Former President Donald Trump gloated over the “sky high ratings” he delivered to CNN for his contentious town hall on Wednesday night.
“It was by far the biggest show of the night, the week and the month!” Trump bragged on Truth Social, the social media site he founded in October 2021 after he was suspended from Twitter earlier that year.
“[It] was a very smart thing that they did,” Trump wrote in the two-part post Thursday night, adding that the town hall gave CNN “sky high ratings that they haven’t seen in a very long time.”
The town hall with the Republican front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination raked in 3.3 million viewers, the last-place cable network’s highest total in two years. A town hall with President Biden on Feb. 16, 2021, garnered 3.7 million viewers.
In “page 2” of Thursday’s Truth Social post, Trump claimed that “many minds were changed on Wednesday night by listening to common sense, and sheer ‘brilliance.’”
“The radical left screamed, ‘Take it down, take it down,’ during the show, because they saw that I was making so many important points on the border, energy independence, the Afghanistan catastrophe, inflation, the economy, Russia/Ukraine and so much more,” Trump wrote in the Truth Social post.
Trump tuned out critics who slammed the network for letting him make his repeated claim that the 2020 election was “rigged,” defend the Jan 6. Capitol rioters and brush off a jury’s recent decision to hold him liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a suit filed by writer E. Jean Carroll.
“People are criticizing CNN for giving me a forum to tell the TRUTH,” he blared.
Among those critics was CNN’s own longtime host Anderson Cooper, who called the town hall “disturbing” and told viewers that they “have every right to be angry and never watch this network again.”
Cooper pointed to cutthroat comments made during the event, including when Trump referred to a black law enforcement officer involved in the Capitol riot as a “thug,” and when he called host Kaitlan Collins a “nasty person” while she was pressing Trump about the ongoing investigation surrounding his handling of classified documents.
Rival cable TV hosts on left-leaning MSNBC were even more apoplectic over CNN’s handling of the town hall. Nicolle Wallace slammed the network’s brass for knowingly airing Trump’s “misogynistic attacks” just weeks after firing Don Lemon over his own misogynistic comments.
“So now the company’s part of the story too,” Wallace said during Thursday’s “Deadline: White House,” suggesting CNN’s decision to ax one man over misogynistic comments while choosing to air another’s was hypocritical.
“The ReidOut” host Joy Reid labeled the broadcast “blatant fascism meets ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’”
In another jab, Reid said CNN is showing it “wants desperately to be the new home for Republican viewers. They want to be the new Fox.”
CNN’s 3.3 million rating for the town hall propelled the network to a rare win in the 8 p.m. time slot against Fox News and MSNBC, which both logged 1.4 million total viewers.
The struggling network also got a boost of more than 2 million viewers in the hours immediately before and after the town hall, according to Forbes.
Even two hours following the event, CNN reportedly still had an audience of 1.2 million, according to Forbes, well above the network’s recent average.
While CNN’s ratings soared, it’s unclear whether the town hall will hurt Trump’s popularity as he makes a third run for the White House. He’s already the preferred candidate for 62% of right-wing voters, according to the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll.
His lead is a wide margin above expected rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had 20% support.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
