Anderson Cooper Gives Donald Trump a Dire Warning

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Anderson Cooper issued a somber warning Thursday night as he kicked off his nightly broadcast for CNN, addressing the widespread criticism the network received the night before after hosting a live town hall forum with former President Donald Trump.

The former president joined CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins in St. Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire, Wednesday night in front of a live audience made up of voters planning to vote in their state’s 2024 GOP presidential primary next spring. The 70-minute program was filled with lies and misleading statements from the former president, who used the broadcast to push his familiar lies, including the widely debunked claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Collins spent most of the evening trying to fact-check or push back against Trump’s claims, but the program sparked outrage aimed at CNN, with many arguing it was irresponsible to give the former president a live national audience to push his platform.

Former President Donald Trump steps off his plane “Trump Force One” at Aberdeen Airport on May 1, 2023, in Aberdeen, Scotland. CNN journalist Anderson Cooper issued a stark warning to his viewers Thursday night after his network hosted a live forum with Trump the night before. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Cooper, who hosts Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN weeknights, began his show Thursday responding to the town hall and the backlash his network received over it, referring to Trump as someone who “tried to destroy our democracy” and called the program itself “Disturbing.”

“A lot of you think that CNN shouldn’t give him any platform to speak, and I understand the anger about that. Giving him an audience, the time, I get that,” Cooper said.

“But this is also what I’m getting at. The guy you’ve been so upset to see and hear about since last night, that guy is the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president, and according to the polls, no other Republican is close,” he continued. . “That man you’re upset about hearing from last night, he could be president of the United States in less than two years. And that audience you’re upset about, that’s a sample of almost half the country. They’re members of your family, your neighbors, and they vote, and many said they voted for him.”

Voters in attendance showed plenty of enthusiasm for Trump through the town hall, including applauding some of his more controversial moments, such as telling Collins he was a “grumpy guy.”

“Now, maybe you’ve been ignoring him since he left the office,” Cooper continued. “Maybe you’re enjoying not hearing from him, thinking, this won’t happen again, some investigation will stop him. Well, not now.

“So if last night showed anything, it showed that it can happen again,” he said. “It’s happening again. He hasn’t changed and he’s running hard.”

Newsweek reached out to Trump’s press team Thursday night for comment on Cooper’s remarks.

In a statement to Newsweek Wednesday night, a CNN spokesperson defended the network’s decision to host Trump’s town hall, writing in an email that the outlet’s “role and responsibility” is to “get answers and hold the powerful to account.”

The spokesperson also praised Collins for demonstrating “what it means to be a world-class journalist” while moderating, adding that he “followed and fact-checked President Trump in real time to arm those voter of important information.”

CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy also praised his colleague in his CNN newsletter for being “tough and knowledgeable.” But Darcy sided with the network’s critics, writing that “it’s hard to see how America was served by the show of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday night.”

“And CNN aired it all,” Darcy added. “It went on and on. It was like 2016 again. It was Trump’s unhinged social media feed brought to life on stage. And Collins was put in an uncomfortable position, because the town hall was conducted in front of a Republican audience. who applauded Trump, giving an unwitting endorsement of his shameful antics.”

Other prominent voices, such as Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, called CNN “anti-American” for allowing the former president a platform.

“In less than an hour, they allowed an authoritarian wannabe to lie constantly while an audience full of his followers applauded,” Mary Trump wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. “This is not a town hall, this is a rally.”

Trump, on the other hand, was very positive about his appearance on the network, which was his first time on CNN since his 2016 presidential run. In a Truth Social post on Thursday, the former president said it was “a brilliant thing” for CNN to host the forum, adding that the network received “Sky High Ratings that they haven’t seen in a very long time that time.”

“The Radical Left yelled, ‘Put it down, put it down,’ during the Show, because they saw that I was making so many important points on the Border, Energy Independence, the Afghanistan Catastrophe, Inflation, the Economy, Russia/Ukraine, and many others,” Trump added.

Preliminary data from Nielsen ratings found that CNN surpassed Fox News, the nation’s most-watched cable network, during Trump’s time on the air, with Fox’s viewership doubling by a point.

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