One Trump Question Will Test Kaitlan Collins — And Chris Licht — At Their Fireworks Accident Trump Town Hall

CNN’s ill-advised town hall with former President Donald Trump does present a useful test for moderator Kaitlan Collins — and by extension, CNN honcho Chris Licht.

On Monday, CNN announced that Trump will be getting his very own town hall event on May 10, moderated by Collins and staged at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire.

The network’s press release described the format, and included a paragraph that seemed designed to pre-address criticism that they should be ignoring Trump:

The former President and 2024 Republican presidential candidate will take questions from Collins and a live audience of New Hampshire Republican and undeclared voters who say they intend to vote in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.

CNN has a longstanding tradition of hosting leading presidential candidates for Town Halls and political events as a critical component of the network’s robust campaign coverage. This event with former President Trump will be the first of many for CNN in the coming months as CNN correspondents travel across the country to hear directly from voters in the runup to the 2024 presidential election.

The criticism is of a sort that will probably be derisively laughed off as illegitimate by people who consider themselves to be media insiders, but even as a dissenter, I recognize the trauma behind calls for CNN and other outlets to ignore Trump, to keep from “normalizing” him, to prevent giving him a platform to say harmful things. I agree 100% with the decisions that networks have made not to broadcast his speeches live because of the harmful things he says and the lies that go unchecked in such a format. I recognize the legitimacy of criticisms that urge outlets to ignore Trump, but I disagree.

In the case of interviews and town hall formats, the risk of harm definitely exists, but that’s all a matter of execution. I think a well-executed interview or town hall, on balance, can do more good than harm because the lies that Trump speaks and the harmful things he says and has said in the past can be challenged, exposed, and exploded in midair.

On the other hand, I do believe the town hall is, on balance, ill-advised because I don’t think the execution will meet the moment. It will be a fireworks fire aboard a trainwreck.

Having said that, this event presents a unique challenge for Collins. Although many of the questions will come from the audience, these forums always include questions from the moderator, as the press release indicates, and those choices will serve as a crucible for the moderator.

A lot of folks may have forgotten that Collins got her start on the White House beat writing for the Tucker Carlson-founded white grievance rag The Daily Caller. Collins was a reporter for the outlet while it was run by Carlson, and was promoted to White House correspondent in January of 2017. As her CNN bio notes, “Collins joined CNN from The Daily Caller, where she served as the White House Correspondent covering the first few months of the Trump administration and the 2016 election.”

After moving to CNN to cover the White House, Collins distinguished herself with adversarial reporting, questions, and commentary. She has been a frequent up-and-comer on Mediaite’s Most Influential list. Some viewers may still need convincing that she has shed the Carlson influence — that sort of stink doesn’t wear off easily — but she has more than proven her willingness to be tough on Trump.

And not to pit Collins against a colleague, but if I had to choose my fighter in journalistic combat with Trump, I’d pick Collins over venerated Trump debate attack victim Chris Wallace every time. While it’s true that Wallace is an exceptionally gifted questioner and made a name for himself going hard at Republicans even while he was working at Fox News, he was caught off guard by Trump’s attacks. And to be fair, he had to balance hitting back at Trump with keeping the focus off of himself at a nationally televised debate.

Collins, like her fellow White House alum Jim Acosta, has a wealth of experience in dealing with direct attacks by Trump at press conferences and briefings, and has proven her ability to fight back without concern for burnishing a detached image. She and Acosta and several others displayed impressive nimbleness in quickly adapting to the new normal of a president attacking reporters off the top rope of a WWE wrestling ring.

I expect Trump will attack Collins with or without provocation, and since she has already demonstrated her skillset in this regard, the only test will be how far she will push him. In a way, this is more Licht’s test than hers.

Much has been made of the fact that Licht has signaled an intention to make CNN a more hospitable place for Republicans since he took over the network. Anti-Trump “resistors” would probably never be satisfied with any airing of Republican points of view, and again I don’t fault them for feeling this way, since modern republicanism means embracing violent insurrection and overt racism and bigotry, all of which go beyond that which is embodied by the frontrunner that Collins will be interviewing. I understand this feeling because these aren’t, as so many dopey pundits like to put it, mere political disagreements. These are people promoting and actively causing harm to marginalized people and our country.

But I dissent once again because these conditions will exist whether CNN reports or examines them or not, and I believe the best thing we can do is encourage journalism to confront these evils rather than try to ignore them.

But if it seems that Collins ends up going easier on Trump than she should, that will lead observers, myself included, to conclude that she had marching orders to do so, that concern over protecting an image of false neutrality was deemed more important than performing the bare minimum functions of a journalist.

There are a lot of things that Collins probably should push Trump on, but only so much time to squeeze in between questions from the audience. The surest indication of whether or not she has been given free rein, or that she feels comfortable going weapons-free on Trump, will be whether or not she asks the one unavoidable minimum basic question: “Why did you continue to incite violence after you inspired one of your supporters to commit terrorist attacks on my coworkers?”

It doesn’t have to be that exact question, but if you are placed in the unprecedented position of interviewing someone who inspired a literal terrorist attack against you, it is impossible to avoid bringing it up. I’m not sure how one would go about doing that gently.

“So, about that whole inspiring a terrorist attack against us thing, what was up with that?”

Yes, you could fill an entire hour — several of them — just talking to Trump about the many acts of violence and terrorism that he has inspired, but given the setting and the context, this one is simply unavoidable — unless you’re really trying to avoid it. And if that happens, it will be on Licht to explain why.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.