As the week began, the last thing we’d heard from Donald Trump was that he was leaving his Ireland golf outing to “confront” his accuser in a rape trial.
Like most everything else we’ve ever heard from the 45th president, the last thing we heard was, almost by definition, the latest lie. There was no confrontation. His own lawyers, for reasons too obvious to state, would not risk putting him on the stand in New York, even after the judge gave them an extra 48 hours to mull that over.
So tell me if I have this right about Wednesday night and what’s already being called, regrettably, the first major televised event of the 2024 election season. The guy who couldn’t be trusted to take the stand in his own defense on E. Jean Carroll’s rape charge is 100 percent good-to-go for CNN’s so-called Town Hall, an international prime time platform for Trump to unload his rhetorical Super Soaker of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and standard everyday lies that have been pulling the nation apart for most of eight years.
When Trump takes the stage in New Hampshire, CNN’s hot-and-cold marriage with responsible journalism will move officially to on-the-rocks, because it’s hard to platform a twice-impeached former president facing 34 felony counts amid ongoing state and federal investigations into his congenital lawlessness for any reason, but particularly as part of your “coverage” of an election that’s 18 months away.
When MSNBC refused to cover Trump’s remarks from Mar-a-Lago the night he was indicted in the porn star hush money matter, anchor Rachel Maddow explained, in part, that “there is a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things.”
CNN will now incur that cost.
When you knowingly broadcast untrue things, you become Fox News. When you knowingly broadcast untrue things for ratings, you become Fox News. If CNN wants to become Fox News, which appears to be the preliminary indication under new management, that’s journalistically unfortunate. But if it wants to help the candidate who fomented insurrection against American democracy and would do it again without compunction, that’s sounds like something closer to conspiracy.
A Trump adviser told the Washington Post that CNN “made a compelling pitch,” and Trump himself was quoted in Forbes as saying, “they made me a deal I couldn’t refuse.”
Really.
David Zaslav, CEO of CNN’s parent company Warner Brothers, told CNBC last week “we need to hear both voices.”
And those would be truth and lies? Democracy and fascism?
If there’s anything more insulting than the duplicitous bothsidesism coming from CNN on all of this, it’s the conceit that the Town Hall is an opportunity for New Hampshire voters to better make an informed choice.
What choice is there? Who in America, who in this world, is thinking, “I’m just not sure about this Trump fella. Let’s hear what he has to say?”
Even Fox News, which blatantly leveraged Trump to sustain its ratings and wound up paying $787 million in court for doing it, knew there was no one home in Trump’s head. In a recent Vanity Fair piece on FOX CEO Rupert Murdoch and his family, Gabriel Sherman wrote: “It’s ironic that Murdoch’s fortunes would become entwined with Trump’s, because Murdoch found Trump appalling. ‘Rupert knew he was an idiot,’ a person close to Murdoch said. Murdoch was a longtime champion of immigration reform and free trade and loathed Trump’s nativisim and know-nothingism.”
In any event, I can’t help but feel badly for Kaitlan Collins, who’ll try to run this Town Hall with Trump at the mic. As certain World War II pilots explained about one particularly recalcitrant aircraft, “It was like sitting on the porch, trying to fly the house.”
Collins is a solid reporter and the very same former White House correspondent Trump once banished from the Rose Garden for shouting questions he didn’t like, and now she’ll be in a roomful of likely Republican primary voters and their most pervicacious avatar.
Chris Wallace still has deep scratches on his stellar reputation from the steamroller Trump drove over him in a 2020 presidential debate against Joe Biden. “I’m a pro,” Wallace remembered thinking, “but I’ve never been through anything like this.”
Wallace was just short of his 73rd birthday that night. Collins just turned 31.
As I was sitting down to write this, Trump posted something about his rape trial, which had gone to the jury in Manhattan. After the judge, again, gave him two extra days to decide whether to testify and he declined, he said this: “Waiting for a jury decision on a False Accusation where I, despite being a current political candidate leading all others in both parties, am not allowed to speak or defend myself.”
And that would be a lie. The latest lie.
God help Kaitlan Collins.
And all of us.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter: @genecollier. His previous article was “Are we dumb enough to default? Oh sure.”
First Published: May 9, 2023, 8:25 p.m.
Updated: May 10, 2023, 6:27 p.m.