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If you caught last month\u2019s disastrous CNN town hall<\/a> with Donald Trump,<\/strong> there were a few things that likely stood out to you. The ex-president\u2019s continued insistence that the 2020 election was \u201crigged,\u201d\u00a0obviously. Or his claim that January 6 was actually Mike Pence<\/strong>\u2019s fault. Or his outrageous suggestion that before Roe v. Wade<\/em>\u00a0was overturned, people could \u201ckill a baby in the ninth month\u2026or after the baby is born,\u201d and his disgraceful smears against writer E. Jean Carroll.<\/strong> But in addition to the avalanche of lies, there was another aspect of the proceedings that made the live broadcast extremely weird and unsettling: The audience, which loudly cheered on Trump\u2019s falsehoods throughout the night and laughed when he, for example, attacked the woman a jury had just found him liable<\/a> of sexually abusing and defaming. And apparently, that was by design.<\/p>\n As Tim Alberta<\/strong> reports in a new Atlantic<\/em> profile of CNN boss Chris Licht<\/strong><\/a>,<\/strong> rather than assembling \u201can ordinary collection of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents\u201d for the event\u2014as CNN had said it would\u2014most of the people in New Hampshire that night were \u201cdiehards, fanboys, political zealots who were likelier to show up at a rally with a MAGA flag than come to a coffee shop with a policy question.\u201d Because, for some reason, that\u2019s exactly what Licht wanted:<\/p>\n Licht had come to Manchester with bigger ambitions than lifting CNN out of the viewership basement for a single evening in May. He believed that Trump owed his initial political ascent in part to the media\u2019s habit of marginalizing conservative views and Republican voters. That needed to change ahead of 2024. Licht wasn\u2019t scared to bring a bunch of MAGA enthusiasts onto his set\u2014he had remarked to his deputies, in the days before the town hall, about the \u201cextra Trumpy\u201d makeup of the crowd CNN was expecting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n Of course, others at the network did not feel the same way, which may have had something to do with it being a terrible idea to basically hold a rally for the guy who tried to overturn the last presidential election and then incited an insurrection when things didn\u2019t go his way.<\/p>\n In the final days before the event, concerns about the audience makeup spiked as Licht\u2019s description of the crowd\u2014\u201cextra Trumpy\u201d\u2014wound its way through Slack channels and text-message threads.<\/p>\n All of these concerns, it turned out, were warranted.\u2026 [Moderator Kaitlan] Collins<\/strong> did an admirable job but was steamrolled by Trump in key moments; her questions, which came almost entirely from the candidate\u2019s ideological left, served to effectively rally the room around him. Not that the room needed rallying: The crowd was overwhelmingly pro-Trump, and because CNN wanted an organic environment, it placed few restrictions on engagement. The ensuing rounds of whole-audience applause\u2014I counted at least nine\u2014disrupted Collins\u2019s rhythm as an interviewer. So did the ill-timed bouts of laughter, such as when Trump mocked E. Jean Carroll, and the jeering that accompanied Collins\u2019s mention of the Access Hollywood<\/em> tape. By the end of the event, it was essentially indistinguishable from a MAGA rally. People throughout the room shouted, \u201cI love you!\u201d during commercial breaks and chanted, \u201cFour more years!\u201d when the program ended.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n Incredibly, Licht\u2014who, when asked by Alberta if he\u2019s a conservative, answered, \u201cI would never put myself into a category. I think it depends on what we\u2019re talking about\u201d\u2014has been unwilling to admit that the town hall was an epic disaster. His immediate take<\/a> on the night was that despite there being \u201cexpected\u201d backlash, Collins gave a \u201cmasterful performance,\u201d \u201cfact-checked Donald Trump in real time,\u201d and \u201cmade a ton of news.\u201d Speaking to Alberta, he said he had no regrets about the \u201cextra Trumpy\u201d crowd, or letting the audience \u201ccheer at will,\u201d or even \u201cdevoting the first question to [Trump\u2019s] election lies,\u201d despite the fact that the former guy was going to obviously keep pushing the lie that he won. In fact, the only thing Licht said he would have done differently was maybe have the audience say if they\u2019d voted for Trump in 2020 or were planning to the next time around.<\/p>\n Given how the night unfolded, that tweak was probably not necessary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
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