I’ve made no pretense of supporting Trump’s political career, and, if you are so inclined, you can easily find evidence of it in the PJ Media annals.
But I’d like to declare the briefest détente to give credit where credit is due: the man was in peak form for his recent CNN town hall. He masterfully handled the hostile moderator, who had clearly prepped hard to crucify him.
“She had blood coming out of… wherever,” as Trump might say.
Her hostile posturing backfired badly, and Trump came up all roses.
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face,” as Mike Tyson once observed. This woman was clearly out of her element on the stage, one-on-one with the big guy. Trump is a force of nature that is not easily contained.
The hottest agenda item, predictably, was the elephant in the room — Trump’s recent loss of a civil court case to his rape accuser and The Atlantic columnist, E. Jean Carroll. Trump defended himself well on that score, denying (as he consistently has) the decades-old allegation for which there is no hard evidence.
CNN accordingly melted down in histrionic pearl-clutching. According to #MeToo orthodoxy, the only acceptable response to a dubious rape charge for any man is to immediately fold and plead for mercy.
In America, as far as I’m aware, you are allowed to call a woman — who you claim fraudulently implicated you in a serious crime for attention and money, and who would presumably have had you jailed had the statute of limitations not run out on the potential rape charge — a “wackjob.”
I’ll go on record backing up that characterization of this woman. Exhibit A is this unhinged interview she gave with a visibly uncomfortable Anderson Cooper, who couldn’t cut to break fast enough, in which she repeatedly described rape as “sexy.”
BREAKING: Jury finds that Donald Trump did NOT rape E. Jean Carroll but say he did forcibly touch her.
Here is Carroll talking about the alleged incident with Anderson Cooper. She doesn’t appear to know what rape means and is clearly not well.
“I think most people think of rape… pic.twitter.com/QqvjAN5BBl
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 9, 2023
In my view, Trump handled the CNN moderator’s condemnation disguised as questioning with great tact and humor.
Related: 9 Key Moments From Trump’s CNN Town Hall
AOC, of course, disagreed. She doesn’t think the leading Republican candidate for president should be allowed a hearing in national media whatsoever as if banishing him from CNN would simply cause him to vanish from the political scene.
CNN should be ashamed of themselves.
They have lost total control of this “town hall” to again be manipulated into platforming election disinformation, defenses of Jan 6th, and a public attack on a sexual abuse victim.
The audience is cheering him on and laughing at the host.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 11, 2023
This woman has apparently never heard of the Streisand Effect — a “phenomenon in which an attempt to censor, hide, or otherwise draw attention away from something only serves to attract more attention to it” — or else she’s so poorly disciplined in the tradition of entitled millennials that she can’t contain her Social Justice™-informed outrage over the fact that people she disagrees with are allowed to speak in America.
The other highlight of the town hall, in my view, was Trump’s response to the Ukraine question. The moderator tried to goad him into answering her childish question about whether he “wants Ukraine or Russia to win this war,” to which Trump tactically responded that he would like peace and lamented all the needless destroyed lives and infrastructure.
This is 100% the correct public posture on the issue from an American — not to mention humanitarian — perspective, and it is clearly in line with his political instincts. The neocons currently in charge of the Biden administration do not want peace and have actively thwarted efforts to achieve it — cynically using the noble Ukrainian people as cannon fodder in the process — in order to pursue their own sick geopolitical ends.
Trump’s performance last night was reminiscent in many ways of 2015-era Trump, before the baggage of his presidency and the litany of poor choices he made while in office when he was buoyed by an optimistic brand of pure populism and propelled into office by voters disgusted with the political status quo embodied perfectly by his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
He’s a natural entertainer and a potential asset to the populist right, although ideally in some other capacity than its singular leader. If he had more substantive leadership qualities and a committed policy agenda to back up his flair on the stage, I’d be more willing to endorse him.
At any rate, the man has nine political lives. Admitting fault with my own analysis where it exists, I can’t count how many times I’ve thought: this time he’s really screwed the pooch.
Of course, I’m not alone in this regard. The corporate media has circulated premature rumors of his demise time and time again, never recognizing their own blindness. By now, you may have seen this excellent montage of the “walls are closing in” mantra.
Counting Trump out, we should all know by now, is a fool’s errand. If Trump stays in current form, I can’t see DeSantis — or whatever handpicked Deep State neocon stooge the establishment tries to prop up in the coming months — standing up to Trump in the primary. And, certainly, the puppet corpse currently in the White House has no chance without the Deep State tipping the scales via election rigging, which its acolytes are currently actively planning.
