The appearance on Wednesday — Trump’s first on the network since 2016 — underscored the former president’s mastery of how to steamroll mainstream media and rile up the GOP’s conservative base, all while putting on a made-for-television show. It also offered a preview — or perhaps a reminder — of what the media and the country can expect from Trump as he once again seeks the GOP’s 2024 presidential nod. 

Collins made an effort to contain and fact-check Trump, a particularly difficult task, as many other journalists who have interviewed the former president have discovered. But that didn’t stem a tide of criticism of CNN for its handling of the town hall.

The decision to feature an audience “made up of Republicans and undeclared voters who tend to take part in New Hampshire’s Republican primary,” for example, gave Trump a loud, supportive crowd to cheer him on throughout the event.

The town hall also saw Trump run through his most controversial hits: he refused to back down from his baseless claim that the 2020 election was rigged, defended the Jan. 6 rioters and suggested that he would pardon many of them if elected president and insisted that he completed his long-promised wall along the U.S. southern border.

Both during and after his appearance, the town hall became the subject of pointed criticism from Democrats, who castigated CNN for giving the former president a high-profile platform to further his controversial political message and most egregious falsehoods.

“CNN should be ashamed of themselves,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “They have lost total control of this ‘town hall’ to again be manipulated into platforming election disinformation, defenses of Jan 6th, and a public attack on a sexual abuse victim. The audience is cheering him on and laughing at the host.”

But Trump wasn’t immune from criticism either. He aggressively dodged questions about his position on abortion — an issue that many Republicans have struggled to navigate over the past year — and potentially dug himself into a deeper hole with comments about the special counsel investigation into his possession of presidential records, including hundreds of classified documents.

The performance also drew criticism from some Republicans, including the main super PAC backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential ambitions, which accused Trump of focusing too much on the past rather than looking to the future.

“The CNN townhall was, as expected, over an hour of nonsense that proved Trump is stuck in the past,” Erin Perrine, the communications director for the super PAC Never Back Down, said in a statement. “After 76 years, Trump still doesn’t know where he stands on important conservative issues like supporting life and the 2nd amendment. How does that Make America Great Again?”