Audience members were advised against booing and disrespecting former President Donald Trump during the disastrous CNN town hall on Wednesday, according to a Thursday report from Puck News.
Republican political consultant Matthew Bartlett told Puck’s senior political correspondent, Tara Palmeri, that while many members of the audience applauded the former president, “there were also people that sat there quietly disgusted or bewildered,” estimating that the audience was split in half.
“The floor manager came out ahead of time and said, Please do not boo, please be respectful. You were allowed to applaud,” Bartlett said. “And I think that set the tone where people were going to try their best to keep this between the navigational beacons, and that if they felt compelled to applaud, they would, but they weren’t going to have an outburst or they weren’t going to boo an answer.”
Bartlett also said that the GOP frontrunner often “lost the audience” when he spoke about the Jan. 6 insurrection or the 2020 election, despite it appearing that audience was consistently in support […]
The moderator was awful. She would ask the same question over and over, hoping DT would give the desired answer. He did not.
She was so unskilled at her job that people who may have been unsympathetic towards Trump (like me) before this event may have been swayed by her ineptness. I was not swayed.
But I began to wonder why CNN bothered to give DT such free publicity. Could it be ratings? Were they trying to grab the audience lost by Fox since it fired Tucker Carlson and saw their ratings plummet? Or is that too farfetched a thought? The $$$ speaks.