The only thing worse for Trump than an unwatchable
debate is a watchable one
Opinion by
Columnist
Oct. 22, 2020 at 10:57 p.m. CDT
The
debate commission muted his microphone. President Trump’s own advisers told him
to pipe down. Heck, maybe somebody slipped some Ambien into his Diet Coke.
And it
worked, sort of. Trump saved most of his hectoring and his over-talking of the
moderator, NBC’s Kristen Welker, for the second half of Thursday night’s final
presidential debate. The more subdued Trump at least made the debate watchable,
unlike the first encounter.
But
there was something Trump’s advisers apparently hadn’t considered when they
told him, in more polite words, to “shut up, man,” as Joe Biden requested
during the last debate: The only thing worse for Trump than having an
unwatchable debate is having a watchable debate.
It
wasn’t a battle between Biden and Trump. It was a battle between reality and
fantasy. In front of tens of millions, Trump played the fantasist — utterly
removed from Americans’ suffering and from the most obvious truths.
In
Trump’s world, “we’re rounding the corner” in the pandemic and “it’s going
away, okay?”
Okay!
In
Trump’s imagination, Biden “doesn’t come from Scranton,” the Democrat’s
Pennsylvania hometown.
In
Trump’s magical retelling, Anthony Fauci said of the coronavirus, “exact words, this is no problem, this is
going to go away soon.”
Trump,
in front of an African American moderator, proclaimed himself “the least racist
person in the room” and the best president for Black people with “the possible
exception” of Abraham Lincoln.
The
most stunning part, even after four years of this, is that Trump seems to
believe his own rearrangement of facts. With a straight face, he announced that
it was Biden who, in eight years as vice president, “did nothing except build
cages to keep children in.” In this novel version, Trump is the one who
“changed the policy” of family separation (and, besides, the facilities where
he warehoused the children were “so clean”).
In
Trump’s epistemological recreation, he’s not the guy who said “I don’t take
responsibility at all” in regard to the pandemic but the guy who says “I take
full responsibility.”
In
Trump’s imagination, his idea about injecting bleach into people was “kidding.”
In
Trump’s telling, “we have so many cases” of the virus only because “we have the
best testing.”
Trump
conjured the notion that Michigan is “like a prison,” that “there’s been nobody
tougher than me on Russia,” that he had a secret bank account in China because
“I was thinking about doing a deal in China, like millions of other people.”
If not
for Trump, “millions of people would be dead right now” on the Korean
Peninsula. Oh, and Republicans are “going to win the House” in 10 days. Yup,
and something about windmill “fumes” and killing “all the birds.”
Never
mind that unfortunate bit about Trump paying only $750 in federal income taxes
in both 2016 and 2017? It’s because Trump “prepaid” his taxes in previous
years.
The
Democrat needed only to answer Trump with reason.
Trump
said of Biden: “All he talks about is shutdown.” Biden replied that “we ought
to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
As
Trump hammered away about Rudy Giuliani’s latest drop of dubious dirt on Hunter
Biden from Ukraine, Biden suggested: “Release your tax returns or stop talking
about corruption.”
On
national security, Biden observed that Trump “is unwilling to take on Putin
when he’s actually paying bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.”
To
Trump’s claims that he’s in Abraham Lincoln’s league in his service to African
Americans, Biden dryly rejoined: “Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most
racist presidents we’ve had in modern history.” To Trump’s implausible claims
about his taxes, Biden turned to the television audience to share the joke:
“Come on, folks.”
Biden
spoke emotionally about the Trump administration’s “criminal” behavior in which
“kids were ripped from their [parents’] arms and separated and now they cannot
find over 500 of sets of those parents and those kids are alone, nowhere to
go.”
And,
after Trump’s incessant yammering about Hunter Biden, the elder Biden reminded
viewers, “It’s not about his family and my family, it’s about your family, and
your family’s hurting badly.” The Democrat made an emotional appeal to raise
the minimum wage to help “families like I grew up in.”
Biden’s
compassion accentuated Trump’s soullessness. Biden’s common sense put Trump’s
fever dreams in sharp relief. Trump ranted and raved about Hillary Clinton,
about “the horrible emails,” about his (currently latent) fundraising prowess,
about the IRS and the tea party, about the “phony witch hunt” (“they spied on
my campaign!”), about “socialized medicine” and Hunter’s laptop.
As the
evening wore on, whatever inner control temporarily restraining Trump wore off.
“Excuse me!” “I will say this! “I have to respond!” “No, but wait a minute!”
Welker
calmly and capably weathered Trump’s hectoring. “We need to move on,” she told
him.
So do we
all.
