Much of the reaction to the CNN town hall with Donald Trump has been centered along Trump’s behavior, the performance of moderator Kaitlan Collins, and the decision by CNN to host the event in the first place. However, KFI’s Gary Hoffman believes the televised event might have been mislabeled.
Hoffman lamented that there were only a smattering of questions from the crowd, and argued that “the only question I heard that was challenging in any way” was from an audience member who asked if Trump would stop using “polarizing talk of election fraud”.
“This is not what we’re worried about right now,” Hoffman said during Gary and Shannon, as FOX 11’s Marla Tellez filled in for Shannon Farren. “Listen, everybody has already made their own decisions about the 2020 election, and I don’t know anyone who is thinking to themselves ‘My vote in 2024 is my reaction to what happened four years ago’. I don’t know anyone who is thinking that.”
He then turned his attention to the difficult position of moderator Kaitlan Collins and how she should have been prepared for the situation. He argued that any fact-check attempt by Collins was bound to turn into a debate, which, like his previous points, would show that it wasn’t truly a town hall event.
“If I were a producer working with Kaitlan, I would have told her ‘We know the gravitational pull about 2020 is too strong. Let’s not let him start there, because — if that’s the case — he controls the whole thing’. I think it was an absolute success for CNN. They got exactly what they wanted,” said Hoffman. “They got a Trump that was pushy, and dropped a couple of laugh lines to appeal to the people in the audience that were clearly his fans.”
