The Irony of Trump Pulling Out of Virtual Debate: Lawless LIVE

Friday, October 09, 2020

GoLocalProv News Team

 

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Jennifer Lawless

University of Virginia Political Science Chair Jennifer Lawless said that President Donald Trump's announcement this week that he would not take part in a virtual debate next week againt Joe Biden is "ironic" in light of his coronavirus diagnosis. 

"The really interesting piece of this is that the [presidential] debate Commission decided to move the candidates into a virtual setting — but Steve Scully, the moderator from C-SPAN and the Town Hall would still meet in Miami," said Lawless. "So it’s that the candidates who would basically be Zooming in, but there would still be live people asking questions which makes it a real debate."

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"The irony of Trump pulling out of this is that if he would not have misled about his diagnosis in the first place, and if he would tell everybody when he had the last negative test prior to testing positive, this might not have actually been necessary," she added. "The only reason that he would still be contagious next Thursday is if we believe his timeline that he didn’t actually contract the disease until last Thursday."

"So now he’s stuck in a situation where he’s either lying then or he’s lying now," she said. "I question the politics of this. You can take Trump’s word, or you can assume it has to do with the lackluster and quite frankly offensive performance he turned in last time."

VP Debate Takeaways

Lawless also spoke to the Vice Presidential debate this week between Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence.

"From my perspective, and I think from the perspective of most watchers, the [Vice Presidential debate] was all about COVID — not because the candidates talked about it, not because Susan Page asked about, but because of the plexiglass barriers, and at the end, the juxtaposition between Kamala Harris’ husband walking up onto the stage wearing a mask, and Karen Pence did not," said Lawless. 

"So no matter what they were discussing, no matter what the question or issue, it was difficult to look at the stage and not see that there have been millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths under the Trump-Pence," said Lawless. 

 

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