Donald Trump will return to CNN next week, his first interview on the cable news channel in years after disparaging it during almost all of his presidency.
Trump, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president in 2024, will participate in a primetime town hall on May 10, to be moderate by CNN This Morning co-host Kaitlan Collins. The town hall will be held at St. Anslem College in New Hampshire, and air at 9 p.m. The audience will include Republican and undecided voters.
For its part, CNN says the Trump town hall “will be the first of many for CNN in the coming months as CNN correspondents travel across the country to hear directly from voters in the runup to the 2024 presidential election.”
When he was president, Trump disparaged CNN as “fake news” and an “enemy of the people,” and he filed a $475 million defamation suit against the channel over some of its anchors use of the term “The Big Lie” to describe his false claims of voter fraud tied to the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
For CNN’s part, the town hall is a big move for Collins, a rising star at the channel who got her start in journalism as the White House correspondent for Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller. It also underscores the effort the channel has been going through to get more Republicans to appear on-air, with Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav frequently highlighting the fact that the channel routinely has Republican and Democratic guests, whereas a few years ago (during Trump’s presidency) it had a hard time booking them, in part due to Trump’s attacks.
“We had to pay people to come on the air and say what Republicans would have said had they come on the air. That is the absolute truth,” CNN CEO Chris Licht said at a Paley Center lunch April 20. “We had a bunch of contributors who came on and said well, ‘a Republican would say…’ because Republicans weren’t coming on CNN. They have come back on CNN and they have not gotten softball interviews.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Hollywood Reporter