SHAUN KRAISMAN (HOST): Yeah there – I was trying to figure – I watched it live last night. The way it was covered the way it was moderated – look, Donald Trump is a tough guy. He's a tough guy to moderate, right? And, you know, Kaitlan Collins did what she could. She had a very, very calm manner. A lot of the questions came from the audience, and that's what a town hall is supposed to be. Now, she did jump in in her own time to try to get her questions in. But yes, the former president, essentially, bulldozed right over her, answering questions and, again, making his own explanation.
I'll say this about CNN. They made this choice to put the former president on. He is right now the front-runner for the Republican ticket for the nomination for 2024. Whether you like it, whether you don't. And with him comes half the country, with him comes 74 million votes that he got in 2020. You can't isolate that. That's the end of democracy there.
Now, the other complaint, too, is that how do you not fact-check on the fly? Well, they did if you watched right after the town hall that they hosted, they had Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper immediately, along with a panel of 18 people all around the table, going at it. So they were able to do that. Do you think that they made the wrong the wrong decision, the right decision? You're going to have to – you're going to have to cover the Republican nominee or the potential Republican nominee or the front runner at some point. And if your CNN like you've been bleeding viewers, which they have, this may be the right way to go about this. As far as journalistic integrity goes, they fact-checked him right after this town hall.