The Memo: How CNN gave Trump his best campaign moment so far

CNN delivered former President Trump his best moment of the 2024 campaign.

That’s the main message from the televised town-hall earlier this week from which the shock waves are still reverberating.

Trump enjoyed more than an hour of primetime in front of a supportive crowd whose loud reactions helped him swat aside any challenging questions from moderator Kaitlan Collins.

The event has caused days of internal ructions inside CNN, where staffers are appalled by what took place; it has drawn scorn and indignation from the left; and it has helped Trump underline his dominance of the GOP primary field.

“I was not in favor of this and once again Trump proved me wrong,” said Michael Caputo, a longtime friend and erstwhile advisor to the former president.

Caputo, now a senior executive at Americano Media, said he felt Trump was ill-advised to go on a network that had so enthusiastically pilloried him, particularly during his time in the Oval Office.

“But he didn’t just win, he completely pinned CNN,” Caputo said.

Sam Nunberg, a former 2016 Trump campaign advisor who says he is unaffiliated with any 2024 candidate, argued that the former president was wrong to spend so much time relitigating the 2020 election.

But he praised Trump’s performance overall and said his willingness to go on CNN in the first place “was a shot across the bows of all the other candidates — namely Ron DeSantis.”

Trump had been expected in Iowa this weekend where he and DeSantis, the governor of Florida, were set to hold dueling events Saturday. A tornado warning caused Trump to cancel at the last minute, however.

In any event, the threat posed by DeSantis has diminished notably in recent weeks.

At the start of April, Trump led DeSantis by about 19 points in the weighted polling average maintained by data site FiveThirtyEignt. That was a strong advantage, to be sure, but not an overwhelming one for a past president against an as-yet-undeclared candidate.

Today, Trump’s advantage stands at 30 points.

The shift has happened as frustration builds among some in the GOP that DeSantis has still not declared his candidacy. The Florida governor also made a misstep by declaring Russian’s war of aggression in Ukraine merely “a territorial dispute.” 

His long-running conflict with Disney and his signing of a six-week abortion ban in his state have also disconcerted GOP megadonors who had hoped he would be a more palatable general election choice than Trump.

Trump’s CNN town hall came the day after a New York jury’s decision to hold him liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. The jury did not hold Trump liable for the most serious allegation Carroll made — that he raped her in a dressing room in Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s — but it ordered him to pay her $5m for damages for the other behavior.

At the CNN event, Trump mocked Carroll, which drew laughter from the audience.

That became one of the most criticized moments of a widely panned event for the network. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted that CNN “should be ashamed of themselves” in part because they had facilitated “a public attack on a sexual abuse victim.”

Even some Trump critics are dismayed at the apparently limited impact the jury’s verdict is likely to have, especially given the CNN-centered storm that immediately followed.

“I have trouble believing there is anyone who went into this week a Trump supporter, heard the E. Jean Carroll verdict, and is no longer a Trump supporter,” said Lucy Caldwell, a political strategist and critic of the former president who describes herself as a former Republican.

Caldwell added, “Anyone who believes women should not be subject to the behavior E. Jean Carroll experienced, already knows that Donald Trump is that person.”

The scale of the storm within CNN underlines just how bad a night it was for the network.

“It was a total debacle and I’ve never been more ashamed to work at CNN,” one prominent on-air talent at the network told The Hill on Thursday. “I don’t think anybody came out looking good. This is entirely a corporate and management failure. They should have anticipated how out of control Trump would be.”

For Trump allies, the message is plain.

“Donald Trump would probably do the next town hall in exactly the same way,” said Caputo. “And CNN would probably never do one in the same way ever again.”

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage. 

Dominick Mastrangelo contributed reporting.