Both the candidate and the network benefit from their collaboration. The rest of us, not so much.
Both the candidate and the network benefit from their collaboration. The rest of us, not so much.
R arely in the history of popular entertainment have we played witness to a duo as gainfully co-dependent as CNN and Donald Trump. Hall and Oates, Statler and Waldorf, and Rodgers and Hammerstein can all eat their hearts out. Sure, they did some good work. Certainly, they complemented one another. Yeah, when you think of one, the other appears sua sponte from the ether and glues himself to the billboard. But Trump and CNN? That’s next-level Hollywood gold. They laugh. They cry. They spar. They correct each other’s sentences. And then, when the cameras stop rolling, they guffaw all the way to the bank. There’s no business like show business.
Season One of The Trump & CNN Show ran from 2015 to 2016. Season Two, which was finally greenlit yesterday afternoon, will start in New Hampshire on May 10. As with the first version, the locations and stories are expected to vary, but CNN has confirmed that episode one will take the form of a “presidential town hall next week in New Hampshire” that will serve as Trump’s “first appearance on CNN since the 2016 presidential campaign.” By all accounts, Donald Trump was as keen to rekindle the relationship as CNN, whose “executives,” a senior Trump adviser told Semafor, “made a compelling pitch” to the former president. Having received the offer, Trump swiftly agreed that it was time “to jumpstart the relationship,” and the rest was history. At this point, it is unclear whether CNN’s spin-off show, #Resistance, will be brought back for a second run.
At the New Republic today, Prem Thakker complains that the show’s renewal represents “proof” that CNN has “learned nothing from 2016.” In fact, the opposite is true: It demonstrates that the network has learned the lessons of 2016 perfectly. Those lessons, in no particular order, are that it is extremely profitable for CNN to pretend that it hates Donald Trump; that it is equally profitable for Donald Trump to pretend that he hates CNN; and that, if Trump ends up in the White House in consequence, the ratings will be terrific for all involved.
Thakker also complains that CNN is “giving open air to a man who warrants none of it.” But this approach is very 2021, is it not? As we all have learned repeatedly over the last few years, media ethics are entirely contextual. When the press wishes to prioritize a given story without being criticized for doing so, it insists that it has no choice but to cover it because it’s “newsworthy.” When the press does not wish to cover a story at all, it resorts to Talmudic, po-faced discussions of “systems” and “disinformation” and “platforming” and so forth. CNN devoutly wishes to get back into bed with Donald Trump, and, as a result, doing so will be deemed to be justified by the loftiest of journalistic ideals.
Besides which, politics as usual is boring — what with all that talk of policy and coalitions and tradeoffs and the law. Know what’s not boring? Politics as practiced by a man who, per CNN’s announcement, “pleaded not guilty last month to 34 felony criminal charges of falsifying business records in Manhattan”; a man who is “under scrutiny by special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading a pair of investigations—one into the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and the other on the handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence”; a man who is subject to “charges this summer from the investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia”; a man who is “being sued by former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s and subsequently defamed her after she went public about the incident”; a man who “has refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, continuing to falsely claim that the election was stolen from him.”
So the one, the only, the incomparable, daring, resourceful Donald Trump is back to once again lead the fight for eyeballs and advertisers in the early slot each day. You can catch him on pay TV, CNN.com, CNN OTT, CNNgo, and wherever else hypocrites are found.