Chris Sununu said the audience’s conduct ‘doesn’t shine a positive light’ on the state, which will hold the first Republican primary
The governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, said it was “embarrassing” that Republican voters from his state laughed and applauded when Donald Trump mocked E Jean Carroll during a CNN town hall this week.
Sununu may yet have to court such voters in a presidential run of his own.
Nonetheless, the governor said, the town hall audience’s behavior “doesn’t shine a positive light on New Hampshire”.
In New York on Tuesday, a jury in a civil case found Trump liable for sexual battery and defamation regarding a 1996 assault in a New York department store changing room which Carroll described in a book in 2019. The former president was fined about $5m.
Regardless, at Wednesday’s CNN event in Manchester, New Hampshire, Trump said he had “no idea who the hell” Carroll was and called her a “whack job”.
He also said he “had a picture taken years ago with her and her husband, nice guy, John Johnson. He was a newscaster, very nice man.
