9/15/20: President Trump shows up for
a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania,
where the audience will be composed of undecided voters. It’s hosted by ABC
News and moderated by George Stephanopoulos.
You can tell it didn’t go well, because as soon as it ends,
apologists claim the Big Orange Buffoon was “ambushed.” That is: Unlike the creampuff
questions he gets when he shows up on Fox News, he was forced to try thinking.
Even easy questions
gave the Buffoon fits. For example, Stephanopoulos wondered if the president
thought he could have done anything better in battling the spread of the
coronavirus.
“I don’t
think so,” he replied.
Strike one.
Was it
true, he was asked, that he had down-played the threat of COVID-19? You
know, like saying it was no more dangerous than ordinary flu – and maybe powdered flower petals would protect us
from the virus?
No, he
actually “up-played it,” Trump insisted.
Strike two.
What about
his repeated claims that the disease would just go away, like some miracle?
Trump
claimed he was right all along. “Sure,
over a period of time,” he said. “Sure with time it goes away.”
Apparently, the Big Orange Buffoon is thinking in terms of eons.
Strike three.
Carl Day, an African American pastor in Philadelphia, and one of the
undecided voters in attendance, had a question about making America great
again. “When,” he wondered, “has America been great for African Americans in
the ghetto of America? Are you aware of how tone deaf, that comes off to [the] African
American community?”
The tone deaf president responded with a tone deaf flourish.
“Well, I can say this: We have tremendous African American support,” he
replied. Black people were killing it before the pandemic hit, he claimed. He insisted
that the pre-coronavirus period “was the best single moment in the history of
the African American people in this country.”
Asked by another questioner if he felt there was racial injustice in America,
Trump did admit that the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake
were “tragic events.” Then he said the real problem was that citizens didn’t
show police respect. “I will say this: If you’re going to stop crime, we have
to give ... the respect back to the police that they deserve. We have to give
them their mojo. We have to let them protect us.”
So! More mojo!
If cops had more mojo, they wouldn’t have to kneel on George Floyd’s
neck, or break into Breonna Taylor’s apartment and shoot her dead by mistake. If
they had their mojo, maybe they would have shot Blake less times in the back.
Seven. That’s a lot.
Even this liberal blogger would admit the job of law enforcement must, inherently,
be hard. Trump only cares because he wants the police unions to support his
campaign. So, he slathers it on thick. “Police are so afraid today that they do
something slightly wrong, slightly wrong and their pension’s gone, their job’s
gone, who knows what happens. Their life is ruined, their wife or their husband
will leave, the whole thing, it’s a very scary thing,” Trump told the audience.
Then again, Floyd and Taylor are dead; and Blake may be permanently
paralyzed from the waist down.
Trump blamed nearly every problem facing the nation on Democrats. He
couldn’t get a second stimulus package passed because House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi was mean, and his party only controlled the Senate, and he was only the president,
and he didn’t feel like compromising.
(Later, Trump called on Republicans in the Senate to increase the stimulus bailout by roughly three-quarters of a trillion dollars,
something similar to what Democrats have been demanding all along.)
Crime in the cities? Trump used to blame President Obama for crime in
the cities – because Obama was president!
He should do something!
Now, Trump said the problem was “Democratic mayors.” Trump said he had
kept his 2016 campaign promise to “restore law and order.” Except for those
pesky cities.
This blogger has mentioned this before: but eight of the top ten states
for most violent crimes per person are … Republican-controlled states.
One audience member asked Trump why he didn’t wear a mask more often and why he didn’t order a national mask
mandate.
Nu uh, Trump objected. He did,
too, wear a mask. Like at hospitals and stuff. Maybe even on Halloween. Besides,
it was the Democrats! “They said at the Democrat Convention … they’re going to do a
national mandate. They never did it,” Trump said. “Because they’re checked out,
they never did it.”
Probably because no one in the Democratic
Party, including Joe Biden, has power to issue a national mandate, not even magic
powers, such as invisibility and being able to levitate by chanting, “Shazam.”
If anything, Trump’s performance got worse. He claimed, “A lot of people think
the masks are not good.”
Stephanopoulos interjected, “Who
are those people?”
“Waiters,” the Buffoon said.
Trump was asked a series of questions related to healthcare. If you were
keeping track, he’d be striking out for about the ninth time in a row. It would
be like he was facing Tom Seaver over and over.
I’ll just cheat here and let ABC News describe what happened when
one questioner offered a tough one:
In a powerful and passionate
exchange about her lifelong health struggles, Ellesia Blaque, an assistant
professor from Philadelphia, politely yet bluntly, asked the president to “please
stop” interrupting her.
“Let me finish my question, sir,”
Blaque said, as she described a life of overcoming the odds, battling an
inflammatory disease called sarcoidosis that deemed her “uninsurable” from the
day she was born, but still going on to get a bachelor’s degree, master’s
degree and a PhD.
Blaque vouched for the
importance of Obamacare, which allowed for people with preexisting conditions
to qualify for health care at the same rate as everyone else.
“Within a 36 to 72 hour period,
without my medication, I will be dead. And I want to know what it is that you’re
going to do to assure that people like me, who work hard, we do everything we’re
supposed to do, can stay insured? It’s not my fault that I was born with this
disease,” Blaque said.
Trump missed the pitch so badly, that if this were real baseball, you would
have felt sorry for the bum, because you’d know he’d be getting demoted to the lowest
levels of the minor leagues the next day.
“It’s a total disaster,” Trump said, referring to Obamacare. And then he
said he’d have a much better plan ready soon.
Kind of the healthcare equivalent of: “Mexico will pay for the wall.” On
Day #1,334 of his presidency, Trump had still not revealed his great new healthcare
plan. Still, he wanted Basque to know that “repeal and replace” would be so
easy. Maybe in his second term.
Maybe in his third.
*
YOU KNEW, if you failed to watch the debacle, that Trump’
performance was terrible. On Fox News, Laura Ingraham, was furious. True. She’s
always furious. But now she was furious about how the Big Orange Buffoon had
been mistreated at the town hall meeting. The Democratic National Committee “may
have put the whole thing on” she alibied for the president. The moderator was a
“Clintonite.” How dared he ask Trump follow up questions! “The president loves
mixing it up with everybody,” Ingraham fumed. “He did the interview with
Jonathan Swan, the 18 tapes of Bob Woodward – now he did this. But this is an ambush.”
Allow me to interject. If you’ve never seen Trump’s interview with Jonathan Swan, it was even more of a fiasco than his town hall failure.
 |
During the Swan interview, the president used graphs
that looked like a third-grader made them. |
As
for those Woodward tapes, you know Trump wishes he could have destroyed them
before they played. And don’t forget. He agreed to speak to the journalist.
He even called him late at night, just to chat.
John McLaughlin, Trump’s favorite pollster (because he always
says Trump is going to win), was a guest on Ms. Ingraham’s show. He claimed the
president “was very sensitive and demonstrated empathy” during the town hall
session. He mentioned the moving story of the woman who told of having just
lost her mother. McLaughlin, astute observers noted, did not mention that the
woman’s mother died from cancer.
Whereas the president repeatedly referred to the woman’s
mother dying of “COVID” in response to her question.
POSTSCRIPT: Trump also had a busy day tweeting.
At one point, with Iran threatening revenge for the killing of Gen. Qasem
Soleimani, Trump tried to channel his inner Clint Eastwood.
“Any attack
by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on
Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!" he said.
Have we mentioned? The President of the United States really likes
making simplistic statements on Twitter.
