Photo by Will Lanzoni/CNN via cnn.com
Donald Trump on CNN Town Hall 2023
Former President Donald Trump participates in a CNN Republican Town Hall moderated by CNN's Kaitlan Collins at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Wednesday, May 10, 2023.
Donald Trump’s barrage of lies that began eight years ago attacking equal rights for racial and religious minorities and women in America won Republicans the presidency in 2016, but it nearly destroyed our democracy.
When American voters corrected their mistake four years later by electing President Biden with the largest vote in history, Trump sent his armed mob of violent supporters to attack Congress in a failed attempt to overthrow Biden’s election.
But Trump’s destruction of the Republican party continues. Trump’s been responsible for major losses for Republicans in three straight national elections but he’s back on CNN once again as the most likely candidate to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
It was Trump’s most disgusting television performance since he shouted insults at Biden and moderator Chris Wallace for 90 minutes during a 2020 presidential debate. That was the night Trump alerted the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” No one knew then Trump planned to summon the armed militias of hate groups to keep him in office if he lost the election.
Supporting Terrorists
We all witnessed Trump’s criminal attempt to overthrow our democracy on January 6, 2021. Now Trump is promising to pardon most of those violent insurrectionists if Republicans are irresponsible enough ever to elect him again.
The worst terrorist attack on democracy led to five police deaths and left 140 other officers with severe injuries including brain damage from being beaten unconscious, but Trump absurdly claimed on CNN: “They were there with love in their hearts … and it was a beautiful day.”
That’s why Republicans can never be allowed near the Oval Office again until the party stops perpetuating such brazen lies. It’s terrifying Republicans would even consider nominating Trump again because what if every other presidential candidate is murdered with an AR-15?
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The only socially redeeming value of Trump’s ugly televised Town Hall was that CNN invited New Hampshire Republican voters as the audience. Americans got to see for themselves how Republicans reacted to all Trump’s lies. They thought he was hilarious. They laughed and applauded every cruel joke, especially the way he demeaned women.
Trump went into an extended comedy riff demeaning writer E. Jean Carroll, the woman awarded $5 million by a jury that found Trump had sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman’s in the 1990s.
Who’s the Whack Job?
Trump called Carroll “a whack job” and said he would never assault in a department store dressing room because he could sexually assault her in the Plaza Hotel he owned next door. Republicans prefer to ignore the creepy accusations of 26 women accusing Trump of making unwanted sexual advances and Trump’s own boasting on the “Access Hollywood” tape that as a celebrity he can grab women’s genitals any time he wants.
All the sexual sleaze surrounding Trump’s relationships with women comes at the same time the driving issue increasing turnout in every election is women’s freedom to control their own lives, health care and reproductive rights destroyed by Trump’s rightwing Supreme Court.
When MAGA Republicans talk about freedom in politics, they’re usually talking about taking it away from people they don’t like. This is particularly dangerous when they start destroying health care for populations they don’t understand.
Republicans have introduced more than 400 bills around the country banning gender-affirming health care. Many of them have never met anyone transgender or non-binary. They just hate the idea of those people. Ignorant politicians should never pass laws affecting the physical and mental health of people they don’t know.
President Biden and the Democrats have a different freedom agenda. It’s based on the freedom Thomas Jefferson envisioned when he wrote beautiful language describing unalienable equal rights for every American in our democracy that didn’t exist in Jefferson’s day or even in his own house.
We’ve never achieved equal rights for everyone in America regardless of race, gender or national origin, but we should always have the goal of achieving that more perfect union. We’ll never get there if corrupt supreme court justices keep pretending our founding fathers wanted us to return to the 1800s when only rich, white, male property owners had any rights.
We all need to pitch in to help Republicans break Trump’s terrorist grip on their party by making sure they never win another election until they expel all the MAGA Republicans, violent insurrectionists and department store dressing room sexual predators from the party.
One hopeful sign is CNN has replaced Fox News as the only news channel desperate enough for ratings to run Trump’s embarrassing ravings. CNN usually only has a few hundred thousand viewers instead of a couple million on Fox.
But CNN really should pull the plug on Trump live. Jake Tapper apologized to viewers after the town hall: “We don’t have enough time to fact-check all the lies he told.”
