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“Thank you, CNN, for securing Trump’s upcoming landslide victory in 2024.”
Perhaps that tweet slightly overstated the case, but only slightly.
All across the political spectrum today, the cry echoes: “What were they thinking?”
AOC and her minions are skirling about CNN’s “irresponsibility” for even hosting a town hall event with Trump in New Hampshire. “CNN should be ashamed of itself,” she tweeted.
On the pro-Trump side, there was also plenty of head-shaking — but this time accompanied by a dollop of glee. The CNN host, Kaitlan Collins, tried manfully to trap Trump, but he was too agile and too brazen to be caught by her little “gotcha” attempts.
She tried to clobber him on the issue of abortion and the repeal of Roe v. Wade, but Trump just parried with the move he had used against Hillary Clinton in 2016. He himself thought there should be exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. But what the radicals wanted was the right to rip the baby from the mother’s womb after nine months.
Collins tried to trip up Trump with E. Jean Carroll, the fruitcake who accused him of raping her in a dressing room at a fancy New York emporium thirty years ago. Sure, a New York jury just found Trump guilty of sexual battery and defamation, but he deftly filleted the charge, much to the delight of the live audience.
Collins kept throwing spitballs: was Trump going to apologize to Mike Pence for his behavior on January 6, 2021? No. And speaking of the jamboree at the Capitol on J6, what about the scores of political prisoners rotting in a Washington jail because they had strolled around the grounds that day? He would have to consider each case on its merits, Trump said, but he might well pardon many of those who had been swept up in the deep-state dragnet.
Did he want Ukraine to win in its war with Russia? He just wanted the killing to stop. (“Now why didn’t I think of that?” you could almost hear Collins mutter.) What about the the federal debt and negotiations over the debt ceiling? We had to have spending cuts, Trump said, and if the Biden administration refused to negotiate on that, the US would just have to default. Without serious spending cuts, it would happen sooner or later, he said, and the later, the more painful.
On and on it went. Collins playing Whac-A-Mole, Trump declining to be whapped. There were no moments like Hamlet’s duel with Laertes when Gertrude could exclaim, “A hit! “A palpable hit!” CNN considerately invited only Republicans and independents join in the event. Considered as a point of fair play, that was as it should be. Niccolò Machiavelli would have deprecated the decision. The audience was clearly sympathetic to Trump, its questions uniformly respectful.
Once again, the media industrial complex underestimated the man they love to hate. They feel nothing but disdain and contempt for Donald Trump, and they assume — falsely — that the voters will, too, if only they get to see the man in action.
The tweeter who said that the event guaranteed a landslide victory for Trump in 2024 overstated the case. It by no means guarantees that he will be the Republican candidate, let alone that he would win the general election. But as a measure of political virility, it revealed that, as of May 10, 2023, Donald Trump is by far the most vital and potent candidate on either side of the aisle.
That could change, of course. This is the moment when I quote Harold Wilson about a week being a long time in politics. Nevertheless, those who have written off the former president would be well advised to reconsider their dismissal. I suspect that the only thing that is certain in this race so far is what last night’s event meant for CNN. It was, as a column in the Hill put it, “a disaster.”
