these days incapable of forcing the House Republicans to do anything really constructive. But his standards and character are high.Bret: As you know, I will vote for him over Trump or DeSantis. But Democrats overstate his achievements and underestimate his unpopularity at their own — actually, our own — peril.Gail: We both were wishing he’d announce he wasn’t running and open the door for other promising candidates to jump in. But since it’s not gonna happen … it’s not gonna happen.Bret: Probably right. Next subject: Your thoughts about the budget negotiations?Gail: I have faith that there’s not going to be a crushing default — that in a total crisis the Fed will figure out something. But when it comes to the bottom line I’m on the side of Joe Biden. (Surprise!) You do not use the country’s credit standing to stage a stupid battle about cutting funds for the poor.Bret: Well, by the same token, you do not use the country’s credit standing to insist that no spending cuts should even be countenanced and that able-bodied single adults should not have to find work as a condition of obtaining government benefits.Gail: The Republicans are attacking the status quo, not some new program the Democrats are trying to push through. And I’ve always been wary of the must-work stuff because all the paperwork, even in our technological era, makes it so easy for people to get cut off for no reason except bureaucratic confusion.Bret: The conservative in me hates subsidizing indolence, especially when jobs are abundant. Welfare should go to those who truly need it, not people who just can’t be bothered to work.Gail: Also, I think this must-work discussion has to begin with quality child care for every low-income family that needs it. Very bottom bottom line is that kids come first.About the budget — I guess Congress could just decide there just shouldn’t be a debt ceiling. After all, we went more than 125 years without one. Is that something you think they should rally around?Bret: The debt ceiling reminds me a bit of the Doomsday machine in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.” In theory, it’s supposed to encourage restraint and responsibility. In practice, it’s likely to destroy the world. I’d be interested to see the administration test the theory that the 14th Amendment, which says that the public debt of the United States “shall not be questioned,” makes the debt ceiling unconstitutional, although I doubt they could win that case in court.The other crisis, Gail, is happening at the southern border. Looking back, anything the administration might have done to avert it?Gail: Not gonna be silly enough to claim the Biden folks have been completely on top of the whole situation.Bret: Our awesome veep ….Gail: But it looks like we’ll finally be getting a lot of new federal workers to deal with the people who show up at the border.And the Biden administration is working on it. The Trump administration was totally useless on the problem.Bret: Not useless but definitely cruel. But what voters will remember is that under Trump, we didn’t have this scale of a crisis.Gail: Not sure the scale is really going to be that overwhelming as the year moves on. And I still have to note that I hate, really hate, your idea of finishing that wall.Bret: A wall won’t stop all illegal immigration. But it can help deter the most dangerous and reckless border crossings, which have left thousands of migrants dead. It should be part of an overall immigration compromise that includes automatic citizenship for Dreamers and more permissive rules for legal immigration through normal consular channels in the migrants’ home countries. Right now we have the worst of both worlds: a totally chaotic border that makes a bipartisan legislative compromise a political nonstarter.Gail: Bret, these people have a lot of reasons for coming — including seeking asylum from government oppression. But most of them are coming for jobs, and as you’ve always pointed out, our economy really needs the workers. In New York, we’ve gotten a ton of newcomers. They’re having a terrible time, particularly with housing, but employers, especially in the service industries, are desperate for their help. We just need to work out a system to make it possible.Bret: Sadly, as our news-side colleague Hannah Dreier chronicled last month, many recent border crossers are children working in conditions worthy of Dickens or Dreiser. Seeing mothers with young children strapped to their backs while hawking candies at traffic stops was something I was accustomed to in my hometown of Mexico City. It’s jarring to encounter them at road intersections and on subway platforms in New York City. If Biden doesn’t get a handle on this, it could cost him the election and lead to an ugly public backlash that will make Trump’s immigration policy seem tame.Speaking of subways, Gail, your thoughts on the killing of Jordan Neely?Gail: We’re talking about a former Michael Jackson impersonator who used to entertain subway passengers, but had deteriorated into a homeless man who was mentally ill and sometimes scary.Bret: Very scary. He was a person who had previously been arrested more than 30 times. He had punched an elderly woman in the face. He had exposed himself and peed inside of a subway car. He had walked out on a residential treatment program. There was a warrant for his arrest at the time of his death — but cops probably wouldn’t have found out about it because a group sued to stop the police from detaining people solely to check for arrest warrants. He was the sort of guy who makes the subway frightening for a lot of passengers, particularly women. People ought to know these facts before rushing to judgment.Gail: Neely was acting out and frightening people on the day he died. Daniel Penny, the former Marine who tackled him, was trying to stop an unnerving incident from happening. But he used chokehold force in a way that killed Neely.I can’t absolve Penny. But the big problem here is that the low-or-no-income mentally ill need more services than they’re getting in New York or pretty much anywhere.Bret: Obviously, I don’t support vigilantism. But that’s what you get when police are hampered from maintaining public order. The answer is to give the police the authorities and resources they need to deal with someone like Neely before a tragedy occurs.Gail, this is too grim a note on which to end — and we haven’t even touched on George Santos’s indictment.Gail: Now there’s a high note!Bret: Before we go, I want to put in a word for Sam Roberts’s obituary for Mike Pride, a former editor of The Concord Monitor, who died last month in Florida at 76, and whom we both knew through his stewardship of the Pulitzer Prizes. Mike showed that you can often make the greatest difference as a newsman by writing about issues that are near to people’s everyday lives. He reminded us that local journalism matters. And that it’s at least one thing that deserves to be made great again.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Week in Business: Trump on TV

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      Giulio BonaseraWhat’s Up? (May 7-13)CNN’s TrumpcastUntil last week, former President Donald J. Trump had not appeared on CNN since 2016. But at a town hall hosted by the network on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential campaign, resumed the lies and name-calling that marked his presidency. Answering questions from the anchor Kaitlan Collins, he repeated misinformation about the 2020 election, called the writer E. Jean Carroll, who won a suit accusing him of sexual abuse and defamation, a “wack job” and derided Ms. Collins as a “nasty person.” When Ms. Collins tried to correct Mr. Trump’s lies, he often talked over her. The largely sympathetic audience cheered him on throughout the evening. Critics of CNN’s forum said it was reckless to give Mr. Trump such a large platform for his message, especially because it proved difficult to fact check his statements in real time. The chairman of CNN, Chris Licht, defended the broadcast on Thursday, saying it underscored that covering Mr. Trump would “continue to be messy and tricky.”Inflation Is SlowingA closely watched report on Wednesday showed that inflation in the United States had reached a noteworthy milestone: April was the 10th straight month that the pace of price increases slowed. The Consumer Price Index climbed 4.9 percent from a year earlier, surpassing analysts’ expectations — in a good way. Economists in a Bloomberg survey had forecast a 5 percent climb. Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and fuel costs, also fell slightly. The report comes on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s 10th consecutive increase to its benchmark rate. The latest inflation data, along with other signs of a slowdown in the economy, could make the May increase the last one for now. Elon Musk’s AnnouncementElon Musk long ago asked users on Twitter if he should step down as chief executive of the platform. “I will abide by the results of this poll,” he said. The results came in: Almost 58 percent of the 17.5 million people who voted agreed that Mr. Musk should leave his post. But it was still somewhat surprising when Mr. Musk announced on Friday that he had chosen his replacement: He said his successor would be Linda Yaccarino, the chair of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal. Mr. Musk said Ms. Yaccarino, who recently interviewed him onstage at an advertising event in Miami, would focus on business operations while he would continue to work on product design and technology.Giulio BonaseraWhat’s Next? (May 14-20)Senate Hearings on the Banking CrisisTwo groups that have sought to blame each other for the recent bank failures will appear at a pair of Senate hearings this week — the heads of those banks and the federal regulators who oversee them. On Tuesday, Greg Becker, the former chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, who stepped down from his post after the bank’s collapse in March, will testify before the Senate Banking Committee. Two former top executives from Signature Bank, which failed two days later, will also testify. They are expected to meet a harsh reception from lawmakers. In a letter summoning Mr. Becker to appear, the chairman of the committee wrote, “You must answer for the bank’s downfall.” Regulators can expect a grilling, too, at a separate hearing on Thursday. When regulators appeared before the committee last month, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle faulted shortcomings in oversight for the banking crisis. Regulators also pointed the finger at the banks’ mismanagement.More Turmoil at FoxDominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox News, which was settled for $787.5 million in April, may have been only the opening salvo in a long fight to hold the network accountable for airing misinformation about the 2020 presidential election. Last week, Nina Jankowicz, a prominent specialist in Russian disinformation and online harassment, filed a new defamation suit accusing Fox of spreading lies about her that led to serious threats to her safety and harm to her career. That’s not Fox’s only legal trouble. It still faces a defamation suit from another election technology company, Smartmatic, which is seeking $2.7 billion in damages. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, the network’s star host who was recently ousted and is still under contract, has said he is starting his own show on Twitter, a sign that negotiations to reach an amicable separation with the network have broken down.Report Cards for Big Box StoresWalmart and Target, two of the country’s largest retailers, will release their quarterly earnings reports this week, providing a glimpse at how inflation — which is falling but persistent — is affecting consumers. For the three months that ended in January, Walmart reported that its revenue was 7.3 percent higher than a year earlier and said December was its best month for sales at its U.S. stores in its history. But the company warned of dimmer prospects for the rest of the fiscal year, suggesting that consumers’ ability to absorb higher prices could be approaching its limit. Other retailers struck similar downbeat notes, suggesting that they expected conditions to worsen in the coming months.What Else?Goldman Sachs said on Monday that it would pay $215 million to settle a gender bias suit accusing the bank of hindering women’s career advancement and paying them less than their male colleagues. Disney, in its quarterly earnings report last week, said that it had narrowed its streaming losses but that revenue from its old-line TV channels had fallen sharply. And Peloton said it was recalling more than two million exercise bikes because of reports of a faulty part. More

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      CNN’s Trump debacle suggests TV media set to repeat mistakes of 2016

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      Donald Trump and CNN were in rare agreement: the former president’s hour of free prime-time television on Wednesday evening, dressed up as a “town hall” with Republican voters, was a triumph.“America was served very well by what we did last night,” CNN’s chief executive, Chris Licht, told skeptical members of his own staff at the network’s daily news conference the following morning.“You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them.”As it happens, quite a lot of people said that not only did CNN fail to get answers but it was repeating the terrible mistake of 2016 when it treated Trump as an entertainer not a hostile politician by giving him hours of airtime to spout freely because he was good for ratings, and therefore profits.One of CNN’s own reporters, Oliver Darcy, was less enthused than his boss.“It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” he said in his daily newsletter, Reliable Sources.Darcy then listed all that was wrong. The same old “professional lie machine” that is Trump ignoring the question, talking over the moderator, unleashing “a firehose of disinformation upon the country”.“And CNN aired it all. On and on it went. It felt like 2016 all over again,” he wrote.More than a few Republicans shared that view. Matthew Dowd, former chief strategist for the George W Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, condemned the news network.“CNN was completely unprepared to hold Trump accountable. CNN has done a complete disservice to our democracy,” he wrote. “CNN, you failed journalism and our country.”The New York Times said Trump’s advisers were delighted: “They can’t believe he is getting an hour on CNN with an audience that cheers his every line and laughs at his every joke.”Which raises the question of how television, in particular, should cover Trump as the next election comes into focus. It’s a question even Fox News, which has fallen out with the former president, is now grappling with.Ted Koppel, former anchor of ABC News’s Nightline, asked what the alternative is to television time for a leading contender for a return to the White House.“So no more live political events, because politicians can be nasty? Because politicians can tell lies?” he told the New York Times. “I’m not sure that news organisations should necessarily be in the business of making ideological judgments. Is he a legitimate object of news attention? You bet.”Bob Schieffer, the former CBS news anchor who moderated presidential debates, took much the same position.“We’re in the business of telling people who’s running for what and what they stand for,” he said.But many Americans wondered if it had to be in front of a supportive, jeering audience that evidently included a fair number of his “Make America great again” supporters with little to restrain his torrent of lies, distractions and evasions.Mark Lukasiewicz, former vice-president at NBC News, said of the programme that the mistake was to do it live: “Proving again: Live lying works. A friendly Maga crowd consistently laughs, claps at Trump’s punch lines – including re sex assault and January 6 – and the moderator cannot begin to keep up with the AR-15 pace of lies.”Even Fox News recorded its most recent interviews with Trump.Writing in the Washington Post, Perry Bacon said CNN’s mistake was to say, in the words of its political director, David Chalian, that is it going to “treat Trump like any other presidential candidate”.“CNN should, of course, treat Trump differently from other candidates. His record of anti-democratic behavior makes him a much more dangerous potential president than other candidates,” wrote Bacon.“In 2016, the media not only played down Trump’s chances of winning, but also suggested Trump would not pursue the outlandish and far-right ideas that he was running on if he won. This attitude was summed up by an Atlantic article titled ‘Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally’. This perspective was entirely wrongheaded.”Part of the problem is that few journalists in the US, striving for ill-defined objectivity and almost invariably deferential to present and former presidents, are a match for a man who views the established norms of interviewing and discussion as a provocation. As Kaitlan Collins proved, as she tried, and failed, to contain Trump, even as he called her a “nasty woman” on her own air.Bacon is not alone in worrying that Trump will continue to exploit CNN’s desperation to win back at least some of the Maga voters it lost when the former president led chants of “CNN sucks” at his rallies.That’s certainly how Trump saw it, writing on his Truth Social site shortly before the programme that CNN was “rightfully desperate to get those fantastic (TRUMP!) ratings once again.“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?” he added.As it turned out, what was good for CNN and Trump was viewed by a large part of the rest of America as another disaster in the making. More

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      No Playing Ostrich With Trump

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      As Sun Tzu says, ‘Know the enemy.’WASHINGTON — My brothers Michael and Martin attended baseball’s opening day at the old Griffith Stadium in April 1951, with the Senators (as our team was then called) playing the Yankees. President Harry Truman had been invited to throw out the first pitch, and the stadium erupted in boos; Truman had just fired the extremely popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur as commander of the Far East, and the crowd was irate.When the boys got home, Martin confessed to our father that he had stood up to boo the president before Michael pulled him down.“Dad told me that President Truman was a great man,” Martin later recalled. “He said that if Truman fired MacArthur, he must have his reasons and that I should never boo another president. I never did.”It seems so quaint now, the idea of respecting the president. Gallant has vanished; gladiatorial is in. Patriotism is no longer a premier American virtue. And to a large degree, we have Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch to thank for that.Trump always ridiculed people, but when he brought that into the presidential arena, it was like injecting a virus of cruelty into the political bloodstream.When I flip on Fox News at night, I cringe at the way they make fun of President Biden, the sick delight they take in sniping at any perceived infirmity.Mitt Romney brought some rare Republican rectitude to the Capitol when he was asked about Trump being held liable for sexual abuse and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll trial.“He just is not suited to be president of the United States and to be the person who we hold up to our children and the world as the leader of the free world,” Romney told CNN’s Manu Raju. (The Utah senator also earlier chided Representative George Santos, saying, “You don’t belong here.”)Todd Young, the mild-mannered conservative senator from Indiana, made it clear Thursday, after Trump’s brazen performance at the CNN town hall, that he’d had enough.He told reporters on the Hill that he would not be supporting the former president as the Republican nominee. Asked why, he replied, “Where do I begin?” — a bracing echo of Joseph Welch’s “Have you no sense of decency?” line to that earlier bully boy Joe McCarthy.As a video circulates of Trump celebrating his CNN performance by dancing to “Macho Man” by the pool at Mar-a-Lago, we see Trump unplugged. The existential threat is aiming to get back in the Oval, this time without anyone trying to keep him from going completely off the rails, and with the scary new world of superevolved A.I. chatbots to help him lie and smear. (Trump posted a doctored video on Friday of Anderson Cooper saying “That was President Donald J. Trump ripping us” a new one “here on CNN.”)Trump is spiraling into even more of a self-deluded narcissist, if that’s possible. And he’s even more obsessed with numbers — if that’s possible. When he was asked by the terrific Kaitlan Collins if he regretted his actions on Jan. 6, he began rhapsodizing about, and exaggerating, the size of the crowd that day.“I have never spoken to a crowd as large as this,” he said, adding: “They were there with love in their heart. That was an unbelievable — and it was a beautiful day.”He called one of the most heinous days in American history “a beautiful day.” He called the Black Capitol Police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt, who was trying to break into the House chamber, a “thug.”New Hampshire voters in the audience were cheering on Trump, and many even laughed when he crudely re-defamed E. Jean Carroll.The town hall was enlightening — and frightening. But we needed that reminder to be on full alert, because Trump is not just an unhinged and dangerous extremist; he is also a cunning and dominating insurgent.The argument that the media should ignore Trump and keep him under a bushel basket is ridiculous. You can’t extinguish Trump by not talking to him. He’s always going to find a platform.Sun Tzu stressed that victory depends on knowing the enemy — “Force him to reveal himself.” Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, did a skillful job of letting Trump convict himself in the deposition.President Biden needs to see what he’s up against. There are only so many times Biden can say “C’mon, man!” in a debate. The more he sees Trump in action, the less likely he is to be steamrolled. Biden’s team has been blithely underestimating the opponent. The cascading indictments allow Trump to play the gilt-dipped martyr on an even larger scale.The task is to challenge Trump and expose him, not to put our fingers in our ears and sing “la, la, la.”“It strikes me as fundamentally wrong to deny voters a chance to see candidates, and particularly front-running candidates, answering challenging questions from journalists and citizens in open forums,” David Axelrod told me Friday. “You can’t save democracy from people who would shred its norms by shredding democratic norms yourselves.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      We’re Asking the Wrong Questions About the Trump Town Hall

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      As a former executive of Fox News, I never expected to write this: CNN performed a valuable journalistic service this week by hosting a spirited town hall with Donald Trump.Like it or not, Mr. Trump is one of the two people who are most likely to win the presidency next year. He should be questioned by journalists at every opportunity, whether those be news conferences, live interviews, taped interviews, debates and, yes, town halls. Far too often, presidential candidates stick to scripted events, safe audiences and saturation advertising; days, even weeks, go by with a candidate — or a sitting president — not facing a single tough question.We’ve heard a lot of naysayers deriding the recent town hall or even the idea of mainstream media interviews with Mr. Trump as “platforming” a monster. Monster or not, Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination (he is about 30 points ahead of his nearest rival) and a central figure in some of the most high-profile political and legal debates in this country. Are we better off as a society if, after shunting Mr. Trump into his own MAGA bubble, we wake up in November 2024 and find that he has been elected president?With the first Republican primary debate scheduled for August, we need to confront this and some other uncomfortable questions now. Is American democracy so fragile that we cannot metabolize the outlandish views of a presidential candidate? If a candidate is the subject of serious investigations, shouldn’t the news media ask him about that? Are our ideas of journalism so degraded that providing airtime to a candidate is tantamount to an endorsement?When a reporter holds a politician’s feet to the fire by asking him tough questions, that does not mean she or the network endorses the politician’s answers. We need to reflect on why televising a town hall with a leading candidate, no matter how abhorrent he is to a portion of the country, could inspire not just outrage at his performance but also fundamental questions about a television network’s decision to host the candidate. The Constitution does not bar Mr. Trump from running and our democracy does not bar him from running — yet CNN should not ask him tough questions?Since the 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, television networks have played a role in our country’s politics. Television is second only to the internet in its ability to concentrate the country’s attention. The United States is a mature democracy. We must trust voters to assess candidates and the media to provide more, not less, information.Some Democrats think that Mr. Trump’s performance at the town hall will hurt him among swing voters, making it less likely that he will win in 2024. That may be so: Many swing voters have spent less time thinking about Mr. Trump these last two years because they don’t obsess about politics like partisans do. So it was a journalistic service to interrogate Mr. Trump’s brand of politics in a forum that allowed voters to assess the former president.I have spent a lot of time thinking about what motivates Americans to vote, and I wonder if there’s more driving the hyperventilating about the town hall than just providing a platform to a monster. Could Democrats be worried that Mr. Trump’s brio and showmanship might strike a chord with some voters? Could Mr. Trump’s performance remind some independents that while they may not be overtly pro-Trump, they are more than a little anti-anti-Trump?Having spent part of my career helping prepare news anchors to question presidential candidates in debates and town halls, I tip my hat to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. Under enormous pressure, Ms. Collins kept her composure and, crucially, never made it about herself. Furthermore, she elicited responses from the candidate that made news on topics from abortion to Ukraine.Mindful of Ms. Collins’s strong performance, critics have instead focused their ire on the town hall format, lamenting that it allowed Republican audience members to cheer on Mr. Trump’s insults and falsehoods. But not all the people in the room were pro-Trump — just the noisy ones. Besides, news organizations have been using town hall formats for years, rightfully reasoning that it’s important for candidates to hear from likely primary voters.Should we ban all town halls because the audience might side with the candidate? Should we ban live interviews because it’s too difficult to fact-check a candidate in real time? Or should we just ban Donald Trump altogether and get it over with, as many of his critics would prefer?We should do none of these things. That would be a journalistic disservice to a pluralistic society and electorate that is entrusted with listening, assessing and judging our leaders. Town halls like this one help Americans to think for themselves. It wasn’t so long ago that journalists were able to report hard truths and conduct tough interviews without worrying about upsetting some segment of their viewers. CNN deserves a lot of credit for attempting to return to a baseline that I always considered Journalism 101, but which now feels downright old-fashioned.Bill Sammon is the former managing editor of the Washington bureau of Fox News.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      As Trump’s lies and scandals deepen, the GOP responds as usual – with silence

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      One day he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The next he was on prime-time television pushing election lies, defending his own coup attempt and refusing to back Ukraine.To his millions of critics, it was another week that proved Donald Trump is unfit for office and dangerous to democracy. But to the top leaders of Trump’s Republican party, it was another week to keep heads down and say nothing.Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House of Representatives; Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate; leading state governors and even most of Trump’s potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 have made a habit of siding with him or remaining silent as each scandal comes and goes.Critics say their complicity underlines how comprehensively Trump took over the Republican party and shaped it in his own image. Even though McConnell and others privately loathe Trump and wish him gone, they dare not alienate his fervent support base. Rick Wilson, a former Republican consultant and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, sums it up in one word: fear.“They are afraid of the mob, they’re afraid of the horde, they’re afraid of the anger and the craziness and the rage and the threats that come any time a Republican elected official really stands up and opposes Donald Trump,” Wilson said.He added: “None of the major elected officials – McConnell, McCarthy, the big state governors – are going to come out and say what they believe and know: that he is a monstrous figure and he is a dangerous figure.”Trump ran against the Republican establishment in 2016, exciting a grassroots army of supporters and eventually bending the party to his will. His victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election and pursuit of an agenda that fit many Republican priorities, from sweeping tax cuts to rightwing supreme court justices, persuaded many in leadership to overlook his chaotic style.But relations with McConnell soured over time, culminating in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, for which he said Trump was “practically and morally responsible”. The former president has branded McConnell an “old crow” and repeatedly hurled racist insults at his Taiwanese-born wife, former transportation secretary Elaine Chao.Even so, despite their mutual animosity, the minority leader made clear this week that he will support Trump if he is the Republican nominee in 2024. Asked about the former president’s improving poll numbers, McConnell told CNN: “I’m going to support the nominee of our party for president, no matter who that may be.”Meanwhile Steve Daines, chair of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, has endorsed Trump for president in what many see as an attempt to curry favour with him and curb his meddling in next year’s Senate elections. Trump’s backing of extremists in last year’s midterms cost McConnell control of the Senate – an outcome that he is eager to avoid repeating.Wilson, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, commented: “He can say, ‘See, Mr Trump, I’m loyal to you. I love you. I’m a good person. You should listen to me. Please, please, please don’t tell Tudor Dixon she should run again or don’t tell Kari Lake she should run again.’ These are very transactional and tactical approaches but nonetheless they are approaches that these people are willing to do to survive in a war with Trump.”He added: “There is no Republican party. It’s just Trump. It is only about his desires and his political power, his political goals. If you told the average Republican elected official, you have to cut off your arm to get an endorsement from Trump, they’re going to ask you for a saw and some Band-Aids.”McCarthy, for his part, also seemed shaken by the events of January 6, but later that month he visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, signalling that all was forgiven. When McCarthy was elected speaker earlier this year after a gruelling series of votes, he paid tribute to Trump for working the phones to help him secure victory.Since then he has swatted aside every legal controversy, including last month when, as Trump became the first former president to face criminal charges, McCarthy tweeted that the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, had “weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump”.This week, in a civil case, a New York jury determined that Trump sexually abused and defamed the writer E Jean Carroll, awarding her $5m in damages (Trump is appealing the verdict). That alone would be enough to sink most political careers but McCarthy repeatedly dodged the issue when asked to comment by reporters on Capitol Hill.Other Republicans went further in expressing their fealty to Trump. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida told reporters: “That jury’s a joke. The whole case is a joke.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added: “When it comes to Donald Trump, the New York legal system is off the rails.” Former vice-president Mike Pence told NBC News: “I would tell you, in my four and a half years serving alongside the president, I never heard or witnessed behaviour of that nature.”The following day, Trump gave an unhinged, falsehood-filled performance in a town hall event broadcast live on the CNN network. He vowed to pardon “a large portion” of the January 6 rioters, suggested that Republicans should let the government default on its debts and refused to call Vladimir Putin a war criminal over the killing of Ukrainian civilians.Strikingly, many in the audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, burst into applause and egged Trump on. When he made fun of Carroll they laughed. It was a glimpse of the “Make America great again” base that keeps party leaders awake at night.Donna Brazile, a former chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, said: “The voters stand by Donald Trump and as long as he has a grip on the Republican party and its voters, the leaders cannot step out ahead of where the voters are.“People should not condemn these voters, these voters who need to be educated, listened to and respected. After all, over 70 million Americans supported Donald Trump in the last election. That’s nothing to sneeze at. That’s voters who know what he stands for, know what he represents and still they’re with him.”She added: “As long as they’re sticking with Trump, I do believe that the leaders of the Republican party will also stand by Trump. Regardless of what they say behind his back, they’ll stick with Trump.”Even in the Trump era, the Republican party is not a monolith. The sexual abuse verdict prompted criticism from senators including John Cornyn, Mitt Romney, Mike Rounds and John Thune. In an interview with Punchbowl News, Bill Cassidy asked: “What if it was your sister? How could it not create concern?”After the chaotic CNN town hall, Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey, described Trump as “Putin’s puppet” and there was condemnation from Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, and Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas running for president. But these are exceptions that prove the rule. Other confirmed or likely primary candidates steered clear in what is now a familiar pattern.After all, the Trump era is littered with the political corpses of Republicans who tried to oppose him only to suffer online abuse, public heckling, death threats or retribution at the ballot box. Senators Bob Corker, Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse and Representatives Justin Amash, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are among those who quit or were purged. They left behind a party that increasingly resembles Trump.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “They have refused to divorce themselves from someone that they know is both a political loser for them and who represents things that are completely destructive to our democracy. After everything that we have seen, after everything that the Republican party itself has endured in terms of its underperforming in multiple election cycles, the only reason why they haven’t divorced themselves from Donald Trump is because they don’t want to.” More

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      in US Politics

      How should the media cover sexual predator Trump? – podcast

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      On Tuesday, a jury in New York found that the former president Donald Trump sexually abused magazine writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her by branding her a liar.
      On Wednesday, Trump made the same baseless claims about Carroll that led to him losing the case – this time, live on CNN to millions of viewers.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland talks to Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan about the fallout from the E Jean Carroll case. The pair discuss how the media should cover a 2024 presidential candidate who has been impeached twice, indicted by a federal court, and who is now legally defined as a sexual predator

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      in Elections

      What We Learned About Trump’s Policies in Contentious Town Hall

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      Former President Donald J. Trump staked out positions on several major issues, including separating migrant children from their parents and pardoning Jan. 6 rioters.Among the barrage of falsehoods and bluster, former President Donald J. Trump laid markers down on several major and divisive issues at the CNN town-hall meeting on Wednesday night.Mr. Trump spoke of several actions he might take if re-elected, at times with a specificity he often dodges in speeches and friendlier interviews. He also revealed much about his thinking on positions that are likely to roil his party, including the war in Ukraine and access to abortion.Here’s a look at some of what Mr. Trump said about policy:Reconsidering migrant family separationsWhen asked if he would return to a policy of separating migrant children from their parents when they arrive at the border, Mr. Trump did not rule it out.“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” he said. “If a family hears that they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.”Mr. Trump acknowledged that the policy “sounds harsh” but claimed that the situation warranted it.Some 5,500 foreign-born children, and hundreds of U.S. citizens, are known to have been separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s so-called zero tolerance policy, which jailed and criminally charged migrant parents for crossing the border without authorization.Mr. Trump abandoned the policy after an international outcry in 2018.President Biden formed a commission to reunite parents with their children, some of whom have spent years in foster care. He also vowed not to separate families at the border and quickly ended the detention of families, though the administration is considering new efforts such as curfews and the use of more GPS monitors for adults as they see more surges of families arriving at the border.Pardons for the Jan. 6 riotersWhen asked if he had any regrets about his actions leading up to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump insisted that he did nothing wrong and sympathized with his supporters who took part.A retired lawyer in the audience asked Mr. Trump if he would issue pardons to those rioters who were convicted of federal offenses.“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Mr. Trump said. “I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control.”More than 900 people have been criminally charged as part of the assault on the Capitol, including four members of the far-right group the Proud Boys, who were convicted this month of sedition.Mr. Trump did not rule out pardons for them, saying he would have to review their individual circumstances.“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to look at their case, but I will say in Washington, D.C., you cannot get a fair trial, you cannot. Just like in New York City, you can’t get a fair trial either.”Dodging on a national abortion banMr. Trump repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if Republicans managed to steer one through the divided Congress. He also would not say how many weeks into a pregnancy he might consider banning an abortion.“I’m looking at a solution that’s going to work,” he said. “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.”Mr. Trump appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court during his presidency, paving the way for the court to eliminate the federal right to an abortion. But he has since resisted being drawn into the debate, and has privately worried about political backlash.Characterizing his views on abortion restrictions as similar to President Ronald Reagan’s, Mr. Trump said that he believed in exceptions for rape, for incest and to save the life of a mother.Not taking Ukraine’s sideMr. Trump skirted the issue when asked multiple times if he wanted Ukraine to win the war after being invaded last year by Russia.“I don’t think in terms of winning and losing,” he said. “I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people.”The former president claimed he would bring the war to an end in 24 hours, if he returned to office, but did not specifically say what he would do to broker a peace.He would not call President Vladimir Putin of Russia a war criminal, as Mr. Biden has, saying that doing so would make it more difficult to end the hostilities between the two nations.Mr. Trump did say Mr. Putin had “made a bad mistake” by invading Ukraine.Threatening default on U.S. debtMr. Trump suggested on Wednesday night that Republicans in Congress should hold fast against raising the federal debt ceiling without budget cuts, even if it means the country defaults on its debt.“I say to the Republicans out there — congressmen, senators — if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default,” he said.A growing list of economists and analysts have warned about the potential consequences if Congress does not raise the borrowing limit before the government can no longer pay its bills, including huge job losses, a recession and a nosedive on Wall Street.Mr. Trump predicted that Democrats would “absolutely cave” when confronted with the choice between accepting spending cuts and defaulting. Still, when asked to clarify if he would endorse a default, he said he would.“We might as well do it now because you’ll do it later,” he said.When Ms. Collins pointed out that Mr. Trump had once said when he was president that using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge could not happen, he said that circumstances had changed.“Because now I’m not president,” he said.The Big Lie 2.0?On a night when he doubled and tripled down on his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, Mr. Trump refused to say unconditionally that he would accept the results of next year’s election should he become the Republican presidential nominee.“If I think it’s an honest election, I would be honored to,” he said.Mr. Trump spent much of the interview re-litigating his defeat and closed with a caveat about the next election.“If it’s an honest election, correct, I will,” he said of accepting the results.Alyce McFadden More