Was there any way last night's televised town hall with former President Donald Trump wasn't going to turn into one long, free advertisement for his 2024 campaign? Trump lied about the 2020 election and about classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, told the female journalist interviewing him that she was "nasty," and insulted the woman he was just found liable for sexually abusing ("what kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you're playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?") while insisting he's never met her. But he did it with his characteristic humor, bravado, and showmanship, a say-anything shtick that many Americans—even those who may not agree with all of his policies or personal decisions—find appealing. And he was given the opportunity to do all this uninterrupted by opposing candidates.
This was CNN giving Trump a chance to put on a nice one-man show—and if that's what the network wants do to, so be it. But one imagines that's not actually what folks at CNN wanted to do. It just goes to show how little the media have learned about Trump since he burst into the political arena in 2015.
