Yolk on faces after Saint Anselm sideshow
Trump frequently interrupted or spoke over Ms. Collins, making sexist gestures and jabs that the audience applauded and hawed at. At one point, he referred to Ms. Collins as “a nasty person” for refusing to cede the stage to his lies, and the audience applauded him for that as well.
O P I N I O N
I should’ve kept the channel on the Red Sox game. But The Imp of the Perverse urged me to change it to CNN and watch the town hall spectacle with former-President Donald Trump.
After all, this was a national news story happening seven miles from my house, and while I knew what to expect from Trump—if you don’t know what to expect from him by now, you haven’t been paying attention—he hadn’t spoken to any news outlet outside of the propaganda mouthpieces at Fox since leaving office.
I’ll admit that I was curious.
What I ended up watching was the equivalent of a bully picking on a victim while his friends formed a circle around them and egged him on.
The bully was, predictably, Donald Trump and the victim was CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins, who did an admirable job holding her ground with the Herculean task of trying to fact-check a veritable barrage of lies.
And the sycophants forming the circle? Well, that would be New Hampshire—particularly the New Hampshire Republicans picked by CNN to give the former president a tongue bath.
Trump’s performance was reprehensible and repugnant, crass and sexist and sociopathic in his inability to not only recognize that objective reality exists but in his brazen shirking of any and all responsibility for his actions inside and out of the most powerful office in the world.
Trump frequently interrupted or spoke over Ms. Collins, making sexist gestures and jabs that the audience applauded and hawed at. At one point, he referred to Ms. Collins as “a nasty person” for refusing to cede the stage to his lies, and the audience applauded him for that as well.
The low point of the night—and for someone as depraved as Trump to hit “a low point” gives you an idea of how low the bar had fallen—the former president was mocking E. Jean Carroll, a woman who accused him of raping her.
Because, you know, that’s what decent people do when someone accuses you of irreparably ruining their life: You mock them and their accusations.
A jury decided on Monday that Carroll had a “preponderance of evidence” to prove sexual assault but not rape in civil court, which Trump sees as a victory, so he decided that a town hall format was the perfect venue to ridicule her account of the events and try out his new stand-up routine.
And the audience laughed like they were at a comedy club. It was an ignominious display that made New Hampshire look like a bunch of ass-hats fawning over a sociopath, an indelible egg stain on our faces.
And shame on CNN for giving Trump the platform to disseminate misinformation and pick on one of their better journalists.
When this sick sideshow mercifully ended, I switched back to the Sox game in time to catch the final innings. After Kenley Jansen closed the game with his 400th career save, we both needed a shower.
