CNN town hall with former President Donald Trump

The audience's reaction during the CNN town hall in New Hampshire with former President Donald Trump shows the influence he still has on the Republican Party, CNN's John King said.

King noted CNN reached out to Republican undeclared voters in New Hampshire to participate in the town hall, showing that the response was "an honest reflection of Republican beliefs in New Hampshire."

He added: "(Trump) is, by far, and away, the Republican front runner. Nobody votes for, what, seven months? So, there's time to see. But he has this enormous grip on the Republican Party. He knows that. He is celebrating it. That's why he mocked (Florida Gov.) Ron DeSantis and the others. But there is zero evidence, and you just saw it on live TV, that he wants to change, will think about changing, even for strategic reasons."

President Joe Biden did not watch CNN’s town hall with former President Donald Trump, a source familiar with the president’s evening said.

Biden was flying from New York City to Washington, D.C. while the event took place, and televisions aboard Air Force One were tuned to another channel — except in the press cabin, which watched CNN.

But Biden’s campaign team and Democratic officials were closely watching and believed several of the former president’s comments will serve as fodder for advertisements and digital content going forward.

A source familiar with the campaign’s thinking said they believe Trump’s messaging and efforts to double down on issues like election denialism will alienate voters and that the town hall showed Biden’s campaign messaging from 2022, the midterms and 2024 will prove to be the right one. Advisers believe they can leverage Trump’s comments on abortion, debt default, and refusing to say whether he’d accept the results of the upcoming election. 

One Democratic official described Trump’s comments on overturning Roe v. Wade as a “home run for us” as they seek to argue women’s reproductive rights are under attack by the GOP.

The Biden campaign is already working to pinpoint moments from the town hall that they can turn into ads and digital content, including Trump’s comments on January 6, election denialism, abortion and other comments containing misogynistic rhetoric.

Biden’s political account has already tweeted a video featuring the former president’s comments about January 6 juxtaposed with images of the insurrectionists at the US Capitol in 2021.

Former President Donald Trump took questions from Republican and undeclared voters in New Hampshire at the town hall moderated by “CNN This Morning” anchor Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday night.

Trump remained defiant about his lies regarding the 2020 election, as well as the many investigations into him – making clear that he’s sticking to the script he’s delivered over the past two years on conservative media.

Here is some of what he said on key topics:

One of the many jarring moments during CNN's town hall with former President Donald Trump occurred when the moderator, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, was asking Trump why he held on to classified documents when he left the White House. The FBI later recovered them from Mar a Lago by executing a search warrant.

When Collins pointed out that the difference between Trump and Joe Biden, who also faces questions about classified documents found at his house but who didn't ignore a subpoena, Trump interrupted her.

"Are you ready? Can I talk?" Trump demanded. "Do you mind?"

"Yeah, I would like for you to answer the question. That's why I asked it," Collins said.  

"It's very simple that you're a nasty person, I'll tell you," Trump said, attempting to insult her as his supporters in the crowd cheered.

"Can you answer why you held on to the documents?" Collins asked again, at which point Trump launched into a rambling answer that boils down to he was negotiating with the National Archives during the year-plus when the government was seeking them.

It's the insult to Collins' face, calling her "nasty," that was jarring. And the cheering crowd made it more so.

The word has long been a favorite insult of Trump's, often hurled at women who frustrate him.

He called Hillary Clinton a "nasty woman" at the close of the final presidential debate in 2016.

He's used it on Vice President Kamala Harris and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Of Meghan Markle, who had criticized him, in 2019, Trump told a British newspaper, "I didn't know that she was nasty."

After he hurled the insult at Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen later that summer, the Washington Post's Aaron Blake documented 14 times Trump had used the insult to describe a woman. He found even more instances of Trump using the word to describe a man, although some of those appeared to be complements.

Former President Donald Trump, discussing the upcoming 2024 presidential election, said: “I hope we’re going to have very honest elections. We should have voter ID.”

Facts First: It’s misleading at best for Trump to claim voter ID doesn’t currently exist in US election.

There are several situations in which casting a ballot without showing an ID would be legal, specifically in the 15 states (plus Washington, DC) that rely on other forms of voter verification. In the rest of the states, voters are required to present some form of identification before casting ballots.

It is true that most Democrats have been against stricter voter-ID laws in the past, but on the grounds that these laws could disenfranchise voters who may not have access to necessary identification – not in order to illegally obtain votes.

Republicans have wielded this Democratic position on voter ID laws to paint Democrats as complicit in election fraud despite the fact that voter fraud is exceedingly rare – and that even states that don’t require ID have other methods to prevent fraud, like signature checks.

Watch:

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Video: Donald Trump fact check from CNN town hall - CNN Video

Former President Donald Trump claimed gas prices are higher under Biden than under his administration, and that Biden ended US energy independence.

Facts First: Trump’s claims about gas prices are misleading. Trump claimed Wednesday that he got gas prices down to $1.87 – and “even lower” – but they increased to $7, $8 or even $9 under Biden. While the price of a gallon of regular gas did briefly fall to $1.87 (and lower) during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the national average for regular gas on Trump’s last day in office, January 20, 2021, was much higher than that – $2.393 per gallon, according to data provided to CNN by the American Automobile Association. On Thursday, the national average for gas was $3.53, per AAA data, not $6, $7 or $8. California, the state with the highest prices as usual, had an average of $4.8, per AAA.

Trump’s claim that Biden shut down American energy is false even if Trump was talking specifically about non-renewable energy. US crude oil production in 2022 was the second-highest on record, behind only production in Trump-era 2019, and production in early 2023 has been near record highs. US production of dry natural gas set a new record in 2022. So did US exports of crude oil and petroleum products.

Biden has also approved some significant fossil fuel projects including the controversial Willow oil drilling project Alaska, and his administration outpaced Trump’s when it came to approving oil and gas drilling permits in Biden’s first two years in office.

Former President Donald Trump tried to blame then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the violence on January 6, 2021 – when his own supporters stormed the US Capitol, claiming she was “in charge” of security that day.

Facts First: This is false. The speaker of the House is not in charge of Capitol security. That’s the responsibility of the Capitol Police Board, which oversees the US Capitol Police and approves requests for National Guard assistance.

Trump’s former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller also told lawmakers that he was never given a formal order by Trump to have 10,000 troops ready to be sent to the Capitol on January 6. “There was no direct, there was no order from the president,” Miller said.

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows sent an email saying the National Guard would be present to “protect pro Trump people” in the lead up to the US Capitol insurrection, according to the report released by the January 6 committee.

Former President Donald Trump took the stage on Wednesday night for a CNN town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Trump once again refused to concede that he lost the 2020 election and repeated his false claims about it being stolen.

See photos from the evening inside the Koonz Theatre in the Dana Center for the Humanities at St. Anselm College:

President Joe Biden tweeted out a fundraising appeal from his political account in the minutes after the end of CNN's town hall with former President Donald Trump.