The
Presidential Town Halls Were Mister Rogers Versus Nasty Uncle Trump
October 16, 2020
Even Donald
Trump has moments of self-awareness. During an interview last
week with Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk-radio host whom he honored with
the Medal of Freedom earlier this year, the
President briefly abandoned his puffery to admit that he might be defeated—and
that his own nastiness would be the reason why. “Maybe I’ll lose,” he told
Limbaugh, “because they’ll say I’m not a nice person.” He added, “I think I am
a nice person,” before pivoting back to his trademark name-calling. A few days
later, the political liability of his brutish persona was clearly on Trump’s
mind again. “Can I ask you to do me a favor?” he begged “suburban women” at a
rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on Monday. “Will you please like me, please,
please?”
I
do not know who will win the election less
than three weeks from now. But I do know this: if Trump does lose, he’s right
that his sheer unlikability will be a major contributing factor. He’s a bully
and a boor. He’s overbearing, self-absorbed, impossible to shut up, and
especially patronizing to women, which, of course, is one of the reasons why
those suburban moms he is begging to vote for him are telling pollsters that
they are decidedly against him.
Trump
was certainly no nice guy in his Thursday-evening town hall, on NBC, offering
those who tuned in a repeat of his harsh performance in his first debate
against Joe Biden. This time, Trump’s foil was not
Biden, because Trump had refused to debate him on the terms set by the
Commission on Presidential Debates, but Savannah Guthrie, the NBC News
moderator. Guthrie seemed to infuriate Trump with her quick questions and
real-time fact-checking of some of his most egregious whoppers. The President
was loud, and increasingly red in the face, as he struggled to respond. He
berated Guthrie and refused to answer questions. He offered a sarcastic aside
about how something she said was “so cute.” He lectured her on how
“underlevered” he was. None of that seemed likely to win over suburban women.
When Trump debated Biden, a couple weeks ago, Fox
News’s Chris Wallace failed to stop Trump from going on the offensive,
endlessly interrupting Biden and making a mockery of the debate rules. On
Thursday, NBC offered Trump a chance to recoup in front of a national
television audience. Instead, he chose to double down—even with Biden appearing
separately, at his own town hall over on ABC. Answering questions from a real
journalist for the first time since that debate and his subsequent coronavirus hospitalization, Trump was
unrepentant about the pandemic, and even absurdly claimed that he had
seen a study purporting to show that eighty-five per cent of those who wear
masks get covid-19 anyway. In
the debate, he had refused to denounce white
supremacy. This time, he refused to denounce QAnon, even after Guthrie explained that the
group falsely claims Democrats are “a satanic pedophile ring” engaged in an
elaborate sex-trafficking conspiracy. “I don’t know about QAnon,” Trump
responded, before saying that at least the group is strongly “against pedophilia,”
which he is, too. The whole effect was more than a little unhinged, as captured
in Trump’s most memorable exchange with the NBC anchor.
Why,
Guthrie asked the President, had he chosen to tweet out a wild conspiracy
theory earlier this week, suggesting that President Obama had killed the
Navy’s seal Team Six in
order to cover up the fake death of Osama bin Laden? When Trump responded that he
was merely retweeting this insane and completely bogus story, so it was
perfectly fine, Guthrie refused to accept his answer. She said, “I don’t get
that. You’re the President! You’re not like someone’s crazy uncle who can just
retweet whatever!”
But,
of course, that is exactly what Trump is, and his combative performance was no
accident: it was just what the President wanted and, indeed, what he had
planned for his encounter with “fake” NBC News, an insult that he tweeted hours
before taking NBC’s stage. Trump, win or lose, will end the race as he began
it, in a blaze of name-calling and narcissism. It’s far too late to rebrand the
President, and the campaign, which last year ran an expensive TV ad during the
World Series literally bragging that “he’s no Mr. Nice Guy,” isn’t about to
start trying.
And so Trump has been
out there on the campaign trail this week, the coronavirus be damned, raging at
Hillary Clinton and the forthcoming “rigged” election. He has
been promising that Mexico is paying for his
gigantic, beautiful border wall, and talking about the Russiagate “hoax” and Hunter
Biden’s e-mails. Four years ago,
Clinton was a “monster”; today, that is what Trump calls Kamala
Harris, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate.
Trump
might not even be entirely wrong in pursuing his theory of the case. He did not
need a winsome personality to win the Presidency four years ago, a miracle
that, for Trump, offers an all-purpose justification for whatever political
folly he is currently engaging in. And the truth is that he does still have a chance
of beating Biden, remote as it seems. On October 15, 2016, the Web site
FiveThirtyEight gave Clinton an eighty-five-per-cent chance
of winning the election. On October 15, 2020, the same Web site gave Biden
an eighty-seven-per-cent chance
of winning. Both nationally and in a few battleground states, the polls are
better today for Biden than they were for Clinton, but only marginally so.
Still,
somehow, this time feels different—and it is, in some real ways. Four years
later, Trump is older, heavier, and far, far less coherent in the message he’s
offering. He’s the incumbent, not the outsider, and he increasingly seems
disconnected from the reality of the country he leads, ignoring the huge death
toll from the pandemic and the economic pain and dislocation it has caused as
he obsesses over a tangle of conspiracy theories that is vast and largely undecipherable
even to those who are paying close attention. After four years of this, many
Americans are exhausted by it all, and particularly by the President’s
relentless, polarizing, inescapable presence in their lives. They could use a
little nice.
At
the end of Thursday night’s town hall, Guthrie offered Trump a final word,
asking him why voters should give him a second chance in office and inviting
him to reflect on “how you might improve.” But self-criticism is hardly the
President’s style, as Guthrie—and all of us—know so well by now. “I’ve done a
great job,” Trump responded. “Next year is going to be better than ever
before.”
When Trump’s hour on NBC
was finally over, I switched the television to ABC, where there were still
thirty minutes left in Biden’s town hall. It was all dulcet tones and policy
wonkery. After listening to Trump, the Biden show sounded soothing, and even a
bit boring. Turning the channel to the former Vice-President exchanging
civilized words with George Stephanopoulos and an auditorium full of earnest
Pennsylvanians was like stumbling into a meditation room after being trapped at
a barroom brawl. If Trump was Guthrie’s crazy uncle, Biden was his sensible,
long-winded brother.
For
days before the duelling town halls, Democrats and even some journalists at NBC
had been furious with the network for agreeing to host Trump at the same time
that Biden was appearing on ABC. But that criticism failed to account for Trump
himself: with his big mouth and inevitable bluster, he remains, as always, his
own worst enemy. Minutes into the two town halls, the Trump campaign aide
Mercedes Schlapp tweeted that Biden
sounded like the late children’s-television host Mister Rogers, of
zippered-cardigan fame. She clearly meant it as an insult. But who doesn’t like
Mister Rogers? Isn’t that sort of what America needs after four years of
binge-watching Trump, the political equivalent of World Wrestling Entertainment?
Pete Buttigieg, who ran against Biden in the
Democratic primaries, suggested as much in his own tweet: “Just imagine turning
on the TV, seeing your president, and feeling your blood pressure go down
instead of up.” In that sense, at least, the second debate may not have taken
place with the two candidates standing on a stage next to each other, but it
nonetheless had a clear winner in Joe Biden, whichever channel you watched.
