Donald Trump Is Now Selling Merch Mocking CNN Over That Disaster of a Town Hall

CNN’s town hall with twice-impeached, criminally indicted, convicted sexual abuser Donald Trump was a glorified campaign rally, and the former president is already capitalizing on it.

Trump’s presidential campaign unveiled a new T-shirt for sale to mark the occasion, tweeting that the town hall was “so masterful that many are now saying CNN should be renamed TNN—the Trump News Network.

And the merch is objectively bad: It’s a white shirt featuring a picture of Trump wearing pixelated meme sunglasses, above the words “This is TNN.”

This isn’t Trump’s first foray into bizarre merch. Remember the NFTs? At least President Joe Biden understands what good meme merch should look like.

The bigger problem, of course, is that CNN gave Trump its platform in the first place. It was a blatant grab for viewers and buzz, which didn’t even work. An average of just 3.1 million viewers tuned in to the town hall, a mere sliver of the eyeballs Trump could attract during his time in office.

All the town hall did was legitimize Trump as a candidate. He spent the entire time spouting lies, misogynistic attacks, election conspiracy theories, and insults at anyone who tried to fact-check him. Countless people in the news media, including CNN employees, have slammed the town hall and the network for hosting it.

CNN went so far as to try to make the event as easy as possible for Trump. Before the town hall, the network reportedly told the audience, “Please do not boo, please be respectful.” They were allowed to applaud, though. Aside from this having big “Please clap” energy, it also provided positive reinforcement to everything Trump said, when his words really should have been met with fact-checks and horrified silence.

And in the end, all CNN has to show for it is egg on its proverbial face.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed a bill that would shield all of his past and future travel records from public access, a measure widely slammed as an attempt to hide his movements.

The new law, which DeSantis signed Thursday, will block reporters from accessing information about how and where DeSantis and other government officials travel, as well as who they travel with. Details about whether DeSantis used a state plane or a private plane will be retracted. The law, the first of its kind, will also keep secret visitor logs to the governor’s mansion and his office.

DeSantis has previously claimed the law is necessary for his security, but critics argue that he’s just trying to keep secrets. Former state Representative Ben Diamond called the measure “outrageous.”

“Floridians’ hard earned taxpayer dollars should not go to pay for Ron DeSantis’s campaign junkets,’’ he tweeted. “But we will never know now that his legislative cronies made his travel records retroactively exempt from public disclosure.”

Ben Wilcox, the research director and co-founder of the good government organization Integrity Florida, told Insider that DeSantis’s argument that the law is necessary for his protection “strains credulity.”

“How else can we know whether the travel was an appropriate use of public funds and hold those responsible accountable?” Wilcox asked.

When the bill passed the state legislature last week, House Democratic Caucus Leader Fentrice Driskell slammed the measure as a “blatantly obvious” attempt to make it easier for DeSantis to travel outside Florida and “raise his profile” ahead of his widely expected presidential campaign.

DeSantis should “resign as governor and go back to being a private citizen” if he didn’t want his travel records to be public, Driskell said. “As long as he’s in office, he should be open and honest about where he’s going, when, and who is with him. Floridians have a right to know what their governor is doing, and that includes these travel details.”

DeSantis has been on multiple trips, both domestic and international, which many suspect double as a warmup for a presidential run. Questions are rising about whether taxpayer funds have been used to pay for his travel, and now we may never know.

Florida Republicans have been clamping down on freedom of information, both in state schools and journalism. They also introduced bills that would have made it easier to sue journalists for defamation, as well as require paid bloggers who write about elected officials to first register with the state. Neither of these bills made it to a full vote.

The flip side of these crackdowns is that DeSantis is very bad at dealing with media scrutiny. He apparently short-circuited when asked about his terrible polling numbers, and he also freaked out when asked about his time working as a Navy lawyer at Guantánamo Bay.

Apparently CNN told the audience of its diet Trump campaign rally that they could definitely applaud but they absolutely could not boo.

CNN has been catching rightful flak—even internally—for hosting its absurd town hall event with twice-impeached, criminally indicted former President Donald Trump one day after he was also found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

And now it seems that CNN somehow found a way to make it all worse.

Puck reports that before the town hall, CNN entreated the audience: “Please do not boo, please be respectful.” They were however allowed to applaud.

Such instruction, beyond the possibility that CNN did not actually try to get a balanced audience of Trump supporters and genuinely “undeclared” voters, may explain why the town hall appeared more like a Trump lovefest and less like an earnest exploration of whether a criminal and sexual abuser deserves to be president (this is needlessly generous: The answer is “no”).

Those defending CNN’s town hall—like Anderson Cooper—argue that the audience represented half the country (fact check: false; only 74 million people, or 22.5 percent of America, voted for Trump in 2020). But not every single one of them would have approved of Trump smearing the woman he was just found liable for sexually abusing and defaming, doubling down on the radical election lies that have only dampened Republicans’ performance since, or saying more lies than truths in such a short amount of time.

But we didn’t get to hear if the audience opposed any of this, because CNN didn’t let them express it.

The defenses of the town hall assume we have no awareness of who Trump is and what many of his supporters have tolerated, if not actively encouraged. But what many, not least myself, actually have no awareness of is why a news network would so eagerly host a farcical event under the guise of holding power to account and then beg the audience only to cheer for the power in question.

House Republicans passed a bill Thursday that would destroy the process to gain asylum in the United States.

The measure, which has been slammed by immigrants’ rights advocates, passed by a vote of 219–213, with just two Republicans joining all of the Democrats to oppose it. The bill squeaked through hours before the expiration of Title 42, the pandemic-era public health emergency measure that allows officials to turn away anyone at the border, regardless of whether they are seeking asylum.

The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, and the White House has also vowed to veto it on the off chance it does. But the bill has a number of hard-line measures that show exactly what Republicans would do if they ever retake control of both chambers.

To start, the bill would require Customs and Border Protection to hire and train 22,000 more agents. It would also require the secretary of homeland security to resume construction of the border wall, a key policy under Donald Trump. The secretary would also have power to block any immigrant from entering the U.S. if doing so is deemed “necessary in order to achieve operational control over” the border. While current Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is unlikely to use this power, the secretary in a future Republican administration very well could.

Migrants who have passed through another country on their way to the U.S. and did not first seek asylum along the way could be considered ineligible for asylum. Once they reach the U.S., people would have to seek asylum at a designated port of entry, instead of crossing the border at any point. This effectively limits who can claim asylum to Mexicans, Canadians, or anyone lucky enough to have a tourist visa to those countries. The bill would also generally expand the reasons someone could be deemed ineligible for asylum.

Under current law, children cannot be detained longer than 20 days. But the bill would revise anti-trafficking laws to allow migrant children to be detained with their parents for the entirety of their immigration court process. Immigration officers could also let unaccompanied children withdraw their asylum applications, “even if the child is unable to make an independent decision to withdraw the application.”

The bill would also increase requirements for business owners to verify that potential employees have permission to work in the U.S., which would make hiring migrant workers less desirable. This could take a massive toll on the U.S. economy, which is already facing a worker shortage and historically has relied heavily on immigrant workers.

Republicans insist that this bill will solve the problem at the border, one of their favorite political talking points. But Democrats warn that the measure does nothing to address the root causes of the huge wave of migration the U.S. is currently facing.

“How do they propose to address our broken, fragile immigration system?” asked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “They continue to bend the knee to the former twice-impeached president of the United States of America in terms of their policy proposals.”

“The Republican approach is anchored in xenophobia and fanning the flames of hatred and distrust and of irresponsible policies that will do nothing to solve the problem.”

A man who says he is from Long Island and charged with committing unemployment fraud has voted to pass a bill to prevent unemployment fraud.

On Tuesday, George Santos was indicted on 13 counts related to money laundering, wire fraud, lying to Congress, and public theft of funds. That includes a charge of fraudulently claiming $24,000 in Covid unemployment benefits while making a $120,000 salary.

Just two days later, House Republicans passed a bill that purportedly aims to recoup Covid-19 unemployment benefits from fraudulent claimants. And Santos—who has either no self-awareness or a really great appreciation of irony—voted with them.

Many Republicans who’ve refused to disavow Santos also voted for the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act, a bill Santos co-sponsored.

Santos has pleaded not guilty to all charges and reached an agreement to be released on a $500,000 bond.

He has received permission to continue campaign activity, being only allowed to travel to New York City and Washington, D.C. To travel outside of those areas, he will need to obtain special permission from the government. The agreement enabled him to return back to the Hill and vote on a bill that, ideally, would stop crimes like the ones he allegedly committed.

The agreement potentially offers House Speaker Kevin McCarthy a smidgen of breathing room, amid Republican efforts to impose work requirements on Medicaid and SNAP benefits during debt ceiling negotiations.

Meanwhile, the unemployment fraud bill, which could in fact weaken the government’s ability to investigate fraud cases, passed 230–200.

At the very least, Santos’s colleagues seem to see it all as validation for the bill: