CNN was right to air Donald Trump’s town hall

Allow me to voice a minority opinion here about the fiasco that was Donald Trump’s CNN town hall.

Even though CNN went, as Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, full Jerry Springer in its 70-minute presentation, and even though management’s motives — ratings, money, expanded audience, whatever — are more than questionable, and even though Trump relishes the opportunity he was given to steamroll a helpless moderator before a worshipful audience, I think the network did a good thing with this town hall, even if accidentally.

By airing Donald Trump in his full Trumpiness, which is to say in all his inglorious lack of simple humanity, they allowed us an unfiltered look at Trump and Trumpism in its present form and to show the former president has lost nothing in his…