CNN’s Trump Town Hall Was a Total Disaster

Twice-impeached, criminally indicted former President Donald Trump had an hour’s worth of exclusive time with CNN—one day after he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.

Despite CNN’s Kaitlan Collins’s valiant effort with the conditions she was given, the fundamental structure of the night was not complementary to what anyone might imagine “good journalism” looking like. The network gave Trump a friendly audience of voters who seemed to largely agree with him on most things; seldom a “battleground of ideas,” the night’s only challenges came from Collins. But Trump sprayed lie after lie after lie, which is difficult for anyone to fact-check in real time.

Here are just some of the lies Trump threw at the wall, with a jeering and laughing audience buoying him throughout.

• Doubled down on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged.
• On pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to find missing votes: “I didn’t ask him to find anything.”
• Then-Vice President Mike Pence “should have put the votes back to the state legislatures, and I think we would have had a different outcome.” The vice president does not have such authority, and numerous Trump allies have admitted that such a process would have been illegal.
• On the January 6 riot: “I offered them 10,000 soldiers.” There is no evidence Trump ever made a request to the National Guard for support, or that Democrats or Washington, D.C., rejected such assistance.
• “The Presidential Records Act is not criminal. I took the documents. I’m allowed to.”
• Documents “become automatically declassified when I took them.”
• President Obama took classified documents from the White House.
• On E. Jean Carroll: “This woman, I don’t know her. I never met her. I have no idea who she is.”
• The judge in the E. Jean Carroll case “allowed us to put nothing in” during the defamation and sexual abuse trial.
• President Obama separated families at the border first.
• Other countries are sending “migrant families” from mental institutions to the U.S.
• People don’t speak English in Chinatown [false, and racist].
• “We created the greatest economy in history. A big part of that economy was I got you the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country, bigger than the Reagan cuts.” Average growth under Trump was lower than in numerous other administrations; moreover, Trump’s tax cut disproportionately benefited the wealthy, rather than low-income or middle-class families. In 2018, after Trump’s tax cuts passed, the richest 400 families in America paid an average effective tax rate lower than what the bottom half of American households paid.
• I finished the border wall.
• “They could kill the baby at the ninth month or after it was born” before the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

This is not an exhaustive list of all the lies, especially the more minute ones, Trump told during the town hall. Just during his four years in office, it is estimated that Trump lied to, or misled, the American people over 30,000 times.

Twice-impeached, criminally indicted former President Donald Trump was asked during the CNN town hall Wednedsay for his response to being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

Trump attempted to discount E. Jean Carroll’s testimony, calling it “crazy,” but the more he went on, the more it seemed like he was imbuing his own fond memories (or fantasies) of what happened with the woman Trump was found liable for sexual abusing.

“This woman said I met her at the front door of Bergdorf Goodman, which I rarely go into other than for a couple of charities,” Trump began.

“I was immediately attracted to her, and she was immediately attracted to me. And we had this great chemistry,” Trump said, as if forgetting that he was trying to discount Carroll’s testimony. “And a few minutes later, we ended up in a room, a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, right near the cash register,” he continued amid laughter from the audience.

“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, musing about whether Carroll was married at the time or not.

Kaitlan Collins also asked Trump about whether he stands by defending the comments he made in the Access Hollywood tape about being able to grab women.

Trump doubled down. “I said, if you’re famous and rich, or whatever I said,” he began. “But I said, ‘If you are a star…’ I said, ‘Women let you.’”

“If you’re a famous person, if you’re a star—and I’m not referring to myself—I’m saying people that are famous, people that are stars,” Trump continued, before Collins interrupted to note that Trump had called himself a “star” during his deposition.

After some cross talk, Trump continued: “They tend to do pretty well in a lot of different ways. OK. And you would like me to take that back. I can’t take it back because it happens to be true. I said it’s been true for one million years, approximately a million years, perhaps a little bit longer than that.”

In a very tellingly simple manner, it’s remarkable that Trump didn’t even pretend to also say something like, “I wish it weren’t true,” or solidly affirm that he himself does not take advantage of this supposed system where “women let you do it.”

Perhaps the laughter and jeering helped Trump ignore the possibility that some people may find what he was saying incredibly disgusting.

During CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump, the twice-impeached, criminally indicted, and sexually abusing former president said he had no regrets about his actions during the January 6 Capitol riots.

Host Kaitlan Collins asked him, point-blank, whether he had any regrets at all. An easy question to express even an ounce of remorse or regret or anything at all, while still maintaining your anti-democratic posture. He couldn’t even do that.

“I’ve never spoken to a crowd as large as this. And that’s because they believed the election was rigged,” Trump replied after a jumbled word salad.

“They were there proud. They were there with love in their heart. That was an unbelievable, and it was a beautiful day,” Trump said about the thousands of rioters. He even lovingly suggested that a lot of the people in the town hall audience “were probably there” too.

Later, when asked by an audience member whether he would pardon January 6 rioters, Trump said he would pardon “many of them.”

Collins followed up, asking if he would pardon the Proud Boys members recently convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Trump said he’d take a look at the cases but that you can’t get a fair trial in Washington, D.C.

The audience started clapping.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has finally condemned the death of Jordan Neely, a Black, homeless man choked to death on the subway—nine days after the fact, and with no mention of how Neely was actually killed.

Ex-Marine Daniel Penny held Neely in a choke hold for 15 minutes on May 1, until Neely suffocated to death. Penny still has not been charged.

Though Adams condemned Neely’s death on Wednesday, he did not mention Penny or the circumstances of Neely’s death.

“Jordan Neely did not deserve to die,” Adams said in prepared comments. “Jordan Neely’s life mattered. He was suffering from severe mental illness, but that was not the cause of his death. His death is a tragedy that never should have happened.”

The mayor’s tepid comments are barely better than his first reaction to the tragedy. Last week, Adams said in a statement that “any loss of life is tragic,” but that he wouldn’t comment further because “there’s a lot we don’t know about what happened here.”

The case has been referred to a grand jury, which will determine whether to issue criminal charges. Protests have broken out in support of Neely and his family. Almost a dozen people, including a photojournalist, were arrested at the protest Monday night.

Adams, meanwhile, has decided the best solution to prevent further tragedies like Neely’s killing is to double down on his controversial proposed policy to send people to mental treatment facilities against their will.

“It is time to build a new consensus around what can and must be done for those living with serious mental illness and to take meaningful action despite resistance and pushback from those who misconstrue our intentions,” Adams said Wednesday.

New York emergency workers are already empowered to hold dangerously violent people. But a directive by Adams at the end of April expands that power. Emergency responders, police, firefighters, and state Department of Health workers will be able to hold anyone who “appears mentally ill and displays an inability to meet basic living needs.”

Adams did not provide details on what criteria determine someone should be hospitalized. Critics of the policy warn the city lacks sufficient mental health resources, particularly in low-income areas. Some city officials were also concerned that law enforcement officers would be permitted to act as mental health professionals.

Senator Tommy Tuberville doesn’t really see the difference between white nationalists and Americans.

The Republican senator said that white nationalists should be allowed in the U.S. military because blocking any ideological group from serving would weaken the institution.

During an interview Monday with the Alabama radio station WBHM, Tuberville was asked if he thought white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military.

“They call them that,” he said, referring to the Biden administration. “I call them Americans.”

“We are losing in the military so fast,” he continued. “Our readiness in terms of recruitment. And why? I’ll tell you why, because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda.”

Tuberville also referred to the military as a “strong, hard-nosed, killing machine,” which is definitely how you want national leaders discussing their opinion of defense policy.

His office released a statement Wednesday saying that Tuberville meant he was “skeptical” that white nationalists were in the military, not that he thought they should be in the military. But the Alabama Republican is wrong there, too.

A month after the January 6 attack, Pentagon officials said in a report that white supremacist ideology had made significant inroads in the military. The report found that white supremacist groups would try to recruit active military personnel and veterans and group leaders would often try to enlist in order to get weapons and training. One Florida National Guard member co-founded a fascist group and said he was “100 percent open” about being a neo-Nazi—and no one batted an eye.

As for military readiness issues, Tuberville might want to take a look in the mirror: He has blocked nearly 200 military promotions since March over his objection to the Defense Department’s abortion policy. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned in a letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren last week that Tuberville’s delay “harms America’s national security” and poses a “clear risk” to the military’s readiness.

Tuberville’s apparent openness toward white supremacists makes sense when you think about his unwavering support for former President Donald Trump, who counted extremists Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller among his inner circle. Trump also infamously told the far-right Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” which prosecutors in the hundreds of January 6 lawsuits said the white nationalists interpreted as a call to action.

Tuberville’s support for Trump remains unflagging, despite the former leader’s ongoing legal woes. On Tuesday, Tuberville said that a jury finding Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation “makes me want to vote for him twice.”