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Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in his television audience battle for his town hall duels, the figures showed Friday, while the president faced conviction for failing to reject QAnon’s conspiracy theory.
Biden, the Democratic challenger, drew nearly 1 million more viewers, according to Nielsen, despite Trump’s event being shown on more channels.
The late-night TV event numbers on Thursday are likely to infuriate the ratings-obsessed president, who told his aides that he hoped to beat Biden and then use the numbers to humiliate him.
Biden’s city hall on ABC averaged 13.9 million viewers, CNN reported, citing Nielsen, while Trump’s audience was roughly 13 million across three channels. The president’s responses to questions about QAnon were condemned on Friday.
QAnon supporters believe that Trump is trying to save the world from a Satanic pedophile cabal that includes Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities. It has been linked to several violent acts since 2018, including at least one alleged murder.
The US president has praised supporters of QAnon, including a candidate for Congress. In a televised “town hall” on Thursday, he repeatedly claimed he was ignorant of the move, considered by the FBI as a potential national terrorist threat.
“I don’t know anything about QAnon,” he told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie in Miami, Florida. ‘I know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight very hard. But I don’t know anything about it … I just don’t know about QAnon. “
Guthrie interjected forcefully: “You know it!”
But Trump said: “I don’t know. No, I do not know “.
There was a general reaction. Ben Collins, a journalist for NBC News, tweeted: “Outside of direct endorsement, this is as close to a dream scenario for QAnon fans as is humanly possible.”
The new controversy came as millions of people voted early, ahead of the November 3 presidential election, and the coronavirus resurfaced with 38 states reporting increasing cases.
Trump and Biden held simultaneous town councils with voters on rival television networks in lieu of their second presidential debate, canceled after the president contracted the coronavirus and virtually refused to debate. Although both candidates are 70-year-old white men, it turned out to be an all-age split screen, radically divergent in both style and substance.
Speaking in Philadelphia, Biden offered long and detailed answers and vowed to follow the science to combat the pandemic. “The words of a president matter,” he told anchor George Stephanopoulos on ABC. “It doesn’t matter if they are good, bad or indifferent, they matter. When a president doesn’t wear a mask, or makes fun of people like me when I wore a mask for a long time, people say it shouldn’t be that important. “
The former vice president admitted mistakes in a 1994 criminal law that led to the mass incarceration of African Americans and vowed to take a firm position on whether to expand the supreme court, saying that people “have a right to know what my position is. And they will have the right to know what my position is before voting ”.
But the sober political discussion on ABC was often overshadowed by Trump’s characteristically vague responses to questions no other American president in modern times would ever be asked.
He became visibly shaken when Guthrie pressed him about his views on white supremacy and his retweeting of a conspiracy theory that Osama bin Laden might still be alive. And pressing on whether he owes money to any bank or foreign entity, Trump responded: “I will let you know to whom, to whom I owe any small amount of money.
“When you look at big properties like I have, and they are big and beautiful and well located, when you look at the amount of money, $ 400 million is a peanut. It is extremely under-leveraged. And it’s leveraged with normal banks, it’s not a big deal. “
Widely criticized for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump said: “What we have done has been amazing, and we have done an incredible job, and it is right around the corner.” But more than 63,500 new cases were reported in the United States on Thursday, the highest number since July.
Trump also misrepresented a recent study to make the false claim that 85% of people who wear masks contract the virus. “That’s what I heard and that’s what I saw.”
Biden has a commanding lead over Trump in opinion polls and fundraising. The Trump campaign, along with the Republican National Committee and related groups, raised $ 247.8 million in September, well below the $ 383 million raised by Biden and the Democratic National Committee in the same period.
Recovered from the virus, Trump has entered a frenzied spell of campaign rallies in critical critical states, but continues to show little discipline in messaging. On Thursday he renewed his attacks on Gretchen Whitmer, calling the Democratic governor of Michigan a “dictator,” even as authorities announced charges against a 14th suspect in a plot to kidnap her.
Whitmer responded on Twitter: “A week after a plot to kidnap and assassinate me was revealed, the President renewed his attacks. Words matter. I’m asking people of goodwill on both sides of the aisle: please turn down the heat on this dangerous rhetoric. “
Yet Democrats take nothing for granted after Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
John Zogby, Democratic pollster and author, said: “I think Trump is messed up. It is very difficult to see a path to victory. But while I say those words. I remember hearing them and maybe even saying them exactly four years ago. I’m not ready to subscribe to the landslide yet. “
Yet Wall Street is bracing for a likely Biden win. Shares of gun makers Smith & Wesson and Sturm Ruger have rallied around 8% since late September. Experts predict an increase in gun sales if Democrats win control of the Senate from Republicans, giving them majorities in both houses of Congress and facilitating the passage of gun control legislation.
