Bubbles and Bullshirt

A bad sign that the press has learned little since 2016.

It’s been a record-breaking interval between editions of The King’s Necktie, six weeks to be exact, owing to my partial sabbatical to finish my as-yet-untitled manuscript for OR Books (to be published early next year) about how we can respond if the Republicans retake power in November 2024.

But I am surfacing briefly because last week CNN gave a master class in the kind of behavior that could help that GOP triumph come about.

By now we all understand that CNN’s decision to air a Trump town hall in New Hampshire, live, in a room full of Trump supporters who cheered and applauded his most vile comments, was a journalistic catastrophe for the ages. For some understatement, let’s go to The Hill, which reported, “Democrats and media pundits….say it made a mistake in giving a forum to Trump, who used the event to promote false claims about the 2020 election, mock the woman a jury recently found he sexually abused in the late 1990s, and voice support for defendants charged with crimes in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.”

Gee, who could possibly have predicted that he would have used that town hall for the purpose?

In addition to the usual tripe about a stolen election, over the course of the evening, Trump — only days after being…