As much as I despise Donald Trump and his torrents of bullshit, he’s regarded by millions as a symbolic pushback against woke Maoism. And therein lies the essence of why MAGA nation is allegedly behind this lying animal, as poll after poll seems to indicate.

Factually and ethically speaking there’s no question that the 76 year-old Trump is a foam-at-the-mouth sociopath, and yet two nights ago CNN honcho Chris Licht gifted this beast with what boiled down to a 70-minute promotional pro-Trump event in the form of a televised New Hampshire q & a with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins.

I was flying during the Trump-Licht-Collins airing and only just caught up with the substance of it this morning (Saturday, 5.13). The 5.11 analysis piece from N.Y. Times reporters Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman is obviously valid, and there’s no basis from which to argue that Collins wasn’t fairly disputing Trump’s lies with verifiable facts.

And yet what she and the never-Trumpers are saying would seep into the political bloodstream much more deeply and effectively if there was simply a frank, sensible, fair-minded acknowledgment that woke Maoism is not fanciful fiction. As Bill Maher pointed out three months ago, it’s not only real but malicious.

Which is worse, the Trump psychosis or a fanatical reincarnation of Mao Zedong’s Great Cultural Revolution? It would be so great if there were more voices (like Maher and others from the sensible, straight-from-the-shoulder moderate camp) saying that both extremes are grotesque.

Even Steve Schmidt, whom I’ve admired and respected since he was portrayed by Woody Harrelson in Jay Roach‘s Game Change (’12) as well as for his many blistering condemnations of the looney-ass right, has posted a great essay bashing Trump and Licht, but he would be heard and agreed with by many more millions if he could just admit the obvious about hard-left derangement.

“If the challenge were to pick out CNN’s lowest moment, its most disgraceful 90 minutes, it would be easy. It is incontestably the disgrace that was aired on CNN and ordered by CNN’s CEO and chairman Chris Licht, dressed up as news. [It was] a propaganda event — a forum given to Trump voters and sycophants….national gaslighting…America’s greatest liar lying with abandon.

“CNN’s Kaitlin Collins was the person strapped to Chris Licht‘s proverbial Titanic bow, [having] been given the challenge of trying to challenge Donald Trump when he lied. But she faced an upstoppable force.

“Chris Licht didn’t do this for news. He didn’t do this to educate. He did it because he’s a profiteer, just like Rupert Murdoch…in the business of manufacturing news. What he did was incite a clearly unstable person who seeks political power for the advancement of an extremist agenda. [It] was a business decision…[an event] aimed to make money. [Licht decided] to throw Trump a propaganda rally, to stack an audience full of his sycophants, and then celebrate it as news. The event that Licht produced was evidence of American’s sickness and decay.”

— from Schmidt’s on “why CNN’s Donald Trump Town hall was an affront to journalism,” posted yesterday on 5.12.23.