Former President Donald Trump believes CNN should have celebrated the ratings boom his town hall delivered the network, telling The Messenger he was “amazed to see” the network was “traumatized” by the event.
Trump spoke with the newly launched news organization, The Messenger, in a wide-ranging interview published Monday that partly touched on his CNN town hall last week in which he steamrolled moderator Kaitlan Collins.
When asked what he gleaned from the event, Trump said he “was surprised by the level of hostility,” as he thought the network was trying to win viewers back:
I thought they would be neutral and even better than that so they could get the viewers back. And they had one of the best [viewership] days in years. So you would think they would claim success. I was amazed to see that they were traumatized by what took place. They were actually traumatized. I think that instead of acting the way they did, they should have said, ‘we had a tremendous ratings night, one of the best in years, many years,’ and spiked the football, right?
The outlet followed up, asking if Trump perceived the town hall as a win. While Trump did not give his opinion, he said that “everybody” has categorized it as a victory for him:
“Well, I don’t want to say. But everyone else says it was. … I’ve never been so credited with the successes the way I have with this. Everybody — the radical left, fascists, Marxists, communists, and normal people — have said that it was a total complete victory for Trump. .. But CNN has taken tremendous hits. And I’m surprised they don’t really say that they had a very big ratings night. Truly surprising to me.”
The event garnered 703,000 viewers in the 25-54-year-old key demographic – which is five times better than CNN’s usual performance in the 8:00 p.m. time slot, former CNN employee Brian Stelter noted. The next evening, Trump wrote that “many minds were changed on Wednesday night by listening to Common Sense, and sheer ‘Brilliance.’”
However, the town hall sparked criticism from some senior employees, including Anchor Anderson Cooper, who told viewers the next day they “have every right to be outraged today and be angry and never watch this outlet again.” Senior media reporter Oliver Darcy asserted in his Reliable Sources newsletter that it was “hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.”
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He added, “CNN and new network boss Chris Licht are facing a fury of criticism — both internally and externally over the event. How Licht and other CNN executives address the criticism in the coming days and weeks will be crucial.”
Darcy’s newsletter reportedly earned him a summons to CNN CEO Chris Licht’s office, where company executives informed “him that his coverage had been too emotional,” Puck News’s Dylan Byers wrote on Friday, adding that “[t]hey put the fear of God into him.”
Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Sunday that “it’s really amazing to watch the head of CNN get absolutely lambasted for asking me to do a so-called Town Hall,” adding:
In all fairness, nobody had any problems with what he wanted to do until after the show started, when they quickly realized that Ms. Collins was not exactly Barbara Walters, or even close. That’s when the trouble from the Radical Left started. Neurotic little AOC with the bad looking boyfriend, went crazy. “He owns CNN, he’s in their head,” they screamed.
He suggested the network “take the GREAT RATINGS!”
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