From what I saw, Trump had a pretty good night during CNN’s town hall. Ben Shapiro thinks this has a lot to do with how CNN handled the town hall and explains why he thinks they did him a huge favor:
Below is the full tweet:
CNN did Trump a MASSIVE favor last night and everybody knows it. Here’s why.
This townhall was billed as a Republican primary townhall, which means that presumably, Trump should have been asked about issues Republican voters care about. Like, say, Fauci and covid; criminal justice reform and Alice Johnson and crime; the border wall and illegal immigration. Etc.
Now let me present a partial list of the issues Republican voters DON’T care about:
E. Jean Carroll
January 6
Georgia election questions
National Archives documents
Alvin Bragg’s allegations
These are all Democrats’ top issues.
Collins asked zero of the questions Republicans cared about and all the ones Democrats cared about.
So, in other words, this was billed as a GOP primary night, and it was just Kaitlin Collins asking questions Democrats have about Trump.
Republican voters sensed this. So when Trump took out the kitchen sink and began hammering Collins into the wall with it, they cheered. Republicans will — ALWAYS AND CORRECTLY — cheer biased moderators being steamrolled by Republican candidates, no matter what those candidates actually say.
Trump wins more favor with Republican voters; Democrats remain offput; independents continue to wonder why we’re relitigating 2020. Ridiculous failure by CNN on all fronts — unless, of course, their goal is to renominate Trump for the ratings and because they think he’s most beatable (NOTE: this, by the way, is precisely their goal).
I think that’s good analysis of what happened. I would add that while Trump got a lot of cheers from the crowd when he got tough with Collins, it wasn’t just about the issues she pressed. Collins acted like a Democrat the whole way through, refusing to accept many of the answers Trump gave to her questions. So when Trump pushed back the crowd ate it up.
Shapiro is also right that Democrats still think Trump is the most beatable and want him to win the nomination. It’s the same strategy we saw in 2022 of helping push Trump candidates to the forefront in GOP primaries so they’d lose the general.