It took barely a minute for Donald Trump to say “rigged election.” From there, he rambled. He ranted. He lied. And he lied some more. And that was the response to the first question of the evening to the first President in American history to refuse to concede his defeat and accept the peaceful transfer of power: “Why should Americans put you back in the White House?”
The disaster that was the CNN “town hall” with Trump in New Hampshire on Wednesday night was both predictable and predicted. None of it was a surprise. The Donald Trump running in the 2024 Presidential election is the same Donald Trump he always was, a purveyor of industrial-strength untruths. A demagogue. A hater. The struggle of the interviewer, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, to fact-check his fire hose of falsehoods was painful to watch. The kindest thing to say is that she tried. It is not easy when the former President of the United States is calling you a “nasty person” in front of a cheering crowd of his voters.
The cheering crowd, in fact, was the tell, the most revealing part of the whole exercise. Trump without the approval of the mob, his mob, would be just another angry old American man, an unwilling Florida retiree shouting at the television after a round of golf. Instead, he still commands his following, which means that he gets to be an angry old man shouting on the television and not merely at it. CNN described the audience on Wednesday night at Saint Anselm College as a collection of Republican and undecided New Hampshire voters who would consider voting Republican in the upcoming G.O.P. primary. But the whoops and cheers for Trump throughout did not convey undecidedness.
The crowd hooted, chuckled, or clapped when Trump called the former Speaker of the House “Crazy Nancy” and when he insisted that his former Vice-President, Mike Pence, had the power to single-handedly overturn the election results on January 6, 2021. They laughed when he insulted Collins. The more offensive Trump’s words, it seemed, the more they cheered. Only a day before the CNN event, a jury in New York had found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll and awarded her five million dollars in damages. Trump’s response was to insult Carroll again on national TV. When he said that he felt sorry for her ex-husband, the audience laughed. When he called her a “whack job,” they laughed once more. When the show was finally over, the audience offered Trump a standing ovation.
Throughout, Collins struggled, and how could she not, having been assigned a near-impossible task? One revealing moment, among so many, came well into the hour, after Trump interrupted a long, untruthful speech about how he had “finished” the border wall, which he had not in fact finished, to mention, yet again, the “rigged election” of 2020. Collins tried once more to interject. “The election was not rigged, Mr. President,” she said. “You can’t keep saying that all night long.”
But he could, and he did.
The question, of course, was why this was happening in the first place—a question that is ever more pressing, considering that Trump is now and will likely remain the front-runner for the Republican nomination to reclaim the office he lost in 2020. One awful hour of television will not resolve the matter. Right up until Trump finally exits public life, whenever that will be, this debate will continue: Should Trump be given a platform to make his attacks on American democracy, and, if so, should you listen? Does the mere fact of his large following in an increasingly radicalized and extremist Republican Party require that news organizations broadcast his views to millions?
In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2020 defeat, with the memory still fresh of his summoning of a violent horde to the U.S. Capitol to do his bidding, there seemed to be a clear answer. The answer was no. He was kicked off Twitter and Facebook. Even Fox News mostly cancelled him. And yet here we are, little more than two years later. Trump has not changed his views or become any less untruthful, inflammatory, or dangerous. If anything, he has become more extreme, even saying that the Constitution itself should be subject to “termination” if that is what it takes to reinstate him to power. But the outrage over Trump’s post-election offenses turned out to have an expiration date. His banishment, it seems, came with an unspoken codicil: it was contingent on Republicans repudiating him, which they have not done. The polls are almighty; he leads, so he can speak.
Whatever else it was, the Trump show on CNN certainly did remind viewers, all too clearly, of who he is. He repeated a litany of his favored lines from the past, about other countries ripping us off and “Antifa” ruining American cities and “impeachment hoax No. 1.” He gleefully slung insults at “RINOs” and Democrats and Europeans. He said words like “horrible” a lot. “Our country is being destroyed by stupid people, by very stupid people,” he said. It was the same garbled nonsense, empty catchphrases, and nasty gibberish so familiar from his four years in the White House. This 2024 Trump still does not speak in coherent sentences, or make arguments. He’s a demagogue. He demagogued.
Aside from the sheer awful spectacle, it’s hard to say that any actual news came out of the questioning. Nor was it clear what CNN executives expected from a CNN-manufactured event that, as Trump said in a social-media post before it began, appeared to be all about an effort by the network to “get those fantastic Trump ratings back!” It certainly was not news that a former President who, according to the Post, made more than thirty thousand falsehoods and misleading statements while in office would ceaselessly lie on air. By the time the farce was over, Trump had made false claims about the 2020 election, about supposedly offering the use of “ten thousand soldiers” on January 6th, about creating “the greatest economy in history” and the “biggest tax cuts” ever. He had lied about President Obama taking classified documents when he left office. Among others. No surprise there: a lying liar is going to lie. Trump is nothing if not consistent in that.
He is also a believer in another time-honored technique of the propagandist: repetition. His provocations on Wednesday night were familiar to anyone who has been paying attention. We already knew that Trump does not want Ukraine to win the war, that he will pardon the January 6th insurrectionists, and that he does not want to say where he stands on Republican efforts to further restrict reproductive rights after the Trump-majority Supreme Court threw out Roe v. Wade. Along with expressing a willingness to see the United States default on its debt if Biden does not give in to Republican demands for spending cuts, those were the newsiest things he said, and they were not new. The shocking revelation on Wednesday was not what he said, it was that he was given the platform to say it.
But, as a matter of politics, both Trump and Biden could claim to have benefitted from the evening. No less a Trump cheerleader and frequent media basher than Stephen Miller thanked CNN for giving Trump the airtime. His advisers were said, per the plugged-in reporter Jonathan Swan, to be “thrilled.” Trump critics also saw some gain for their side from the wretched performance. They imagined all the attack ads that could come out of it, all the fresh material Trump had just provided for those millions who loathe him. With a highly unpopular President of their own who has just announced a reëlection bid at the age of eighty, Democrats will need to make the race a referendum not on Biden but on Trump. Both parties in this age of polarization have become skilled at ramping up the outrage and anxiety of their voters.
Soon after the town hall was over, Biden tweeted: “It’s simple, folks. Do you want four more years of that?” This, in short, is the 2024 campaign. It is coming fast upon us. Beware. ♦
