CNN Cutting Donald Trump Town Hall Short by 20 Minutes Raises Questions

Questions have been raised as to why CNN appeared to cut a town hall broadcast with Donald Trump on Wednesday evening short by as much as 20 minutes.

The former president and 2024 Republican primary contender took to the stage at Saint Anselm College, in New Hampshire, where he spoke on a number of topics including his civil defamation case loss the previous day and the debt ceiling, in a conversation with network anchor Kaitlan Collins.

CNN had courted controversy after announcing the program on May 1, with detractors accusing the channel of giving Trump another platform to spread misinformation and calling for a boycott after a New York jury ruled he had sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996.

In a statement to Newsweek earlier this week, the network said it was "our job despite his unique circumstances is to do what we do best. Ask tough questions, follow up, and hold him accountable." Following the town hall, CNN said Trump had made false claims about abortion and repeated his unfounded claim that the 2020 election was rigged.

Dylan Byers, a senior correspondent at Puck News, tweeted on Wednesday night that the town hall was scheduled as a 90-minute broadcast, "though the network expected the actual event to go as long as 75 minutes."

He went on to say that it ended less than 70 minutes in. "In other words, they could have gone longer if they wanted—which is usually what executives do with big ratings draws," Byers added.

Archived listings show that the town hall was scheduled to last 75 minutes, followed by two back-to-back episodes of Anderson Cooper 360. Another Twitter user said the program lasted "exactly 69 minutes," posting images of the event on TV at 6:09 p.m. PT.

The apparent early ending of the show attracted queries from both sides of the political divide.

"Did CNN cut it short because Trump was doing SO WELL?" Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, wrote on Twitter. "I've never seen a Town Hall get called like a 'Mercy Rule' before. Did that really happen?"

"It's as if they realized along the way, 'Oh, Lord, what have we done? We've introduced all of the things that made this guy a success again,'" The Spectator editor and Fox News contributor Ben Domenech suggested during a broadcast of The Ingraham Angle on Wednesday night. "Congratulations, CNN, congratulations to Kaitlan Collins, you have injected all the kind of energy that this guy had before back into his effort to become president again."

Richard Grenell, who served as the acting director of national intelligence under Trump, tweeted: "CNN literally ran out of the room...20 minutes early."

Max Burns, a Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies, also said he was "curious why Trump's town hall ended almost 25 minutes early."

A CNN spokesperson told Newsweek it had gone on record "days ago" that the town hall would last "roughly an hour" with "a little room to bleed over."

Wednesday's program marked a thawing of relations between the former president and the news network after he spurned it during his time in office.

Before and during his presidency, Trump repeatedly chastised CNN reporters, once refusing to answer a question by Jim Acosta and calling him "fake news." Collins herself covered Trump's White House and was once banned from a press event in 2018 after asking the then-president about the so-called Michael Cohen tapes.

Speaking at the town hall, Trump would not say whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war against Russia—a battle the Biden administration has supported with aid—and said the United States "might as well" default on its debt, despite warnings of the potential for devastating economic impact if it did.