With the aid of a mute button and some discipline from NBC News’ Kristen Welker Thursday night, America finally saw a semblance of a normal presidential debate between Acting President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. That simply meant the acting president had some guardrails to observe and, as a Trump campaign adviser told Axios, “He finally listened.“
Trump was less nasty and interrupted less (Welker could have cut his mic more). That did not mean he did not spit out a torrent of lies and misinformation.
After Trump performances, we’ve come to expect CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale to recite a burst of Trump falsehoods as if singing Major General Stanley from “Pirates.” But last night was perhaps too much.
“For a fact checker, you’re kind of sitting there with Biden. Occasionally you’re like, oh, that’s wrong,” Dale told Wolf Blitzer. “With Trump, you’re like that ‘I Love Lucy’ episode in the chocolate factory. You don’t know which one to pick up because there’s just so much … a constant barrage, incessantly, of false and misleading stuff.”
The New York Times summarized the lowlights:
In their final debate, President Trump unleashed an unrelenting series of false, misleading and exaggerated statements as he sought to distort former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s record and positions and boost his own re-election hopes. The president once again relied heavily on well-worn talking points that have long been shown to be false.
The president appeared determined to reinvent the reality of the last four years — and the history of the pandemic in 2020 — as he faces judgment on his actions in just 12 days. He once again falsely dismissed the Russia investigations as a “phony witch hunt.” He insisted that aside from Abraham Lincoln, “nobody has done more for the Black community,” an assertion that people in both parties find laughable. And he tried again to wish away the pandemic, saying “we are rounding the turn” even as daily cases of the virus this week topped 70,000 in the United States for the first time since July.
If you must have a play-by-play accounting of Trump falsehoods, the Times assigned well over a dozen reporters to the task.
Countering charges that federal authorities are unable to reunite 545 children separated from parents at the southern border, Trump first tried to assign blame to human smugglers and drug cartels. He claimed, essentially, ‘they started it,’ meaning the Obama administration. Called out on that, he asserted without supplying details that he had a plan in development for reuniting traumatized children with their parents. In the meantime, “They are so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that were so clean.”
The debate is not likely to have changed any minds. Trump certainly did not reach out to voters outside his rabid base. Anyone outside the conservative/Fox/Breitbart conspiracy bubble might have thought Trump often was speaking Greek. To normal people and even to professional news-watchers, much of his “laptop from hell” and other conspiracy rambling was unintelligible.
Acyn Torabi summed up the night.
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