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By Katherine Fung
Senior Writer
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Former President Donald Trump's CNN town hall, which had been seen as a "calculated risk" for his 2024 campaign, wound up paying off for the GOP frontrunner.
The reactions to Wednesday's primetime programming shocked many viewers at home, who were less surprised by false statements that Trump made and more taken aback that the Republican audience in New Hampshire was lapping him up, laughing and cheering for the former president as he bulldozed over moderator Kaitlan Collins' attempts to fact-check him.
By Thursday morning, CNN was facing widespread and harsh criticisms for giving Trump 70 minutes of unfiltered airtime, especially when Trump had just been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation by jury a day earlier.
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But for Trump, whose team couldn't rule out questions ahead of time and reportedly had no control over the event, his first appearance on CNN since his 2016 campaign was, as his eldest son called it, "a huge success."
Early Nielsen Ratings showed CNN successfully outperformed Fox News, the nation's most-watched cable network and a former favorite of Trump's, between 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., at one point more than doubling the views that Fox had.
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CNN, which began airing the town hall at 8 p.m., pulled in 3.1 million views in the first hour of the program. Early ratings show Fox saw 1.4 million viewers in the same time frame. Even though CNN lost a significant number of viewers by 9:15 p.m., the network still had slightly more eyeballs, with 2 million to Fox's 1.9.
The ratings are a rare success for CNN, which has been experiencing some of its lowest numbers in decades. In March, the network averaged 473,000 primetime viewers a night, while Fox was seeing 2.09 million viewers.
Trump's ability to bring over more than a million regular Fox viewers underscores that, like polls have suggested, that the former president remains a dominant figure in U.S. politics. The town hall gave Trump the opportunity to espouse his views, and sometimes, his lies.
Internet personality Ed Krassenstein, who has been a vocal critic of Trump, pointed out over Twitter that the clip he shared of Wednesday's town hall had 3.2 million impressions alone, surpassing CNN's Nielsen ratings and raising questions if views are even higher than expected with non-traditional media platforms on the rise.
Since leaving the White House, Trump has limited most of his appearances to conservative media outlets. But a town hall on the network that he railed against throughout his presidency was a way for Trump to step outside the GOP traditional "comfort zone" that other Republican candidates are hesitant to do, a Trump advisor told Axios.
"His team recognizes that he needs to start venturing beyond the fringe to gain access to a broader audience, particularly as a contrast to [Governor] Ron DeSantis of Florida, who avoids the mainstream media," the Times reported.
On Thursday, CNN Chairman Chris Licht addressed the public backlash to the town hall, telling employees on a company call, "We all know covering Donald Trump is messy and tricky, and it will continue to be messy and tricky, but it's our job," according to The New York Times.
"I absolutely, unequivocally believe America was served very well by what we did last night," Licht said, adding that the GOP audience at the town hall may have made people "uncomfortable," but that those voters "represent a large swath of America."
"The mistake the media made in the past is ignoring that those people exist," he said.
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