He’s back!
Actually, he never went away. But now, former President Donald Trump is once again the clearly dominant figure on the American political scene, far eclipsing everyone else, including the sitting President.
On Thursday night, he made a long-awaited return to CNN, the lion’s den of what he calls “fake news,” for a primetime townhall broadcast live from New Hampshire. Moderated by Kaitlan Collins, the forum offered the former president a chance to address a wide range of issues, take questions from voters, and perhaps most importantly, demonstrate that he remains the 800 pound gorilla of the Republican Party.
It began with a discussion of the 2020 election results. Collins challenged Trump on his claims that the race was “rigged,” but Trump held firm that it was not a truly fair election. Indeed, Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg pumped $400 million into key states for drop boxes, get out the vote operations, ballot harvesting and other activity that heavily favored Democrats. Just weeks before the election, the FBI worked with Twitter and other social media companies to suppress the New York Post‘s factual story of Hunter Biden‘s laptop, and all of the evidence of Biden family corruption on it. At the same time, 51 current and former intelligence officials signed a letter falsely claiming the laptop was “Russian disinformation.” And the pandemic allowed for the expansion of mass mail-in voting, early voting, and relaxed signature verification standards, opening up at the least the possibility of abuse.
While Trump didn’t get into many of these specifics, they’re the kinds of machinations that swayed the election.
When asked by a voter if he would “suspend polarizing talk” of election fraud during the current campaign, Trump replied, “Let’s just win it again and straighten out our country.”
By Monica Crowley
