Day 1,365: Trump endorses extrajudicial killing on US soil, refuses to disavow QAnon, stutters discussing his own debt, questions mask-wearing
With less than three weeks until Election Day, a flailing Donald Trump is lagging in the polls and doesn’t appear to be doing much to try and change the minds of American voters.
At a speech in North Carolina, Trump gleefully recounted how U.S. Marshals “didn’t want to arrest” an American activist and ended up killing him within 15 minutes instead.
What Trump is endorsing is wholesale murder by government killing units. Whether his account is accurate remains unclear, but his cheeriness over the overseers of “law and order” undertaking very unlawful actions is decidedly on-brand.
Later, at a town hall in Miami, Trump stuttered and stumbled for an hour.
He spent nearly two minutes refusing to disavow the far-right wing conspiracy theory QAnon, claiming first to not know anything about it but then noted its supporters are “very much against pedophilia.”
When it came to discussing his reportedly $400-plus million debt, Trump gave conflicting answers. First, he claimed the numbers were untrue, implying that they were too large to be believed. Then, seeming to confirm the figure, he claimed the amount of debt was a “tiny percentage of [his] net worth” and inconsequential. He also said that he borrowed the money as “favors” to banks. Pressed if he owed money to foreign banks, Trump looked like a deer in the headlights, claiming “not that I know of,” before abruptly stopping and adding nonsensically, “I will probably, because it’s easy to solve.”
Despite near unanimity about the effectiveness of face masks in preventing the spread of COVID-19, Trump continued to publicly doubt the science. He did that even as red-states are seeing a surge in cases from governors hesitant to cross Trump and his administration’s stance on all things coronavirus and more than 215,000 people have died from the disease in the U.S.
More than anything on Thursday, just as he did Wednesday, Trump proved he remains unchanged from four years ago: a wannabe authoritarian and big time conspiracy theorist, levered up to his eyes in debt, denying science and content to see tens of thousands of Americans die as long as he can point the finger at someone else.
1,365 days in, 97 to go
Follow us on Twitter at @TrumpTimer
