On CNN, lying Trump was a late-night comedian for an America I didn’t recognize

“Our country is being destroyed by stupid people — by very stupid people.”

— Ex-President Donald Trump, in a CNN town hall Wednesday night

Like the several million others who went against their better instincts and watched CNN’s New Hampshire town hall with Donald Trump on Wednesday night, I thought I was mentally prepared for what was going to be a predictably demoralizing 70-minute torrent of full-force lies.

Just as there was no “new Nixon” in 1968, there is no “new Trump,” as the short-fingered vulgarian sits poised to gain the GOP nomination for the third straight time in 2024. A numbed nation saw Trump continue to deny President Joe Biden’s seven million vote victory in 2020, create a bizarro world around the Jan. 6, 2021, attempted coup in which a violent insurrection was “a beautiful day” and the Black cop who shot Ashli Babbitt as she threatened Congress was a “thug,” and slander the woman he now owes $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming.

That was all too predictable. But here’s what I wasn’t prepared for, and it gutted me.

The applause.

I never expected Trump’s inanities like the assertion that U.S. elections are routinely rigged (spoiler alert: they aren’t) or the inevitable attack on CNN moderator Kaitlin Collins as “a nasty person” would be greeted with a roomful of cheers, like platitudes on a late-night TV talk show. As the night dragged on, it felt like Trump had become a kind of Johnny Carson for a new version of “middle America” that I no longer recognize, trapped in a bubble of alternate reality and exploding with glee when the rhetoric turned violent or ugly.

The absolute rock bottom came when the former president of the United States launched into the all-too-foreseeable hateful and misogynistic rant about E. Jean Carroll, the writer who just won that $5 million judgment from a jury that agreed with her allegation that the then-developer assaulted her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and that Trump since defamed her in denying what happened. On CNN, Trump lashed out and called Carroll “a whack job,” and the audience laughed and whooped as if that were a late-night zinger.

This utterly depressing event came after days of debate over whether CNN should be giving a national platform of essentially free advertising to Trump after his role in that attack on American democracy on Jan. 6, and as he promises “retribution” as a new form of American fascism if he returns to the White House on Jan. 20, 2025. Much of the focus was on whether Collins could ask the right kind of tough questions that Trump largely avoids in his own bubble of sycophants and true believers — thus exposing the candidate at the dawn of his new campaign.

» READ MORE: America needs to confront its ‘Mussolini moment’ | Will Bunch Newsletter

It seems we weren’t asking the right questions. Where CNN went off the rails was in creating an audience at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, N.H., comprised of Republican primary voters — the people completely oblivious to insurrection or sexual abuse as they continue to hail Trump as their champion — and, allegedly, some undecideds. Rather than reflect the many questions about POTUS 45 that caused the majority to reject him in 2020, this group became the mob from every other Trump rally, leaving Collins totally isolated as the nasty woman asking the rude questions, earning the enmity of these self-anointed “real Americans.”

The audience questions may have been forged in New Hampshire, but it felt like they were coming from Mars. The most surreal moment came when — as workers in Texas are still mopping the blood from an outlet mall where an avowed white supremacist used his legally purchased AR-15 assault rifle to mow down eight innocent people — the president of college Republicans at St. Anselm stepped forward to ask Trump what he will do to prevent the government from “repressing gun rights.”

This is not the concern of average young American voters, who are traumatized by a childhood of active-shooter drills and who have been marching since the Trump presidency for stricter gun laws. But then, CNN’s supposedly representative audience didn’t raise the other very real concerns of Gen Z voters, like climate change. No wonder young citizens are so alienated that they might just stay home on Nov. 5, 2024 — which would hand the presidency back to Trump. That irony is painful — as was so much about Wednesday’s unreality show.

Even CNN — albeit not for attribution — now seems to realize this town hall was a terrible mistake. One unnamed “CNN insider” acknowledged afterward to Rolling Stone that the night was “appalling,” lamenting that the network gave Trump “a huge platform to spew his lies.” Most non-brainwashed viewers would agree, but I’m not sure that either CNN insiders or media critics understand that the dishonesty on the main stage wasn’t as appalling as the adulation from the peanut gallery.

The crowd that became St. Anselm’s fire didn’t speak for the nation’s majority, yet they represent a powerful phenomenon that America doesn’t know how to reckon with. The applause for conspiracy theories and the punch-line laughter for rape denial was the physical embodiment of today’s public opinion polls, which show Trump cruising to renomination next summer in Milwaukee and running a neck-and-neck race with Biden — even winning in one recent survey. Trump’s politics of personal narcissism is not forever — whether it succumbs to the overlapping criminal probes or his next trip to the KFC drive-through — but those voters, who numbered 74 million in the fall of 2020, aren’t going away anytime soon.

Trump’s firehose of lies about everything from election integrity to the federal deficit (massively accelerated by his disastrous tax cuts on the wealthy) is deeply disturbing. But what matters more is the mass delusion that causes millions to prefer the Big Lie as popularized on Facebook over the “nasty” truths when presented by the mainstream media or the deeply ingrained racism and misogyny that laughs at a Black officer as a “thug” and a victim of sexual abuse as a “whack job.” Until society figures out how to break that fever, the CNN town halls of future elections might make us nostalgic for Trump’s goofball version of fascism.

But in the short term, Wednesday’s town hall did reveal Trump as a dangerous threat — highly energetic for a 76-year-old, able to stay focused and unfazed in his mission of crafting a fake United States, ruled by grievance and resentment. And the GOP front-runner — although unintentionally — framed the question that matters most for 2024: Is the future of America going to be determined by “very stupid people”?

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter