Donald Trump’s far-ambling interview with host Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday landed strangely on numerous important topics; the novel coronavirus pandemic, including tests and mortality rates, the November presidential election, and Confederate statues, as well as the flag. Mind you, because Trump is Trump, he challenged factual information on the coronavirus mortality rate, brought up “fake news” when presented with accurate information, and declined to agree to accept the results of the presidential election that’s just a few months away. In all of this, Trump also smeared former Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, by questioning his competence. In fact, he went as far as to suggest that if Biden were in an interview like the one he was in with Wallace, he would “be on the ground crying for mommy.” Yes, really.
“Let Biden sit through an interview like this,” Trump said to Wallace in the Fox News Sunday interview. “He’ll be on the ground crying for mommy. He’ll say, ‘Mommy, mommy, please take me home.’” The sitting president added of Biden: “He can’t do an interview. He’s incompetent.”
Wallace graciously pressed Trump on this bizarre remarks, asking him if he thought Biden might be senile. “To be president, you have to be sharp and tough and so many other things,” Trump insisted, apparently without an inch of self-awareness. “He doesn’t even come out of his basement.” He also claimed Biden “can’t put two sentences together.” To the direct question of calling his opponent senile, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that.”
Shortly thereafter, Trump asserted: “Joe doesn’t know he’s alive, okay? He doesn’t know he’s alive. Do the American people want that?”
Of course, the conversation veered to Trump’s cognitive skills test, which Wallace noted that he himself took. Wallace added that one of the questions tested one’s ability to count backward from one hundred by sevens. Trump, undeterred, stressed that he guarantees “Joe Biden could not answer those questions.” He’s challenged Biden to a cognitive test earlier in July, as well.
Continuing on the surreal Biden claims, Trump added that “religion will be gone,” seemingly in reference to coronavirus guidelines on crowd capacity affecting churches for health and safety reasons, if Biden “got in.”
Here is that clip.
In a statement from Joe Biden’s campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, she described Trump as saying he “lurched from smear to smear, all while being forcefully corrected on most.” She added: “For over a year, Donald Trump and his campaign have cycled through the same self-defeating attacks against Joe Biden and have failed to get traction on a single one.” She specified that Trump was corrected on his assertion that Biden supports defunding the police; while some progressives do back that idea, Biden is not among them.