Even Donald Trump has moments of self-awareness. During an interview last week with Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk-radio host whom he honored with the Medal of Freedom earlier this year, the President briefly abandoned his puffery to admit that he might be defeated—and that his own nastiness would be the reason why. “Maybe I’ll lose,” he told Limbaugh, “because they’ll say I’m not a nice person.” He added, “I think I am a nice person,” before pivoting back to his trademark name-calling. A few days later, the political liability of his brutish persona was clearly on Trump’s mind again. “Can I ask you to do me a favor?” he begged “suburban women” at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on Monday. “Will you please like me, please, please?”
I do not know who will win the election less than three weeks from now. But I do know this: if Trump does lose, he’s right that his sheer, massive unlikability will be a major contributing factor. He’s a bully and a boor. He’s overbearing, self-absorbed, impossible to shut up, and especially patronizing to women, which, of course, is one of the reasons why those suburban moms he is begging to vote for him are telling pollsters that they are decidedly against him.
Trump was certainly no nice guy in his Thursday-evening town hall, on NBC, offering those who tuned in a repeat of his harsh performance in his first debate against Joe Biden. This time, Trump’s foil was not Biden, because Trump had refused to debate him on the terms set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, but Savannah Guthrie, the NBC News moderator. Guthrie seemed to infuriate Trump with her quick questions and real-time fact-checking of some of his most egregious whoppers. The President was loud, and increasingly red in the face, as he struggled to respond. He berated Guthrie and refused to answer questions. He offered a sarcastic aside about how something she said was “so cute.” He lectured her on how “underlevered” he was. None of that seemed likely to win over suburban women.
When Trump debated Biden, a couple weeks ago, Fox News’s Chris Wallace failed to stop Trump from going on the offensive, endlessly interrupting Biden and making a mockery of the debate rules. On Thursday, NBC offered Trump a chance to recoup in front of a national television audience. Instead, he chose to double down—even with Biden appearing separately, at his own town hall over on ABC. Answering questions from a real journalist for the first time since that debate and his subsequent coronavirus hospitalization, Trump was unrepentant about the pandemic, and even absurdly claimed that he had seen a study purporting to show that eighty-five per cent of those who wear masks get covid-19 anyway. In the debate, he had refused to denounce white supremacy. This time, he refused to denounce QAnon, even after Guthrie called it a “satanic cult” that falsely claims Democrats are engaged in an elaborate sex-trafficking conspiracy. “I don’t know about QAnon,” Trump responded, before saying that at least the group is strongly “against pedophilia,” which he is, too. The whole effect was more than a little unhinged, as captured in Trump’s most memorable exchange with the NBC anchor.
Read more from Susan B. Glasser about life in Trump’s Washington at The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/mister-rogers-versus-nasty-uncle-trump
