For anyone who may have forgotten (or tried to forget), there was Donald Trump, that pied piper of the extreme right, again on full display for 70 minutes in a town hall/campaign rally that CNN thoughtfully provided for him. Any American harboring illusions that the man had changed, even the teeniest bit, was disabused of that notion with the very first question.
Trump, with either false sincerity or genuine mental illness, insisted yet again that he won in 2020, only to be done in by massive fraud that would have required hundreds if not thousands of conspirators to pull off, not one of whom has yet breathed a word about it. The crowd applauded.
For the remainder of the event, Trump was, well, Trump, leaving all but his most fervent supporters wondering, also yet again, if he really believed his own fantasies or was he simply spewing out the vitriol his fans have come to demand.
But the real fallout was directed not at Trump but rather at CNN. The network was excoriated by virtually every other media outlet, including MSNBC, which took the opportunity to mention how much better the night would have gone if Rachel Maddow had been in the interviewer’s chair. (The idea that Maddow could have ridden herd on Trump any better than Collins, or anyone else for that matter, is almost as delusional as Trump’s millions of fake Biden votes.)
The most serious criticism, however, was that CNN had allowed Trump to salt the crowd, that the so-called “independent voters” were merely MAGAs in disguise, who, when coupled with the announced MAGA attendees, turned the town hall into the sort of braying, snickering spectacle that people generally associate with Christians being fed to lions.