Conservatives are celebrating Donald Trump's CNN town hall appearance while making fun of the network that one Republican lawmaker said got "destroyed."
Trump's appearance Wednesday night in the New Hampshire-hosted forum, moderated by Kaitlin Collins, came one day after he was found liable by a New York jury of sexual assaulting E. Jean Carroll. Trump amused the audience by joking about Carroll's allegations that he raped her in a department store dressing room 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," Trump said while recalling Carroll's version of events, prompting loud laughs from the crowd.
Trump also refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, repeatedly dodging questions by Collins prior to saying he would accept the results of the next election unless he believed fraud occurred.
I enjoyed congratulating President Trump on his outstanding town hall and undefeated record against CNN.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 11, 2023
They had to air him telling the truth about how the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.
We laughed and laughed. pic.twitter.com/0I0th1SGTm
"I enjoyed congratulating President Trump on his outstanding town hall and undefeated record against CNN," Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted Thursday. "They had to air him telling the truth about how the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. We laughed and laughed."
Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert tweeted that "after President Trump destroyed Kaitlin Collins, Byron Donalds took on the rest of CNN and destroyed them too."
Donalds, a Republican congressman from Florida, appeared on a CNN panel following the town hall. It led to a chaotic exchange in which he argued that the town hall should have focused on the U.S.-Mexico border, inflation, foreign policy and the debt ceiling rather than the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser in the Trump administration, wrote on Gettr that CNN got "owned" not just by Trump but by his supporters. He linked a video to a post-town hall panel of voters, including one male voter who questioned why January 6 was the topic of the event's first question.
There were also questions about the length of the town hall, which Dylan Byers, a senior correspondent at Puck News, tweeted was scheduled as a 90-minute broadcast but lasted less than 90 minutes, which he found peculiar as networks typically want the ratings.
"Did CNN cut it short because Trump was doing SO WELL?" Florida Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted. "I've never seen a Town Hall get called like a 'Mercy Rule' before. Did that really happen?"
Texas Representative Ronny Jackson wrote on Truth Social that "Trump is once again proving he's the ONLY choice for 2024." It was a sentiment shared by Arizona Representative Andy Biggs, who said Trump "remains America's leader."
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk praised Trump for calling Collins "a nasty person"—a similar moniker that he gave to 2016 presidential election opponent Hillary Clinton during a debate.
Monica Crowley, podcast host and former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Trump administration from 2019 to 2021, wrote in Newsweek that the event was further proof of Trump's stranglehold on the GOP.
"Former President Donald Trump is once again the clearly dominant figure on the American political scene, far eclipsing everyone else, including the sitting President," Crowley wrote.
The communications director for a PAC supporting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has not declared his candidacy for president though is expected to and could immediately become Trump's biggest Republican challenger, chastised the former president.
Erin Perrine, who in 2020 served as the Trump campaign's communications director and is now the communications director for the "Never Back Down" PAC supporting a 2024 DeSantis candidacy, called the town hall "nonsense that proved Trump is stuck in the past."
Matt Wolking, strategic communications director for the group, tweeted: "No message for the country's future. No plan for winning in 2024. Couldn't provide any answers on policy issues. Didn't lay a glove on Biden. Barely talked about anything 95% of 2024 voters care about. And they think this is a home run? Bananas."
Oliver Darcy, CNN's senior media reporter, ripped his own network for hosting Trump in the first place.
"It's hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening," Darcy wrote.
Patricia Crouse, a political science practitioner in residence at the University of New Haven, told Newsweek that CNN "failed miserably" in terms of the network hosting Trump and holding him accountable, as promised by CEO Chris Licht.
"Fact-checking in real time and holding someone accountable are not the same thing," Crouse said. "Reminding him of his lies but letting him continue to spout them on national television is not holding him accountable.
"And the Trump-friendly audience obviously didn't really care whether what he was saying was true or not. In the end, CNN and Trump both got what they wanted: CNN got big ratings and Trump got to be the center of attention on national television."
Update 5/12/23, 9:27 a.m. ET: This story was updated with comment from Patricia Crouse.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Nick Mordowanec is a Newsweek reporter based in Michigan. His focus is reporting on Ukraine and Russia, along with social ... Read more
