Former President Donald Trump took a victory lap Thursday, bragging about the “sky high ratings” for his town hall appearance on CNN Wednesday. “People are criticizing CNN for giving me a Forum to tell the TRUTH,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “I believe it was a very smart thing that they did, with Sky High Ratings that they haven’t seen in a very long time. It was by far the biggest Show of the night, the week, and the month!”

CNN, which has languished in third place behind MSNBC and Fox News Channel, jumped into first place Wednesday night, with its controversial Trump town hall delivering a total audience of 3.1 million viewers. But the network was harshly criticized for allowing Trump to repeat lies about the 2020 election being “stolen” and to disparage the criminal cases against him, including laughing a jury’s verdict finding that Trump has sexually abused E. Jean Carroll.

On CNN Thursday evening, Anderson Cooper defending the network’s decision to host Trump, saying “you have every right to be outraged today and angry and never watch this network again. But do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?”

Later in the evening, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins—who moderated the town hall session and tried repeatedly to counter Trump’s lies, only to be called “nasty” by the former president—defended the event as newsworthy. Anchoring the network’s CNN Primetime, Collins opened the hour by saying “about last night” before describing the town hall as “a major inflection point in the Republican Party’s search for its nominee, and potentially the starting line for America’s next presidential race.”

Collins aired clips of Republicans in Congress who criticized Trump’s performance, including Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who said “I think people saw last night what they would get with another term of Donald Trump as president, which is completely untethered to the truth.”

Trump ridiculed criticism from both the left and right, saying in a message on Truth Social that “the Radical Left screamed ‘take it down, take it down’ during the Show because they saw that I was making so many important points on the Border, Energy Independence, the Afghanistan Catastrophe, Inflation, the Economy, Russia/Ukraine, and so much more. Many minds were changed on Wednesday night by listening to Common Sense, and sheer ‘Brilliance.’”