CNN Drives Trump’s Get-Away Car

He didn’t shoot someone on 5th Avenue. But he was found liable for sexual assault. And CNN whisked him away from facing any scrutiny or political consequences. That’s the exact opposite of what journalists are supposed to do.

On May 10, just one day after a jury found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, CNN gave him a megaphone to spout a firehose of lies in a televised “town hall,” reprising its 2015/16 role as his key enabler, and underscoring how little — if anything — the media has learned since then about how to deal with his all-out attacks on the truth. Or perhaps, more accurately, CNN’s new corporate owners — heavily influenced by billionaire investor John Malone — knew exactly what they were doing. Malone has publicly praised Fox as a model for what he’d like CNN to become, falsely citing them for “actual journalism.”

“It’s like 2015 all over again, with CNN giving him free access to lie to their audience,” media critic Dan Froomkin wrote. “Except this time the guy tried to overthrow the U.S. government and faces a litany of possible felony charges for flouting the law in innumerable ways.”

Experts on authoritarianism weighed in as well. “CNN putting Donald Trump on the air for hours before an adoring and applauding crowd is recklessness on an unbelievable scale,” tweeted Daniel Ziblatt, author of “How Democracies Die.”

“What CNN did is dangerous & irresponsible,” historian William Horne tweeted. “All the existing research shows that 1) repeating misinfo only makes it more effective & 2) spreading hate speech conspiracy theories increases rates of political violence.” In short, CNN wasn’t just giving Trump a electoral advantage vis-à-vis Democrats and other GOP candidates, they were giving him a regime change advantage to further undermine democracy. And he wasted no time in doing so.

“Mr. Trump’s first lie was told, just seconds into the night, with his false familiar claim that the 2020 election was, quote, a ‘rigged’ election,” CNN’s Jake Tapper responded just after the town hall ended. But by then, the damage had been done, sweeping aside what should have been a huge millstone around Trump’s neck: reckoning with the first jury verdict to hold him directly accountable for his habitual lawlessness.

While Carroll’s lawsuit was civil, not criminal, the underlying act of sexual assault is a crime, which a court of law has now found that Trump committed. In a healthy democracy, that reckoning should have required responses from Trump’s co-partisans, including, but not limited to any other presidential contenders. This was particularly called for, given the heinous nature of the crime, the infrequency with which such crimes are reported (less than 20% according to some estimates), and the GOP’s posture as the party of “law and order.” The media should have demanded Republican responses, relentlessly, for days, even weeks, if necessary. Accountability is the essence of democracy. Are Trump’s co-partisans for it or against it? Are they pro-democracy or anti-democracy? It’s the most fundamental question the press can ask.

Instead, three million plus people tuned in to watch Trump perform in a so-called “town hall” that was quickly revealed to be a de facto campaign rally: a pre-selected pro-Trump audience, that was told in advance they could applaud, but “Please do not boo.” While CNN management claimed those ratings as a win, a mere two days later they came in fourth in ratings, behind Fox’s far-right competitor Newsmax, as their long-time viewer base seemingly abandoned them.

The Truth CNN Hid

The $5 million jury verdict — which should have dominated the media for days, if not weeks — was significantly diminished in significance, just as Trump surely wanted, even as he repeated his defamation of Carroll, prompting the possibility of yet another successful suit.

“Today, the world finally knows the truth,” Carroll said in a statement just after the verdict was announced. “This victory is not just for me but for every woman who has suffered because she was not believed.”

In a taped deposition, Trump had falsely claimed he didn’t know Carroll, and that she was “not my type” — as if rapists necessarily have “a type” — but he also mistook her for his second wife, when shown a picture in which they both appeared. Then, in CNN’s town hall, he claimed, “I have no idea who the hell — she’s a whack job.” But the case was so clear-cut, it only took the jury three hours to decide — barely long enough to vote on the full range of specific counts — and Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, responded that, “We have to give serious consideration” to suing him again. 

But instead, two weeks later, Kaplan filed to include Trump’s conduct in another defamation suit Carroll has pending against  Trump. “This conduct supports a very substantial punitive damages award in Carroll’s favor both to punish Trump, to deter him from engaging in further defamation, and to deter others from doing the same,” the filing stated.

Meanwhile Trump faces at least four probable criminal cases, alongside multiple dormant ones: the already-filed 34-count New York indictment for falsifying business records to hide hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, a wide range of election interference charges in Georgia, expected to be announced in August, a federal case based on his efforts to overturn the election and another federal case based on his theft of classified documents and subsequent obstruction and lying about them.

The last case — seemingly the most mundane — may be the most dangerous for Trump, due to overwhelming evidence. His former White House lawyer Ty Cobb said, “I do think he will go to jail on it.” Keeping Trump’s criminality off to the side — allowing him to falsely portray it as “a witch-hunt,” rather than a long-delayed catching up with an epic crime spree, typical of how authoritarians rule — is clearly key to Trump’s political survival. By airing its campaign-rally-style “town hall” the day after Trump’s sexual assault verdict, CNN gave him an invaluable assist, not just in fending off electoral rivals, but in further undermining democracy itself.

But CNN CEO Chris Licht was oblivious. “America was served very well by what we did last night,” he said in a staff meeting the next morning. “People woke up and they know what the stakes are in this election in a way they didn’t the day before.” In fact, by sidelining the sexual assault verdict — supported by the testimony of two other victims — CNN significantly obscured the stakes, normalizing Trump as a presidential candidate like any other, in a format that favored his unrestrained lying.

CNN can hardly plead ignorance. They hired Daniel Dale away from the Toronto Star in 2016 specifically because he specialized in fact-checking Trump. Dale single-handedly chronicled thousands of Trump lies, though not quite as many as the 30,573 “false or misleading claims” recorded by the Washington Post during his presidency, with 492 identified in his first 100 days as president skyrocketing up to 503 on the last day before the 2020 election. And that was before the big lie of the stolen election became a central part of his repertoire.

Lies, Bullshit And Gaslighting

The media has never adjusted to lying on this scale, as countless media critics have argued. But it’s not just the quantity of lies that matters, it’s the quality as well: the purpose and result. In his 1986 essay “On Bulllshit,” philosopher Harry Frankfurt distinguished between liars who try to conceal some specific truth about the world, and bullshitters, indifferent to truth or falsehood, who try to conceal the general truth about their intentions. While numerous observers took note of Trump’s bullshitting during the 2016 campaign, the media never adjusted its reporting to reflect that — perhaps in part because bullshitting is commonplace in politics, but not at Trumpian intensity levels.

But there’s a second qualitative difference the media failed to grasp as well: the difference between bullshitting and gaslighting. The gaslighter doesn’t merely seek to hide what he’s up to, he seeks to undermine the sanity of the targets of his lying, to erode their sense of reality so profoundly that they give up relying on their own judgments, surrendering to the gaslighter’s judgment instead. This is precisely what Trump has managed to do with his base — and to a lesser extent with the Republican Party as a whole, plus millions of other Americans.

But Trump’s hardly unique, because gaslighting is ubiquitous in the fascist tradition, which includes modern-day “populists” who follow in the earlier fascists footsteps. Federico Finchelstein describes this tradition in his book, “A Brief History of Fascist Lies,” which begins with inscriptions from Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Trump. Trump’s reads simply “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening”—a classic expression of the gaslighter’s creed.

“Lying is, of course, as old as politics,” Finchelstein writes, and can be found in modern traditions such as liberalism, conservatism and communism. But, “Lying is a feature of fascism in a way that is not true of those other political traditions,” he writes. “Fascists consider their lies to be at the service of simple absolute truths, which are in fact bigger lies.” Recognizing this, and acting according, is the real duty of journalism — not just repeating or broadcasting lies. If nothing else, the press can simply refuse to be complicit, as CNN’s chief international anchor, Christiane Amanpour, argued.

While Licht repeatedly denied having made a mistake, Amanpour publicly dissented in a commencement speech at Columbia Journalism School the following week. She suggested a radically different way of dealing with Trump. “Maybe we should revert back to the newspaper editors and TV chiefs of the 1950s, who in the end refused to allow McCarthyism onto their pages, unless his foul lies, his witch hunts and his rants reached the basic evidence level required in a court of law,” Amanpour said. “Maybe less is more.”