If you had the displeasure of being tuned into tonight’s CNN town hall hosting former U.S. President Donald Trump, we feel for you. After a straight hour of dodging questions, lying through his teeth, and making inflammatory remark after repulsive anecdote – all in front of an audience of rabid supporters, it’s almost feels like the guilty verdict in his sexual assault case, just yesterday, never happened.
CNN is being widely scrutinized by people from just about every political leaning for either the way they covered Trump, or why the network gave him a prime time television slot to spout drivel in the first place. This includes prolific sci-fi actor and active Twitter user George Takei, who gave his followers a bitter pill to swallow after the dust had settled from the clown fiesta that the Town Hall turned out to be:
If you cast your mind back to the news cycle back leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s bid for Presidential candidacy started out as a bit of a meme, which quickly spiraled out of control and ultimately led to him becoming the leader of the world’s most powerful nation. As Takei astutely points out, it’s giving Trump the sort of platform that we saw tonight, that puts us in a dangerous spot in which, despite all of his misdeeds, Trump could again emerge as a frontrunner for 2024.
From his persistent refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, his willingness to pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists, denial of knowing his sexual abuse victim, to the outlandish claim that he could resolve the Ukraine war in 24 hours – and everything else in between – the segment was an absolute mess.
Perhaps we should’ve heeded Mark Hamill’s words and tuned into what he was watching tonight instead of CNN. Maybe we’d have been better off.