President Donald Trump said Thursday he did an “amazing job” handling the coronavirus pandemic and defended his retweets of conspiracy theories while Democrat Joe Biden at the same moment was faulting the president’s leadership on the pandemic and stewardship of the economy.
The two candidates -- who appeared in dueling televised town halls Thursday night -- contrasted sharply in style and substance, with Biden giving what amounted to a public policy seminar while Trump discussed topics including the far-right conspiracy theory movement QAnon’s views on pedophilia.
“We saved 2 million people,” Trump said on NBC in Miami, as he praised his handling of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 217,000 in the U.S. and left millions infected.
Biden, speaking on ABC in Philadelphia, said: “It is the presidential responsibility to lead and he didn’t do that.”
The concurrent appearances made for one of the stranger moments of the 2020 campaign, fracturing television viewership as the candidates deliver their messages without the added tension and drama of a debate.
Trump’s handling of the pandemic has met with disapproval from an increasing number of voters and has contributed to Biden expanding his lead over the president, polls show. Trump has downplayed the threat posed by the virus, touting an experimental antibody treatment he received while hospitalized for it and saying social-distancing measures advocated by Democrats did more harm than good.
Trump in response to questions went further than his earlier statements on several topics. He disavowed White supremacy -- after he failed to do so in his first debate with Biden on Sept. 29.
But he also defended his retweet of a conspiracy theory that baselessly claimed that SEAL Team Six killed only a body double of Osama bin Laden and that President Barack Obama and Biden as vice president had them killed to cover it up. Trump said he was putting the information out for people to make their own decision.
“I do a lot of retweets and frankly because the media is so fake and so corrupt, if I didn’t have social media, I don’t call it Twitter I call it social media, I wouldn’t be able to get the word out,” Trump said.
Asked about QAnon, a right wing Trump said he couldn’t disavow it because he didn’t know enough about it. “I do know they are very much against pedophilia,” Trump said. “They fight it very hard.”
Meanwhile, Biden said that he would contain the virus “by being rational” and pointed to the plan he released to help businesses and schools navigate the new reality. He also disputed Trump’s assertion about the speed of the recovery.
“He talks about a V-shaped recovery -- it’s a K-shaped recovery,” Biden said.
The two candidates originally were supposed to debate Thursday night. Instead of sparring with each other, the town hall format gave the candidates a less contentious opportunity to lay out their positions, and engage one-on-one with voters about issues they care about. But they couldn’t answer each other’s statements.
Trump backed out of the originally scheduled town hall format debate after his campaign rejected revised plans by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates for the candidates to appear remotely due to his infection with Covid-19. The campaign insisted that the president and his aides, a number of whom have also tested positive for coronavirus, posed no health risk.
NBC’s decision to air Trump’s town hall at the same time as Biden’s drew criticism from a group of more than 100 actors, writers and producers who complained in a letter to Comcast Corp. and NBCUniversal, calling it “a disservice to the American public.”
“We believe this kind of indifference to the norms and rules of our democracy are what have brought our country to this perilous state,” according to the letter, signed by director J.J. Abrams, actor Jon Hamm and writer-director Aaron Sorkin.
NBC said its decision to air the Trump town hall at the same time Biden’s began was out of a desire for “fairness” after hosting Biden in that hour last week.
“If we were to move our town hall with President Trump to a later time slot we would be violating our commitment to offer both campaigns access to the same audience and the same forum,” NBCUniversal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde said in a statement.
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