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cnn trump town hall
Why the CNN Town Hall Was a Success, Sort-of
The town hall greatly advanced the agenda of the wealthy elites who own the media and control public discourse in this country. That is the manner in which it must be considered a real hit.
May 15, 2023
The CNN town hall with Donald Trump was an overwhelming success. Yes, I know that runs counter to the conventional wisdom which has it that the event was a debacle, a desecration of everything we hold dear about culture, decency, and democracy. Ordained pundits everywhere were clutching their pearls.
But if we look behind the curtain that conventional wisdom maintains to sustain the illusion of democracy, we see that the town hall greatly advanced the agenda of the wealthy elites who own the media and control public discourse in this country. That is the manner in which it must be considered a success.
First, let’s dispense with the superficial deformities of the event.
Yes, it was a lurid media enactment of Godzilla versus Bambi, with Donald Trump and Caitlin Collins playing their respective roles. That made for good theater, in the domesticated modern form of what the Romans relished as Bread and Circuses. Nobody can be mistaken about that mannerized essence of it.
When you marry Trump’s force-of-nature demonic character with the money-seeking imperative of commercial media and stew it all in the primal resentment held by vast swaths of the public who believe that the country has shafted them, you get exactly, formulaically, what we saw last week...
Yes, the content was an hour-long effluvium of lies, hate, misogyny, resentment, victimization, denigration of democracy, and all the other perversities that saddle up as Republican—and especially MAGA—talking points. Anyone who expected anything more is disingenuous, as Trump is.
And, yes, it served to normalize all those excrescences by serving them up to a national audience, in prime time, with the explicit imprimatur of one of society’s anointed purveyors of received culture. In effect, the event signified that this is what we are, so this is what we are destined to imbibe. Suck it in.
But if we look behind the curtain that the conventional wisdom (via the mainstream media) maintains to keep us confused, divided, pacified, and impotent, we see that the townhall delivered exactly what the doyens of power—those who own and run the media—wanted. That’s the “Sort-of.”
Let’s be honest: hate and fear and blame and victimization and resentment generate more clicks and eyeballs than do thought and tolerance and engagement and negotiation and compromise. That’s why bottom-dwellers like Marjorie Taylor Greene run the Republican Party; she generates clicks and eyeballs and, so, money.
When you marry Trump’s force-of-nature demonic character with the money-seeking imperative of commercial media and stew it all in the primal resentment held by vast swaths of the public who believe that the country has shafted them, you get exactly, formulaically, what we saw last week: an almost satanic (certainly, sadistic) celebration of our worst side, our basest nature, our latent id, the devils of our lesser being. It couldn’t be anything but.
Let’s be clear: Trump would not exist as the lurking, putrid, destructive cultural phenomenon that he is if the past 40 years of neoliberal governance had been a success for the American people
The essence of Trump’s message and of Trumpism itself is this: “Tear it down. It’s shafted you, it’s rigged, and it cannot be redeemed.” This is exactly what Trump means when he says with deadly seriousness, “I am your retribution.” That is, “I am your retribution against a society that has shafted you.” The fact of Trump’s resilience is the proof of the depth—and the breadth—of this sentiment. It is fanatically shared by tens of millions of people. We ignore it at our peril.
But “tear it down” is not a viable governing policy principle, which is why Republican policy proposals are nothing so much as nothing. There’s no “there” there. There are no actionable actions that can be acted on. It’s just vituperation, rage, conspiracy, histrionics, and bile.
This is exactly what the rulers of the country want you to see: for Trump not to be a reasonable alternative, which is not to say that his is not a palpable impetus. This is what signals that the town hall, while a calamity from one vantage, was such a success from another: that of our rulers.
The way the process is framed is that it’s either Trump, or the alternative, which is to say, Biden and the status quo. This has the effect of herding sensible people, whether Republicans or Democrats or Independents, to “the alternative.” But that “alternative,” is no more and no less than the neoliberal state that generated the conditions that barfed up Trump in the first place.
Let’s be clear: Trump would not exist as the lurking, putrid, destructive cultural phenomenon that he is if the past 40 years of neoliberal governance had been a success for the American people. But it hasn’t been a success. It’s been a disaster, indeed, a calamity for the vast majority of the population. Consider.
Average incomes, adjusted for inflation, have barely budged in the past 40 years. If working-class wages had only kept pace with productivity, people’s incomes would be more than double what they are now. Do you really think we’d have Trump if people were making double today what they actually are?
Fifty trillion dollars have been transferred from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 1%, those who own and operate the media and the rest of the country, including the government. Do you think we would have Trump if that $50 trillion were still in the pockets of the bottom 90%?
The country has had to take on more than $30 trillion of national debt to mask the rot occasioned by over four decades of neoliberal rule. But the duct tape of massive borrowing and spending can no longer keep up with all leaks that are busting out of the hose of governance. That’s what Kevin McCarthy’s debt ceiling farrago is revealing.
The problem for the keepers of the status quo, those conventional voices who counsel sobriety and sanity, is that Trump’s diagnosis—that the system isn’t working—is spot on. It’s not working! If it were, we wouldn’t have societal breakdown erupting all around us. We wouldn’t have Trump, who is simply a symptom, an avatar, of that breakdown.
The prescription of these conventional counselors of caution, these sane sentinels of sobriety, is “Let’s reject Trump but keep doing more of what brought us Trump.” And that, of course, is the proof of the deceit in the would-be framing of an “alternative.”
There is no more seasoned, no more committed a keeper of the neoliberal order than Joe Biden. He has been in American politics for more than 50 years. He used to be called “The Senator from Mastercard.” He is one of the principal architects, certainly one of the principal operators, of the neoliberal order that has predictably, reliably, inexorably delivered the greatest inequality in the history of the country, a de-industrialized economy, a bankrupt fiscal state, a desiccated culture, a collapsing social order, an imploding international presence.
And the implicit message of the CNN town hall was, “You can either have Trump, or you can have the system that gave us Trump. Take your pick.” Some pick.
Notice, for example, that there is no framing of any kind of potential solution beyond the repulsive alternative of Trump or the toxic alternative of, well, the alternative. There’s no alternative to the alternative. There’s no Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for example, held up as the Democratic alternative to Joe Biden. Nor will there be, which is the testament to the Democratic Party’s complicity in this neoliberal pretense of protecting democracy.
The wealthy don’t want democracy because democracy is the only institution in society that has the legitimacy, and, therefore, the power to constrain the predations of concentrated wealth.
In the case of Trump, the end of democracy comes through the suspension of constitutional processes, i.e., naming him dictator, radical gerrymandering, massive voter suppression, and such. In the case of “the alternative,” the end of democracy comes through the continued charade that the artifacts of democracy—the speeches, debates, elections, party labels, townhalls, etc.—equal the substance of democracy, which is when the will of the people is expressed as public policy. But artifacts do not equal substance. That’s why they are merely artifacts.
The Princeton study by Gilens and Page proved, scientifically, that in the U.S., the will of the people is virtually never enacted as public policy, while the will of the elite almost always is. That is the reality, though, admittedly, not the stage-managed illusion, of American democracy.
To disparage Trump while promoting the system that gave rise to Trump is not only disingenuous, it is perfidious, which is to say deceitful, and dangerous.
We can either have Trump, which is anti-democracy, or we can have the alternative—the status quo—which is faux democracy, and which delivered precisely the circumstances that gave us Trump and his drive to dismantle democracy, and which will do so again, given the chance. It’s as if the glass box we’re supposed to use in case of societal emergency said, “Break glass to ensure society’s assured self-destruction.”
The wealthy don’t want democracy because democracy is the only institution in society that has the legitimacy, and, therefore, the power to constrain the predations of concentrated wealth.
In its townhall, CNN informed us in its uniquely condescending way that there are two “acceptable” alternatives available to us: one that destroys democracy; and one that continues the charade of democracy. In neither case is there any actual democracy. The wealthy win. That is why, from their point of view, the townhall was a rousing success.
It is easy to mock and denigrate Trump. He is so conspicuously, unapologetically odious. Self-fancied intellectuals on both sides of the political spectrum have made a self-congratulating blood sport of it. But to disparage Trump while promoting the system that gave rise to Trump is not only disingenuous, it is perfidious, which is to say deceitful, and dangerous. That is the noxious concoction CNN ladled up in its townhall, one that works for them, or at least its wealthy owners, but that puts a knife into the heart of our collective ability to pursue real democracy, which is what we need if we are to save this country.
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'It Was Shameful': CNN Faces Furious Backlash for Giving Trump a Megaphone to Spew Lies
"They put a sexual abuse victim in harm's way for views," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "This was a choice to platform lies about the election and Jan. 6th."
May 11, 2023
Former President Donald Trump predictably used the megaphone CNN handed him Wednesday night to spew falsehoods about the 2020 election, the January 6 attack, abortion, and E. Jean Carroll, turning the hour-long primetime town hall into what one of the corporate media network's own reporters characterized as a "spectacle of lies."
Many others echoed that assessment, faulting CNN and its chosen host—Kaitlan Collins, a former reporter for the right-wing Daily Caller—for giving Trump a platform to let loose a torrent of egregious claims with minimal and ineffective real-time fact-checking.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was one of the most vocal critics of CNN's decision to hold the town hall, which came a day after a jury found the former president liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll. Unsurprisingly, Trump took the opportunity he was gifted by CNN to mock Carroll—sparking laughter from the live studio audience packed with Republicans.
"CNN should be ashamed of themselves," Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. "They have lost total control of this 'town hall' to again be manipulated into platforming election disinformation, defenses of Jan. 6th, and a public attack on a sexual abuse victim."
"This falls squarely on CNN. Everyone here saw exactly what was going to happen," the New York Democrat added. "Instead they put a sexual abuse victim in harm's way for views. This was a choice to platform lies about the election and Jan. 6th with no plan but to have their moderator interrupted without consequence."
\u201c"What we saw tonight was a series of extremely irresponsible decisions that put a sexual abuse victim at risk...in front of a national audience, and I could not have disagreed with it more. It was shameful."\u201d— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) 1683770762
Trump's team and CNN, which is now under the leadership of Chris Licht, reportedly negotiated over the New Hampshire town hall for weeks. According to Politico, the former president's advisers saw the event "as an opportunity to reach a major national audience" as Trump campaigns for another White House term.
"Sorry, but—as predicted—this was a clear win for Trump," MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan wrote in a column following the nationally televised event. "He felt no pressure and conceded nothing. He was welcomed onto CNN to address an audience of non-Republicans watching at home and an audience of loyal Republicans sitting in that hall in New Hampshire. Win-win."
"When Trump falsely denied he had suggested 'terminating' parts of the Constitution, Collins didn't correct him," Hasan noted. "When Trump falsely claimed Democrats wanted to execute babies, Collins didn't correct him. When Trump falsely claimed he finished building his border wall, Collins tried to correct him—but he just talked over her. And when Trump made a racist remark about Chinatown, Collins said nothing whatsoever. Nor did she defend herself when he called her a 'nasty person.'"
Much of the criticism over the town hall was directed at Licht, CNN's CEO. Last year, shortly after taking the helm, Licht pledged to combat the spread of disinformation on CNN's platforms.
“The analogy I love to use is some people like rain, some people don't like rain. We should give space to that," Licht toldCNBC in October. "But we will not have someone who comes on and says it's not raining."
That promise appears laughable in the wake of Wednesday night's debacle. As CNN's own Oliver Darcy wrote in a recap of the town hall: "Trump lied about the 2020 election. He took no responsibility for the January 6 insurrection that those very lies incited. And he mocked E. Jean Carroll's allegations of sexual assault."
"And CNN aired it all," Darcy continued. "On and on it went. It felt like 2016 all over again. It was Trump's unhinged social media feed brought to life on stage."
One on-air CNN personality, speaking anonymously to The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona, said the town hall devolved into "a Trump infomercial."
"It is so bad," the person added. "We're going to get crushed."
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