“They learned nothing and forgot nothing.”
Those famous words have been attributed to the 19th century French diplomat Talleyrand, supposedly in reference to the Bourbon dynasty that replaced Napoleon.
But he could have been referring to CNN in the age of Donald Trump.
Seven years on from that car-crash coverage, CNN offered the twice-impeached and newly indicted ex-president another live prime-time platform.
Looking back on the 2016 election, the network’s former chief Jeff Zucker admitted that it was a “mistake” for CNN to have run Trump rallies, live and uninterrupted, and to have allowed him to “say outrageous things, or say things that weren’t true.”
Yet Wednesday night, seven years on from that car-crash coverage, CNN and CEO Chris Licht offered the twice-impeached and newly indicted ex-president, who was also found liable of defamation and sexual abuse just this week, another live prime-time platform to once again “say outrageous things, or say things that weren’t true.”
Worse, the network put its star anchor and interviewer Kaitlan Collins in a room full of Trump supporters, who laughed at their cult leader’s crass jokes and applauded his cheap insults — including jabs at Collins herself. (By my count, seven of the nine audience questions came from people who supported Trump’s 2020 re-election bid!)
The former president, as I point out in my book “Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading and Public Speaking,” is a master of the “Gish Gallop”; he specializes in overwhelming interviewers with a “relentless barrage of falsehoods” and drowning them “in a deluge of distortions, deflections, and distractions.”
So CNN, with this ridiculous town hall format and an audience seemingly recruited “from the Mar-a-Lago parking lot,” put its own anchor in a position to fail. The only way Collins really could have even semi-succeeded would have been if she had ignored the audience and the format entirely and…
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