So I just saw this headline…
More people watched Biden on ABC than Trump on NBC, MSNBC and CNBC
…and I thought, "Oh, that's gotta hurt." No doubt if the positions were reversed, Trump would claim that as an indicator that the polls were wrong; that more people love him than love Joseph R. Biden. Which, of course, it would not be just as the real news isn't proof Biden's gonna win. It's a measure of what people were watching, not how registered voters are voting.
I actually thought Trump would do better than Biden for a simple reason: His interviews are more volatile and more colorful…and a lot of Americans are waiting for him to go so full-goose-bozo in front of a camera that even Rudy Giuliani won't be able to defend it as normal. We're expecting Trump to turn into that dictator in the Woody Allen film Bananas who decrees that underwear must be worn on the outside and that all children under sixteen years old are now sixteen years old.
I caught a little of each — not a lot but enough to see Trump was sweating and wanting to strangle Savannah Guthrie for asking hardball questions and calling him out on answers that would have made Sean Hannity wet himself. Over at Biden's Town Hall, he was giving real answers, speaking mostly of policy. It may not have been Good Television but I think it was Good Campaigning. I thought this dodge by Trump would have hurt him with undecided voters if there were any…
Guthrie grilled Trump about a retweet he posted on Wednesday evening of a conspiracy theory promoted by a QAnon account. The tweet accused Biden of pulling strings to take out the group of Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden — a theory refuted by the fact that every Navy SEAL involved in the bin Laden raid is in fact still alive.
Instead of even trying to defend himself, Trump suggested to Guthrie that because he read it on the internet it might be true, describing the conspiracy theory as "an opinion of somebody and that was a retweet. I'll put it out there. People can decide for themselves. I don't take a position."
It's obviously reckless and irresponsible for the president to amplify incendiary conspiracy theories that are clearly false, not to mention defend QAnon, which he did during the same town hall. And in one of the more memorable moments of the evening, Guthrie hit back, admonishing Trump, "You're the president. You're not someone's crazy uncle who can retweet whatever."
That was a quote from this article and if you read the whole thing, you'll see how this morning, Trump retweeted a story he spotted on the web that said…
In a last-ditch effort to stop negative stories about Joe Biden and his family from spreading, Twitter shut down its entire social network Thursday.
You're smart enough to know it wasn't true. It was from a website that clearly labels its stories as satire. Why wasn't Donald Trump that smart?