IF YOU THINK CNN'S TRUMP TOWN HALL WAS A TURNING POINT, YOU'VE BEEN LIVING IN A BUBBLE

I respect Peggy Noonan's anger about CNN's Donald Trump town hall, but if you believe what she believes about the town hall's impact, you're part of the problem:

Well, that was a disaster, a politically historic one. It situated Donald Trump as the central figure of the 2024 presidential cycle.... It will have an impact on the campaign’s trajectory.

When it was over I thought, of CNN: Once again they’ve made Trump real.

Until Wednesday night, Donald Trump wasn't real? Maybe that's what you think if your social circle consists of aging journalists and former Reagan Cabinet officials, all of whom peaked in 1986. Until Wednesday night, maybe you could still imagine a universe in which "mainstream" Republicanism continues to have a large, passionate following and Nikki Haley or Asa Hutchinson could win the 2024 Republican nomination in a spirited battle of ideas. But that world hasn't existed for years and isn't coming back.

Politically, Donald Trump is real -- and he hasn't stopped being real since 2015, even after January 6.

On the subject of the town hall audience, which greeted Trump with a standing ovation and "chuckled when he talked about sexual assault," Noonan writes:

That wasn’t Gov. Chris Sununu’s broad GOP. It certainly wasn’t representative of New Hampshire in general or of New Hampshire on primary day, when undeclared voters can cast ballots for any presidential candidate in either party. The Republicans in the audience seemed more like supporters of the Trump-endorsed candidates who went down in flames last year.

In other words, the audience was the contemporary Republican electorate. Why do you think Governor Sununu chose not to run for Maggie Hassan's Senate seat last year? It was probably for the same reason Charlie Baker of Massachusetts -- also a moderate Republican governor with strong support from Democrats -- didn't run for reelection last year: he might not have survived his own party's primary.

That's the GOP right now. Voters want thuggish extremists. So of course Trump has never stopped being "real" to the Republican electorate.

Politico's Playbook also got this wrong:

CNN’s New Hampshire town hall with DONALD TRUMP last night may have done more to boost his chances of winning the GOP presidential nomination than anything that’s happened since the 2020 election.

Again, you can only believe something like this if you believe that the Republican electorate swore off nastiness and rage sometime after January 6 and has been patiently waiting for Mike Pence to lead a troop of Boy Scouts in the Pledge of Allegiance, with visuals by Frank Capra, after which he'd become the nominee by acclamation, but then Trump came roaring back on a motorcycle and reminded GOP voters how much fun bad boys are, something they'd completely forgotten.

Believing that the Republican electorate is full of fine, upstanding citizens who love civic virtue is willful blindness. Republican voters want someone to break stuff and have fun doing it. The only reason Ron DeSantis is struggling is that when he breaks stuff -- including people -- he doesn't really seem to being having fun. So of course Trump has been leading in the polls, DeSantis is second but trailing badly, and all the candidates who still maintain a surface politeness (while largely sharing the same political beliefs as DeSantis and Trump) are in single digits.

But these misreadings of Wednesday night reinforce my belief that the town hall wasn't a disaster for America. It's clear now that many people in the world of politics have been living in a civility bubble and had no idea what the Republican Party really is. Now I hope they know.