USA:800 Americans died from Covid-19 Thursday, yet President Donald Trump still played the victim.
On a night of simultaneous town halls on rival TV channels, Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden played out the roles of aggrieved incumbent and comfortable front-runner after the cancellation of their second debate.
As a metaphor for a divided America, Thursday night was just about perfect. In a starkly polarized nation, voters could tune in to the channel where their candidate was saying exactly what they wanted to hear. The undecided — a small cohort two-and-a-half weeks from Election Day with millions of votes already cast — faced a challenging night with an itchy clicker finger.
If they took the trouble to switch back and forth, they would have veered between two different worlds. In Trump’s, the President shifted blame for everything, refused to condemn conspiracy theories falsely linking Democrats to pedophiles, massively undermined mask wearing amid the pandemic and reinforced questions over whether he knowingly carried on in public while infected with Covid-19. He fired off relentless attacks and serial untruths and left little doubt that the man who swore to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution on January 20, 2017, is threatening to tarnish it with his equivocal comments on whether he would hand over power peacefully.