Tonight was supposed to be the night of a televised town hall meeting featuring both President Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. But, after Trump tested positive for coronavirus, the organizers of the event turned it into a virtual meeting. Trump refused to participate. So Biden arranged an event of an hour and a half on ABC. Then Trump arranged his own, separate hour-long town hall on NBC.
NBC faced deep criticism for giving Trump a platform when he had ditched the official plan. But the network made up for that criticism by giving the position of moderator to journalist Savannah Guthrie, who has a J.D. from Georgetown Law School and worked as a litigator. Although the setting of the NBC event was oddly partisan—the backdrop consisted of masked women nodding along with the president’s answers—Guthrie repeatedly pressed Trump on his evasive answers to questioners, and his frustration was palpable.
Before the event, Trump had denigrated it. “They asked me if I’d do it, I figured, ‘What the hell? We get a free hour on television,’” he said.
But the questioning did him no favors.
Trump defended spreading a preposterous conspiracy theory about the death of Osama bin Laden saying he had merely been passing along a supporter’s view.
“That was an opinion of somebody and that was a retweet. I’ll put it out there. People can decide for themselves,” he said, when questioned by NBC’s Savannah Guthrie about his passing along a theory that the killing of bin Laden by Navy SEAL Team 6 had been staged, and that members of the unit had been killed to cover it up.
“I don’t get that. You’re the president,” Guthrie said. “You’re not like someone’s crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever.”
: “I don’t get that. You’re the president. You’re not, like, someone’s crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever.” #TrumpTownHall
“Well, back to the debate, because the debate commission’s rules, it was the honor system, would be that you would come with a negative test. You’re saying you don’t know if you got a test on the day of the debate?”
“I had no problem, again, the doctors do it, I don’t ask them. I test all the time—”
“Did you take a test though the day of the debate?”
“You ask the doctors, they’ll give you a perfect answer.”
Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, has repeatedly refused to answer when Trump last tested negative for COVID-19.
Following more discussion of COVID-19 and an argument about whether the U.S. has been “a winner” by the metric of excess mortality, Guthrie pressed the president on why it seemed he had trouble denouncing white supremacy.
“You were asked point blank to denounce white supremacy. In the moment you didn’t. You asked some follow-up questions: Who specifically? A couple of days later on a different show you denounced white supremacy—”
As Guthrie formulated her question, Trump grew irritated.
“I denounced white supremacy, OK?” he shot back. “I denounced white supremacy for years, but you always do it, you always start off with the question. You didn’t ask Joe Biden whether or not he denounces antifa,” Trump said, adding, “Are you listening, I denounce white supremacy.”
Guthrie continued, “It feels sometimes like you’re hesitant to do so—”
After more crosstalk about antifa, Guthrie broke through by noting that “Republican Senator Ben Sasse said, ‘QAnon is nuts and real leaders call out conspiracy theories.’ Why not just say it’s crazy and not true?”
“He may be right, I just don’t know about QAnon,” Trump said.
“You do know,” Guthrie insisted.
“I don’t know, no, I don’t know,” Trump said, adding, “What I do hear about it is they are very strongly against pedophilia and I agree with that. I mean I do agree with that.”
“But there’s not a Satanic pedophile cult—”
“I don’t know that. I know nothing about that,” Trump insisted.
“You know nothing about that,” Guthrie responded, incredulously.
Meanwhile, over at his own town hall, Biden put to rest Trump’s accusations that he is senile or “sleepy.” Biden answered questions from voters ranging from what he would do about racial inequality to our standing in foreign affairs. He showed deep knowledge of the issues, citing history and statistics, as well as providing detailed plans for what he would do to address the nation's problems. He was empathetic and human—the word people keep using is “decent”—and seemed energetic and eager to get underway with his plans for getting America back on track.
In one of the more striking moments of the evening, moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Biden “If you lose, what will that say to you about where America is today?” Rather than giving the obvious answer for a presidential candidate-- “I won’t lose”—Biden demonstrated that he is willing to accept responsibility for his actions, something that has been perilously thin on the ground for the past four years, and demonstrated his confidence in his fellow Americans. “It could say that I’m a lousy candidate and I didn’t do a good job,” he told Stephanopoulos. “But… I hope that it doesn’t say that we are as racially, ethnically, and religiously at odds with one another as it appears the president wants us to be…. Because we have the greatest opportunity than any country in the world to own the 21st century and we can’t do it divided.” [sic]
Trump's administration seems to have turned into a revenge operation. Today, Trump appeared to celebrate last month’s killing of murder suspect Michael Reinoehl by law enforcement officers who had been deputized as U.S. Marshals. Reinoehl was a suspect in the killing of a right-wing agitator in Portland, Oregon, when the officers shot him. “They knew who he was; they didn't want to arrest him, and in 15 minutes that ended," Trump told an audience at a campaign rally in North Carolina, seeming to gloat over an extrajudicial killing. Trump also continued to attack Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, just a week after the FBI arrested 8 men for plotting to kidnap her.
We also learned today that intelligence officers had warned White House officials, including the president, that Russians were using Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to feed disinformation to Trump. A former intelligence official told Washington Post reporters: “The message was, “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine.” This makes the willingness of Republicans to push yesterday’s “revelation” of an incriminating laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden even more astonishing. NBC News reports that intelligence officers are investigating that story to see if it is a foreign intelligence operation.
Today the administration rejected a request from California Governor Gavin Newsom for a disaster declaration to free up money to help the state after six wildfires have burned hundreds of thousands of acres across the state. California is a reliably Democratic state that will likely give its electoral votes to Biden.
Meanwhile, in the absence of a coronavirus relief bill, poverty is growing. Depending on the scale they use, researchers say 6 to 8 million Americans have slipped below the poverty line.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/15/us/fact-checking-town-halls
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/15/us/trump-biden-town-halls
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/14/donald-trump-coronavirus-farmer-bailouts-359932
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/politics/trump-california-fire-disaster-assistance/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/us/politics/federal-aid-poverty-levels.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/politics/trump-fugitive-shooting/index.html
Kristol:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-attack-whitmer-dictator-fox-business
