Donald Trump returns to CNN next week, his first interview on the cable news channel in years after discrediting it for nearly his entire presidency.
Trump, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president in 2024, will attend a primetime town hall on May 10 to moderate by CNN this morning co-host Kaitlan Collins. Town Hall takes place at St. Anslem College in New Hampshire and airs at 9 p.m. The audience will be made up of Republican and undecided voters.
For its part, CNN says Trump’s town hall “will be the first of many for CNN in the coming months as CNN correspondents travel the country to hear directly from voters in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.”
When he was president, Trump decried CNN as “fake news” and an “enemy of the people”, and he filed a $475 million defamation suit against the channel over some of the channel’s use of the term “The Big Lie”. are anchors to his false claims of voter fraud in connection with the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
As for CNN, City Hall is a big step for Collins, a rising star at the channel who got her start in journalism as a White House correspondent for Tucker Carlson’s The daily caller. It also underscores the efforts the channel has made to get more Republicans on the air, with Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav. Discovery, regularly stressed that the channel routinely has Republican and Democratic guests, while a few years ago (during Trump’s presidency) it struggled to book them, in part because of Trump’s attacks.
“We had to pay people to get on the air and say what the Republicans would have said if they got on the air. That’s the absolute truth,” CNN CEO Chris Licht said at a luncheon at the Paley Center on April 20. They came back to CNN and they did not got softball interviews.”
Now it’s Trump’s turn to receive the same treatment.
