Trump’s rage at the NBC town hall exposes an ugly truth about 2020

Trump’s rage at the NBC town hall exposes an ugly truth about 2020

At dueling town halls, Biden and Trump face questions from voters

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President Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden appeared at separate town halls on Oct. 15, the night that was supposed to be their second debate. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

Opinion by Greg Sargent

Columnist

Oct. 16, 2020 at 11:51 p.m. GMT+9

President Trump is often at his most revealing when he’s angry, and his appearance at the NBC town hall was notable for his repeated flashes of barely suppressed rage. And in this case, a common thread ran through those moments on Thursday night, one that captures an essential truth about how he has approached his entire reelection campaign.

It’s this: Trump is in a fury because he isn’t being permitted to wage this campaign in his own manufactured universe, a universe that’s almost entirely fictional.

Trump just issued a barrage of tweets that spun new fictions about his performance: He claimed he has received “very good reviews” and that his poll numbers are “very strong.” In fact, Trump trails by double digits in national polls, and by anywhere from four to seven points in the five or six states that will decide the election.

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Paradoxically enough, Trump’s anger at the town hall — whatever “reviews” he received — neatly demonstrated why he’s losing. Consider what, in particular, got him angriest: The exchanges over white supremacy and QAnon.

Trump grew particularly incensed when moderator Savannah Guthrie pressed him on whether he’d denounce white supremacy. He insisted this question is unfair, and said, “I denounce white supremacy,” but then abruptly pivoted to denouncing “antifa” and the “people on the left that are burning down our cities.”

The pivot itself is the thing. Trump is angry that the campaign isn’t being waged in the universe he tried to manufacture for it, one in which the most serious threat to civil society right now is organized violent left-wing terrorism.

Trump’s alternate universe of leftist terrorism

Trump has devoted extraordinary resources to the creation of this universe. Last spring his campaign dumped at least $20 million into ads depicting the terrifying police-free dystopia that Joe Biden would allegedly create. Many of his senior law enforcement and national security officials lent official credence to an absurdly exaggerated depiction of the leftist threat.

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The Biden response to this was to point out that Trump’s “law and order” rhetoric is a smokescreen for deliberately stoking white backlash while working to encourage and politically profit from violent civil strife. This was illustrated with ads suggesting that Trump encourages white supremacy and vigilante violence by his supporters.

Of course, all of that is exactly what Trump has been doing, as senior adviser Kellyanne Conway revealed when she admitted to the calculation that violence helps him politically. Yet this wasn’t supposed to be exposed. He was supposed to get away with stoking white backlash while making the debate all about exaggerated impressions of leftist violence.

And so, when Trump rages about being pressed about his flirtation with white supremacy, and insists we should be talking about antifa instead, he’s raging that he isn’t being allowed to dictate this campaign’s reality with impunity.

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Indeed, the new Department of Homeland Security threat assessment — an official government document, as opposed to public statements from political appointees — concludes that white supremacist extremists pose the deadliest domestic terror threat. The fact that Biden is winning the “law and order” argument suggests reality is trumping the president‘s recasting of it.

Trump winks at qAnon

Trump tried the same pivot when Guthrie pressed him to disavow qAnon, the conspiracy theory holding that top Democrats belong to a shadowy cabal of pedophiles who are working to destroy Trump.

First he claimed not to know what it stands for, then allowed that he agreed with its opposition to pedophilia. Then he said: “Why aren’t you asking me about antifa? Why aren’t you asking me about the radical left?”

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Trump might as well have said: Why isn’t this campaign unfolding in the fictional universe that I created for it?

It’s often noted that Trump is reluctant to criticize groups who support him, even ones with the most demented and extreme views, such as white supremacists or qAnon. But the deeper point here is that Trump wants to be permitted to maintain his under-the-radar bond with the extremist fringe while barring any tough questioning of himself over it and while inflating a comparatively minor threat on the left into the “real” extremists.

It’s telling that Trump grows so angered at precisely the moments when this is not permitted.

There may be only one answer

On other fronts, we saw a similar dynamic. Trump falsely claimed that huge percentages of people who wear masks catch coronavirus, only the latest in a much broader effort to recreate political reality as a place where he has been right to scoff at social distancing all along.

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This recasting of reality is also failing: New polls show his approval on the pandemic is at abysmal lows, even as large majorities would support a national mask mandate.

And even when Trump finally conceded he’d accept a peaceful transfer of power, he quickly added the caveat that he would only do so if we have an “honest” election, and again floated the usual lies about voter fraud. When told that his FBI director says large scale fraud isn’t a threat, he angrily rejoined: “Then he’s not doing a very good job.”

We all know what Trump means by all this, because he has repeatedly told us so himself: An “honest” election can only be one in which he prevails. Here again Trump is asserting that he creates the reality within which this election is unfolding, and raging at outside voices that contradict it, even ones in his own government.

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In the end, there may be only one real rejoinder to all of this depravity. And it may be unfolding before our eyes right now: Americans are already voting in record numbers, and most of them are Democrats.

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