On Thursday morning, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced next week’s second debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would be a virtual event, on account of Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis. Mere minutes later, the president said in no uncertain terms that he would not participate.
“I’m not going to waste my time on a virtual debate. That’s not what debating is all about,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business shortly after the news broke. “You sit behind a computer and do a debate? It’s ridiculous. And then they cut you off whenever they want.”
“Oh, man. You’ve got to love Trump sometimes,” Trevor Noah said in response during Thursday’s episode of The Daily Show. “He’s just openly admitting that he won’t do a virtual debate because they’d make him follow rules.”
In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s on-air tantrum, the Biden campaign announced that the former vice president would participate in a town hall with voters hosted by ABC in lieu of the debate. Trump’s campaign manager, meanwhile, denigrated the bipartisan commission as “swamp creatures” and claimed the president “will have posted multiple negative tests prior to the debate.” (The White House has steadfastly refused to release information about Trump’s testing history since his diagnosis.)
But by afternoon, the Trump campaign suggested instead that the debate should be delayed by one week, pushing the third and final televised argument between the candidates to just before the election. That ploy didn’t work either. “Donald Trump doesn’t make the debate schedule; the debate commission does,” a representative for the Biden campaign said in a statement. “Trump chose today to pull out of the October 15 debate. Trump’s erratic behavior does not allow him to rewrite the calendar, and pick new dates of his choosing.”
By evening, Trump’s team had landed on another gambit. Using a note from the president’s doctor, Dr. Sean Conley—where he claimed to “fully anticipate the president’s safe return to public engagements” by Saturday—the reelection campaign circled back to the notion that next week’s debate should happen as planned. There is “no medical reason why the Commission on Presidential Debates should shift the debate to a virtual setting, postpone it, or otherwise alter it in any way,” campaign manager Bill Stepien, who was also recently diagnosed with coronavirus, said.
But on The Daily Show, Noah came up with a simple way for all of this pettiness to have been avoided in the first place.
“If Trump didn’t want to do a virtual debate, you know what he could have done? Not gotten coronavirus, motherfucker!” Noah shouted. “That was an option, yeah? You can’t get coronavirus and then get mad when they switch things up so that your ass doesn’t get everybody else coronavirus like you.”
“I’m not surprised at all by Trump’s reaction here,” he added, before condemning Trump. “If he understood how the coronavirus works and if he actually cared about not spreading it, he would want to do a virtual debate. Unfortunately, neither of those things seems to be true.”
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