Greg Sargent: “President Trump deigned to take hard questions at a town hall on Tuesday night, and the verdict of his propagandists is in: Trump was treated with hideous unfairness even as he managed to convert the spectacle into a triumph through sheer force of his forthrightness and deep benevolence. After Trump appeared at the ABC News forum, which featured Pennsylvania voters questioning Trump, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham pronounced the affair an “ambush” that could have been staged by the Democratic National Committee.”
“The Fox chyron read: ABC SPRINGS AMBUSH ON PRES TRUMP AT TOWN HALL. This response, and the town hall itself, capture a larger truth about the moment. When Trump is not permitted to freely dissemble with abandon or coddled by an interviewer who treats his magnificence as a foundational premise — as he so often is on Fox — he is actually very bad at answering difficult questions about his performance. The notion that this spectacle constituted an ‘ambush’ underscores the point: If this felt like a surprise attack, it’s only because direct and persistent questioning about his towering failures and broken promises really are politically damaging to him.”