Fox News host Laura Ingraham reacted in glee to CNN’s town hall event for Donald Trump, who uttered a flurry of false claims, in some cases too quick for moderator Kaitlan Collins to fact-check in real time.
CNN at first “thought they likely caught Trump in a very well coordinated trap,” Ingraham claimed. “But soon it became clear that they were the ones in the trap and they were totally out of their league because Trump hammered them on issue after issue.”
In his first answer, Trump lied about the 2020 election, repeating his baseless accusation that it was “rigged.” He was misogynistic when asked about having to pay $5 million to writer E. Jean Carroll after a New York jury found him liable for sexual battery and defamation. He called Collins “nasty.” He smeared the Capitol Police officer who shot and killed Ashil Babbitt on Jan. 6, even though the officer was later cleared of any wrongdoing.
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In all, Trump’s appearance, one CNN staffer told The Daily Beast, was “one of the worst hours I’ve ever seen on our air.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called the network’s programming decision “profoundly irresponsible.”
Accordingly, many of Trump’s allies heralded his first on-camera interview with a CNN journalist since before the 2016 election as a win. Campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung likened it to pirates taking over an oil tanker.
Fox News contributor Ben Domenech followed up Ingraham’s praise by imagining CNN executives coming to terms with their error.
“It’s as if they realized along the way, ‘Oh Lord, what have we done?” Domenech said, cracking up Ingraham. “‘We’ve introduced all of the things that made this guy a success again.’”
David Zaslav, the CEO of CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, defended the town hall last week, saying that since the U.S. government is divided, “we need to hear both voices.” Of Trump, he added: “He is the frontrunner. He has to be on our network. We’re happy he’s coming on there.”
On Wednesday night, the network released a statement supporting Collins, who “exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist. She asked tough, fair and revealing questions.”
Domenech said the move “injected all the kind of energy that [Trump] had before back into his effort to become president again.”
“He responded to the questions that were put in front of him, and he knocked them out of the park,” he insisted. “And what are we to be surprised about when it comes to this? This is exactly the kind of forum in which he succeeds. We know this now. And CNN should know this now. There is no trap to be sprung.”
