CNN’s coverage of Donald Trump’s town hall was the hot topic across Sunday political talk shows, including on ABC’s “This Week,” where former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said the audience of Trump supporters looked awfully similar to the ones he saw when he was running for president in 2016.
“I don’t care how they introduced them. I know a lot of those people in that audience. I spent a lot of time in New Hampshire eight years ago, and a lot of those are the same faces that I saw eight years ago,” Christie, now a Republican commentator, said.
Before the widely condemned town hall with the former president went on the air Wednesday, CNN said that the audience for the event in Manchester would consist of Republicans and right-leaning independent voters. But Christie believes that the network “went in the tank” to get Trump on their network for ratings and “allowed him to negotiate who was going to be in that audience.”
“You pay no attention to the audience reaction. Those were all people who in the main, 80% or so, were Trump supporters. So that was a negotiation deal that Trump did with CNN and I think CNN was wrong for doing it,” he said.
The Trump town hall drew 3.3 million viewers, making the struggling CNN the most watched news network on Wednesday night. Though it may be that the town hall may not have drawn viewers outside of Trump’s base, as that 3.3 million total is only slightly above the 3.2 million average that Tucker Carlson drew on his last Fox News broadcast on April 17 before he was abruptly released by the network.
Watch Christie’s remarks in the video above.
