In case it wasn’t clear, CNN purposely stocked the Trump town hall audience with MAGA diehards.
rather than assembling “an ordinary collection of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents” for the event—as CNN had said it would—most of the people in New Hampshire that night were “diehards, 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.” Because, for some reason, that’s exactly what Licht wanted:
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’s habit of marginalizing conservative views and Republican voters. That needed to change ahead of 2024.
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’t go his way. In the final days before the event, concerns about the audience makeup spiked as Licht’s description of the crowd—“extra Trumpy”—wound its way through Slack channels and text-message threads.did an admirable job but was steamrolled by Trump in key moments; her questions, which came almost entirely from the candidate’s ideological left, served to effectively rally the room around him.
Incredibly, Licht—who, when asked by Alberta if he’s a conservative, answered, “I would never put myself into a category. I think it depends on what we’re talking about”—has been unwilling to admit that the town hall was an epic disaster. His immediateon the night was that despite there being “expected” backlash, Collins gave a “masterful performance,” “fact-checked Donald Trump in real time,” and “made a ton of news.
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