I'm Still Reacting To Trump's CNN Town Hall

As I noted yesterday, my gut reaction to the first reports I saw on the Trump CNN town hall was uh-oh. If I could parse it out into sentences, it would be that his opponents had nothing new, Trump was simply bypassing the nothing-new with his charisma, and the audience was loving it. They loved it even more when Kaitlan Collins's head kept exploding and, as one commentator put it, she kept acting like everyone's ex-wife.

What I began to notice Thursday was that Trump's town hall performance simply overwhelmed the rest of the news, even though the rest of the news -- the deep state ignoring congressional subpoenas, the Comer committee releasing details of Biden family money laundering, and the border chaos -- was on balance poison for the Biden administration. Never mind that, everyone wanted to talk about Trump.

Six months ago, I was convinced that Trump had misread Ukraine, he'd proved disastrously weak against Fauci and Birx, his vaccine program was a failure, and DeSantis had displayed greater foresight over COVID and was pursuing more credible current policies over corporate wokery and transsexualism. Nevertheless, since then, DeSantis has failed to gain traction and is unlikely to eclipse Trump as the primary season gets under way.

With Wednesday’s CNN town hall behind him, former President Donald Trump remains both the prohibitive GOP front-runner for the 2024 nomination and a man who was found liable this week in a civil case for sexually abusing and defaming former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll.

While we cannot yet know what effect that verdict will have on the race for the Republican nomination, Trump built his large polling advantage with this civil trial in the news and after being indicted earlier this spring in a separate criminal case related to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. (Trump has denied all wrongdoing.)

Trump’s edge in surveys of Republican voters and in endorsements from elected officials at this stage is among the strongest for a nonincumbent in the modern presidential primary era.

I think the answer to the puzzle here is that the public is discounting all the courtroom kabuki over Trump and understands there's nothing new there. Charges that Trump was delusional about the 2020 election are slowly losing credibility as information emerges about efforts by current Secretary of State Blinken and CIA insiders to recruit other deep staters to discredit the Hunter laptop as Russian disinformation.

During the debate on Oct. 22, 2020, in response to Trump's taunts of "it's the laptop from hell, the laptop from hell," Mr. Biden pushed back, "There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this — he's accusing me of is a Russian plan — they have said that this has all the characteristics — four — five former heads of the CIA — both parties, say what he's saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him. . . and his good friend Rudy Giuliani."

The interim report accuses the Biden campaign of taking "active measures to discredit the allegations about Hunter Biden by exploiting the national security credentials of former intelligence officials" and also said the "Biden campaign coordinated dissemination of the statement to members of the media."

There are two strategies operating here. One is the congressional strategy, keep investigating, keep attacking on individual points, like deep state coordination of the Biden electoral strategy, deep state refusal to respond to congressional subpoenas, and the Biden family finances. We might add to this the DeSantis point strategy of attacking specific issues of corporate wokery, porn in school libraries, or drag queen story hour for third graders.

The problem is that these are all small ball and as point strategies are vulnerable to point attacks. DeSantis thinks drag queen story hours are grooming, his opponents say he's a bigot, nothing moves forward. Trump is a different case entirely. Trump has an almost magical ability with body language and facial expression to characterize his accusers as everyman's ex-wife. He sweeps the point strategies, both offense and defense, away with a wave of his hand.

This comes from his ability to read the room, figuratively speaking, which his opponents simply don't have. The remarkable Dylan Mulvaney fiasco in particular is a sign of the current public mood, but Dylan Mulvaney as a symbol represents far more than just individual point issues of drag queen story hour, men in women's sports, or men in ladies' rooms. Trump understands this to the point that he doesn't even need to mention Mulvaney to convince his supporters that he understands the underlying issues.

Allegations of grabbing body parts and January 6 so far are all Trump's opponents have, and the public has already discounted them. The CNN town hall illustrated this plainly, which is what made it something of a revelation. Every indictment from now on will do nothing but feed the beast, which Trump's oppenents so far haven't figured out. But what else can they come up with? Even if they can take him out in one way or another in the next 18 months, another Republican will step up and claim his mantle.