Happy Thursday, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest.

Tonight, in the aftermath of Trump’s CNN town hall, here’s my conversation with Matthew Bartlett, a former Trump administration appointee at the State Department who stepped down after January 6, and who was in the audience last night in New Hampshire. For those of us who watched it at home, it certainly seemed like the room was brimming with Trump enthusiasm. But in the studio theater, Bartlett says the scene was much more complicated.

Herewith, a first-hand account of the evening, analysis of the aftermath, some notes on Kaitlan Collins’s performance—and what it all portends for the future of the country.

During the Trump administration, he became an appointee at the State Department, where he worked for the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, reauthorized the Global HIV/AIDS Program, became a communications director for an entire bureau, and traveled the world—including a stint in Burma, where he joined U2 on stage at a concert and held up a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi. “Flash forward a few years and we’re certainly keeping an arms distance away from her, after winning a Nobel Peace Prize and then being accused of enabling genocide,” he told me. “I guess you realize there are no angels and be careful who you glorify.”

So how did this guy end up working for Trump? He said it was because he won the presidency as an outsider, and there was a true opportunity to serve his country, especially at a program like PEPFAR, which he called “the greatest honor of my life.” They were able to reauthorize that program through a Republican House and Senate and get it signed by President Trump, something even Vox gave him credit for, with the headline “Trump Signed a Good Law this Week. Yes, really.” But then he resigned on January 6, 2021.

So why am I talking to Bartlett, who claims part of his family came over on the Mayflower, pre-Sarah Palin? Well, because Barlett was in the audience Wednesday night when Kaitlan Collins and Trump faced off on CNN, and had some unique and telling observations that only a longtime political consultant from New Hampshire would have recognized, and that were not captured during the live stream. Here’s our conversation, edited for clarity. (Note: Bartlett told me that he is not planning on working for any national candidates this cycle.)

Matthew Bartlett: That’s the beauty of New Hampshire. You get the opportunity to see politicians up close from both sides of the aisle, people who you really believe could be the next President of the United States. Sometimes they are people you might vehemently disagree with, but it’s a really critical part of democracy to hear from people and to make your own judgment call. We have this unique feature of democracy where the presidential race is not just sound bites. It’s not TV ads. You get to hear things unfiltered—fortunately or unfortunately.

Were there ground rules for the audience?

They did some warm up with the audience ahead of time. One of the questions was, Are there any conditions? And Kaitlan said, No, there are no conditions. And someone asked if [Trump] knew the questions ahead of time and she said he didn’t. I think a lot of people were prepared to ask questions. The floor manager came out ahead of time and said, Please do not boo, please be respectful. You were allowed to applaud. And I think that set the tone where people were going to try their best to keep this between the navigational beacons, and that if they felt compelled to applaud, they would, but they weren’t going to have an outburst or they weren’t going to boo an answer.

I don’t know what it looked like on camera, but when he was talking about certain things, whether it was the paper he took out of his pocket or on the tweets, I do feel as if he lost the audience, especially at times when he was litigating January 6th or the election. It just didn’t seem to resonate with everybody. There was a feeling of bewilderment. Again, there were plenty of people there that no matter what he said, they loved it. But there were plenty of people there with a healthy dose of New Hampshire Yankee skepticism, and were there to either talk, ask questions or to listen.

What was your takeaway from the whole debate?

There were plenty of people in that room that were ardent supporters of President Trump, and no matter what he said, they were ready to jump out of their seats and applaud. But there were also people that sat there quietly disgusted or bewildered. In a TV setting, you hear the applause, but you don’t see the disgust. So Trump did not have the entire room on his side, make no mistake, even if it certainly came across that way on TV.

When I turned on my phone after the event, the text messages came flying in. You saw the coverage afterwards. People thought it was more of a rally than a town hall—maybe at one point even a debate between Kaitlan Collins and Donald Trump. But in that room, I remember walking out and people in the front row were like, He’s talking some crazy stuff, and I think a lot of these lawsuits are adding up. There was heavy skepticism. He kind of lost the audience at some point when he was rambling about January 6th and the back and forth around the tweets. And then there were some people that were like, This is vintage Trump. I’m so happy to see him stick it to CNN right in their face. So it was a mix.

Unfortunately, I think that when people hear applause on TV, they just assume that the entire room was on his side, but that just wasn’t the case. I saw Joe Scarborough today make some comments about the room; there were people in that room that were like Joe Scarborough—that are ardent Republicans who really have broken away from the party because of Trump. So that was present. You just may not have heard it.

But the most telling part of last night was not the town hall, but the focus group that CNN did in the 10:30 p.m. hour. They had eight people that were present at the town hall and they asked if anybody thought that Trump exceeded expectations. Nobody thought he did. They all said, Yeah, this is Trump. This is kind of what we expected. Nothing that we haven’t really heard before. You had a lot of women in that group really express how difficult it was to hear him talk about the terrible judgment and his liability in the E. Jean Carroll case. I thought that was amazing. And then at the end, the moderator said, Who here is ready to vote for Trump in 2024? And only one hand went up. So I think that was the most telling part.

Incredibly aggressive. It was a disservice where you could have elicited some wonderful opinions from a good group of people. And instead he tried to browbeat them into saying, What do you think about Donald Trump talking about the 2020 election? And I think the first person said, Well, yeah, you guys opened up the entire town hall with it. You guys started talking about it. That’s a good, good New Hampshire voice, that’s gonna speak the truth no matter what.

It seemed like he wasn’t getting the answers from the focus group that he wanted. It sounded like they really wanted to talk about kitchen table issues, and they didn’t want to spend the entire time litigating the election. Right?

You got that 100 percent correct. They all made it clear. We wanna talk about 2024, we want to talk about the actual circumstances of our everyday lives and how the President and administration can have an effect on that. I know for a fact that there were plenty of people in there with questions regarding immigration. Not just broken immigration at the border, but the legal process too. These are people that need workers. Here in New Hampshire we have a very tight labor market, and I think there’s an opportunity to maybe have a legal process to get workers.

There were people that were really disgusted with Trump’s behavior that were ready to confront him about that in the room. Last night, there were people that wanted to talk about school choice. There were people that wanted to talk about a host of issues. I think the back and forth between Kaitlan and Trump took away that opportunity, and maybe took the town hall a little bit off course. What did CNN think? Trump is going to somehow acquiesce? Was this the first time they had met Donald Trump? It could have been a better format in my opinion.

Can you give me an idea of the split in the room? What percentage was pro-Trump? Trump-skeptical? Anti-Trump?

I’m going to guess that there were about 200 to 250 people in the room. My understanding was that it was open to registered Republicans and registered independents. I know that there were people in that room who did not vote for Trump in 2020. I know that for a fact. So when the first applause broke out, I kind of looked around and I would say maybe half the people were applauding and the other half kind of sat there. So how many people were anti-Trump? I don’t know. But there was a heavy deal of skepticism in the audience.

Unfortunately, the expectations were higher for CNN and Kaitlan Collins than they were for Donald Trump. Donald Trump is what he is. He’s going to continue to be what he is. For CNN, there is the whole notion of changing their brand, incorporating more voices, and changing the audience. She had a very hard job. I don’t know if there’s a better person to walk away with it. There are some people saying This is a Daily Caller reporter, and then there are some people saying This is the liberal media. It goes to the polarization of our country.

Half that audience, I’m sure, said, Oh, my God, we are seeing the rise of Nazi Germany. The other half were saying, Man, we just saw the movie Caddyshack being played out in real time and it’s so refreshing. It’s a very weird time, and I think CNN did their best to balance that. They certainly want to try to be accurate, but it’s tough to try to be accurate and not combative and end up having a town hall forum become a debate between the candidate and the moderator.

How do you think Kaitlan will do at the 9 p.m. slot as my colleague Dylan Byers scooped?

She’s 31 years old. She just did a very difficult thing in national politics. She survived. She will continue to thrive in her career. You can always look back and say, Would you do things differently? But there was no career-ending moment. If anything, she will continue to be one of our country’s premier journalists.

What could CNN C.E.O. Chris Licht have done better?

I think they had the opportunity to get a bunch of questions from New Hampshire voters. Let the voters get out there and make a point. There are plenty of people who have legitimate questions around the president’s behavior, whether it’s January 6th or some of his more outlandish claims regarding the election. I mean, I resigned on January 6th. I was an appointee. I remember walking home across the mall and seeing the balcony filled with more than peaceful protest shirts. I thought it was an absolute disgrace, and to be sitting in that room on a day that, you know, certainly affected my life, and to hear it called a beautiful day—I thought it was disgusting.

There are plenty of people out there, Republican, Democrat, whatever they are, who can say that was a very bad day. Let the voters speak to that and maybe not have the moderator try to do an instant fact-check or get into a tit-for-tat. Donald Trump is not going to renounce this to CNN. Everybody knows that, but let people use their voice.

So do you think it was good or bad for democracy to have that town hall? And does it even have an impact on democracy?

I’ve thought about that. I think it’s both. There are a lot of people that need to hear what the other side is thinking or saying or believe, and in some ways that’s an eye-opening thing. And it’s good to get out of the D.C. bubble in some way. It’s really good to have people recognize that, like it or not, this is the direction where things are going and you have to balance personality, you have to balance problems with the role of government, and the role the president. So these are sometimes very painful and messy things. But at the end of the day, this is how our country, this is how our democracy is run.