Last week, CNN broadcast a town hall event featuring Donald Trump. This was about a
month and a half after Trump was indicted in thirty-four felony counts related to hush
money payments he made to his former mistress Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election,
and one day after a federal jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer
E. Jean Carroll, and with multiple state and federal investigations into Trump’s criminal
conduct in connection with the January 6, 2021 capital insurrection, and his theft of
classified documents from the White House at the conclusion of his presidential term still ongoing.
Despite those facts, CNN chose to treat Trump, who is once again running for President of the
United States, like any other candidate and offer him a nationally televised forum to
respond to questions from the moderator and from his supporters in the audience.
It went about as well as anyone with half a brain in their head predicted it would.
For over an hour, Trump was given a platform to lie, deny, deflect, and ramble on,
mostly uninterrupted and uncorrected, about his favorite subjects: what a great president he was,
how the 2020 election was stolen from him, and how he and his supporters, including those who
stormed the capitol on January 6, 2021, have been persecuted by the media and the government,
and how every one of the many people who have accused him of a wide variety of crimes is a
liar. Moderator Kaitlan Collins did her best to fact check him, but it’s an impossible task
when practically every other word out of his mouth is a new lie and he just denies
everything that contradicts him, anyway. My issue isn’t with Kaitlan Collins or her performance as
moderator — my issue is with the network itself, and the executives, including CEO of CNN Chris
Licht, who allowed this farce to happen in the first place. And my questions for Chris Licht
and the others responsible for this are: Who was this for? And, what were you hoping to accomplish?
I have a feeling the answers are, respectively, “Whoever would watch it,” and “To pop the biggest
rating possible,” but for the sake of the video let’s pretend I’m talking about thoughtful,
conscientious human beings who feel a responsibility to something higher
than generating revenue, instead of . . . the people who actually run CNN.
Who was this for? Was it for Trump supporters? They don’t watch CNN so much, as a rule — which
makes sense, given how relentlessly Trump and his surrogates have vilified the network over
the years. Was it for people opposed to Donald Trump? Why would they want or need to watch Trump
say the same stuff he’s been saying ad nauseum everywhere else? Was it for undecided voters? Who
could they possibly be at this point, where Trump is concerned? Seriously — it’s 2023 — who the fuck
is still undecided about whether or not they’d be willing to vote for Donald Trump? And why do the
bosses at CNN think it’s their job to help these dipshits, whoever they are, make up their minds?
What were they trying to accomplish? That’s the really important question. What was the point of
this meant to be? What was the purpose of it? How was this supposed to help? Because for the Trump
supporters in the audience, however many there were, it couldn’t have been of much use, since
they had heard all this shit before — Trump said nothing new. And, for the people in the audience
opposed to Trump, it wasn’t of any use either, because Trump said nothing new! CNN stands for
Cable News Network — where was the news? There was no news! And nobody could have seriously expected
that there would be. What, did they think Trump was suddenly going to admit to stealing classified
documents, or inciting a riot at the capitol, or committing numerous acts of sexual assault?
According to CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, the point was apparently to put the Trump
freak show on display so that right-minded people would see it and realize the danger
Trump and his supporters represent to the country. The night after the town hall,
Cooper used a portion of his primetime show on CNN to address viewers who were upset by
the decision to put Trump on the air, 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? . . . The man you
were so disturbed to see and hear from last night, that man is the front-runner for the
Republican nomination for president. And that audience that upset you, that’s a sampling of
about half the country. They are your family members, your neighbors, and they are voting.”
Here’s my problem with what Cooper is saying: we tried that in 2016, and it didn’t work.
People who make arguments like this in defense of platforming bigots and fascists — and Trump
is very much both — like to say “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” as though that’s just
a self-evident fact of life. But the thing is, it’s not. Sometimes, sunlight is the
best disinfectant. Sometimes, the public hears the unvarnished hatred and malevolence that a
politician or some other famous person has been hiding, and they react with outrage and horror,
and that person’s career is over. Sometimes, it is like the downfall of Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in
the Crowd, or the shunning of the racist Juror Number Ten in Twelve Angry Men. But sometimes,
that doesn’t happen. Sometimes, people hear someone they support saying something awful,
and they just shrug, because they don’t care, or they nod in agreement, because
they think the same awful thing and they’re glad someone finally said it into a microphone.
That’s what happened in 2016 with Trump and the Access Hollywood tape. Sure, lots of us
were offended by it. Lots of us thought it was disgusting. And I’m sure it did peel off a few
people who had been planning on voting for Trump before that — but it couldn’t have been all that
many. Most Trump supporters either didn’t think it was a big deal, or thought it actually made Trump
look good, because that’s the sort of people they are. And it feels like we’re awfully late
in the game to still have experienced, sensible journalists like Anderson Cooper — who obviously
recognizes Trump for what he is — trying to argue that continuing to expose people like Trump to the
widest possible audience is going to do any good for anyone other than Donald Trump. The notion
that all that’s necessary to defeat Trump is to give him enough rope to hang himself has been
disproven over and over and over again. Letting people see him and hear him as the bigoted buffoon
he is did not turn out to be an effective strategy for defeating Trump last time, and it’s not going
to work this time, either, because pretty much everyone who would be moved by that strategy
have already been moved, and as it turns out, it wasn’t as many people as we hoped it would be.
There is something that Anderson Cooper said that I agree with:
the people in the audience of that town hall meeting who were supporting Trump,
laughing at his jokes, cheering for his lies and empty boasts, are real people,
who still support Donald Trump — not in spite of the repugnant things he says and does, but because
of them. And the people in that town hall audience represent millions more throughout the country who
think just like they do. No amount of sunlight shone on Trump is going to change their minds.
Yes, people are smart, and honest, and capable of growth and change. But,
people are also misinformed, and gullible, and suggestible, and keen to have their prejudices
validated. The point Anderson Cooper seems to be missing is that those of us who watched
that town hall on CNN last week who were embarrassed and repulsed by Trump and his
supporters know this shit already. We’ve got it. We got it seven years ago. Giving Donald
Trump over an hour of primetime television isn’t forcing anyone to leave their “silo.” The only
thing putting Donald Trump on TV and treating him like a normal, legitimate presidential
candidate does at this point is normalize and legitimize him, and I can’t believe I’ve still
got to say this in the year of our goddamn lord two-thousand and twenty-goddamn-three.
There’s a bit of common wisdom which advises us to never play chess with a pigeon, because the
pigeon just knocks over the pieces, shits on the board, and struts around like it won. You may be
familiar with this saying if you, like me, have a history with the online atheist/skeptic community,
because it was often said ten or fifteen years ago as a way of advising against debating
creationists on scientific questions. But if you aren’t a fellow survivor of online atheism,
and you’re familiar with the expression, it’s probably because a bunch of people
were saying it in 2016 after watching Donald Trump in presidential debates!
Don’t play chess with a pigeon! At best it’s a waste of your time,
and at worst it’s an existential threat to our democracy, particularly when the
pigeon in question is a shamelessly corrupt criminal who has incited his supporters to riot,
sought to overturn lawful election results, and openly boasted of his plans to weaponize the
Justice Department against his political enemies and further persecute already
marginalized minority groups. How much bird shit does there need to be on the chess board
before we finally realize that inviting the fascist pigeon to play is a bad idea?