President Donald Trump faced life outside his own political bubble on Tuesday, where his self-congratulation, buck passing and audacious falsehoods conspicuously failed to meet the moment when he was confronted by undecided voters.
Trump appeared at an ABC News town hall in Philadelphia, and peppered a socially distanced audience with the rhetoric and talking points that delight his loyal base. But if his goal was to satisfy relatively small groups of voters who polls show haven't yet made up their mind, the President appeared to fall short and rarely addressed the substance of questions about his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, race relations and health care.
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He said he did a "tremendous" job on the virus, insisted "it's going to disappear" and that "a lot of people think masks are not good." Asked who said masks aren't good, Trump replied, "Waiters." He bizarrely said "herd mentality" would make it go away, in an apparent reference to herd immunity that medical experts say could cost several million lives. The President has pounced on Biden's verbal slips as evidence that he lacks the mental capacity to be President. But his own confusing answers after six months supposedly leading the national effort to fight the pandemic failed to inspire confidence that he fully understands the implications of the emergency even now.
He also illogically complained that Biden, who has no power, had not followed through on a national mask mandate and claimed falsely the US response to the crisis was the best in the world. And the President denied any blame for how the pandemic has turned out -- placing the entire responsibility on China, where the virus first emerged, and several times complained he is not getting the credit he deserves.
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The town hall event exactly seven weeks before Election Day was a reminder of the kind of chaos, falsehoods and divisiveness that is a selling point for the President's most faithful voters but is the kind of behavior that may prompt an undecided voter to turn away.
The stream of lies and alternative realities that the President promoted recalled a statement attributed to former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats in Woodward's book "Rage" that was published on Tuesday.
"To him a lie is not a lie. It's just what he thinks. He doesn't know the difference between the truth and a lie," Coats is quoted as saying to former Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
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He is implicitly arguing that not only does he not deserve any blame for a response that lags other industrialized nations -- the US has 4% of the world's population and more than 20% of the Covid-19 cases and deaths.
But such a view relies on an interpretation that distorts the traditional sense that the buck stops on the Oval Office desk and instead relies on voters to believe a flagrant act of salesmanship that defies the reality of their own lives.
