CNN CEO Chris Licht cut right to the chase on Thursday’s 9 a.m. call with network staff. “I realize there’s been backlash and that’s expected,” he said about the widely criticized town hall CNN hosted with former president Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, the night before. Licht congratulated moderator Kaitlan Collins “on a masterful performance,” in which she “asked the tough questions and followed up and fact-checked Donald Trump in real time” and “made a ton of news.” He referenced an Axios piece—an article that downplayed the outrage as “Twitter-bubble hysterics”—that did an “incredible job laying out everything new we learned.” 

Watching Wednesday’s town hall, though, news was hardly the takeaway. It was an ugly spectacle, in which the former president lied about everything from the 2020 election to the January 6 Capitol attack that he incited and Democrats’ abortion policies. He smeared the writer E. Jean Carroll, a day after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming her. And the live audience, of New Hampshire Republican and undeclared primary voters, laughed and cheered as he did. When the town hall concluded after about 70 minutes, CNN turned to a panel that included GOP representative Byron Donalds, who refused to concede that Trump lost the 2020 election and attacked Collins’s moderation. “I suspect you won’t see him on [air] talking about election results in the future,” a source close to Licht told Vanity Fair. 

Prior to the town hall, producers were concerned about the recap panels being too negative on Trump, Vanity Fair has learned. There was also concern that Trump might walk off in the early portion of the town hall, and producers wanted the recap panelists seated and ready to go by 8 p.m. in case the main event ended earlier than planned. When the town hall concluded, many of the faces on the panel, save for Donalds, appeared stricken, a sober mood in sharp contrast to the preshow punditry talk that gave some déjà vu to 2016. “This will not come as a shock,” said one CNN journalist, “but I don’t know anyone who was happy with last night. The mood is absolutely the lowest it’s been in the Licht tenure, and that’s saying a lot.”

None of what Trump did Wednesday night is new. He has been lying about his election loss to Joe Biden for nearly two and a half years, and started rewriting other parts of history long before that. What was different, however, was seeing it play out on CNN. This was Trump’s first appearance on CNN in years—he hasn’t done an interview with the network since his 2016 presidential campaign, and repeatedly dismissed CNN as “fake news” throughout his presidency. The town hall was CNN’s idea, one the network brought to veteran Trump adviser Jason Miller a couple months ago, per The Wall Street Journal. Licht had “taken an especially hands-on role preparing for the event,” Politico reported. “It’s a reset for Chris,” an insider told the outlet. 

But the town hall seemed out of CNN’s control from the get-go, made worse by the crowd, which applauded Trump when he called Collins “a nasty person” and suggested “she doesn’t understand” the subject matter, and laughed when he called Carroll “a whack job.” (Politico reported earlier on Wednesday that the Trump campaign is “expected to fundraise off the Carroll decision.”) On Thursday morning’s call, Licht noted that “while it might’ve been uncomfortable to hear people clapping in response to some of the president’s answers, that audience represents the views of a large swath of America. The mistake the media made in the past is ignoring that they exist.” He added, “Just as you cannot ignore that President Trump exists. The idea of doing so is [an] overcorrection of a time when nets took campaign rallies live.”

Wednesday’s town hall, though, seemed to confirm that while the media cannot ignore Trump, it also cannot treat him like any other candidate. That was CNN’s approach going in: The network’s political director David Chalian told me last week that Trump being a “unique candidate…does not make our approach any different, in the sense that we hold every candidate who comes to CNN accountable for their words.” The issue Wednesday, however, was that Trump simply spewed out too many falsehoods for any moderator to catch them all. Many gave Collins credit: “This isn’t @kaitlancollins fault (she is doing the best one can), but this is a gushing geyser of disinformation that cannot be fact-checked in real time,” former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer tweeted. 

Collins covered the Trump White House for CNN, and on several occasions clashed publicly with the former president. Such incidents ranged from Trump declaring CNN “fake news” to banning Collins from a Rose Garden press conference after she asked questions about former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Russian president Vladimir Putin. 

On Wednesday, Trump repeated some of familiar lines and lies, including calling the deadly Capitol attack “a beautiful day” and saying former vice president Mike Pence had the power to “put the votes back to the state legislatures” and overturn the results (he did not have that authority). He continued to stand by his remarks about women in the 2005 Access Hollywood tape, in which he bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”—comments he doubled down on in his taped deposition for the Carroll suit. “I can’t take it back because it happens to be true,” Trump told Collins Wednesday. He also lied about abortion, claiming baselessly—in a statement that went unchecked—that before Roe v. Wade was overturned, “they could kill the baby in the ninth month or after the baby was born."