On Friday night, Real Time host Bill Maher weighed in on Trump’s unhinged, sweaty, hour-long ragefest on NBC Thursday with Savannah Guthrie, wherein the president defended the batshit-insane conspiracy theory QAnon, which claims that the Democrats and Hollywood are killing and raping babies (and extracting their fear for medicine), as well as his decision to retweet another wacky conspiracy theory about the bin Laden raid. “The Trump one was just amazing,” offered Maher. “Trump defended retweeting this crazy conspiracy theory—did you see this?—about how bin Laden wasn’t really killed by Obama, because of course Obama never could do anything good so […]
Savannah Guthrie
Dealt dreadfully lousy cards—that is, widespread and justified criticism of NBCUniversal and its traumatized news division for hastily gifting Donald Trump an hour of free airtime at the same moment that Joe Biden was doing his previously scheduled town hall over on ABC—Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie did not fold. Quite the contrary, she managed to burnish her journalistic reputation, if not that of her employer, by repeatedly forcing the president to answer the sort of inconvenient questions he has easily evaded during countless press gaggles, phoned-in interviews, and his first and possibly final official debate against the frontrunning Democratic nominee. […]
On Thursday night, Jimmy Kimmel escalated his feud with NBC over their questionable decision to give in to President Trump’s demands and air a town hall with him at the same time as Joe Biden’s over on ABC. Given that Trump’s interview would also air on MSNBC and CNBC, the ratings-obsessed commander-in-chief would surely garner bigger ratings and also siphon viewers from his opponent. “Presidential debate number two was scheduled for this evening but instead we got two dueling town halls—Joe Biden on ABC, Donald Trump on NBC,” explained Kimmel on his late-night show. “NBC pulled a very sneaky move. After […]
On one channel, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. On the other, a rerun of Celebrity Deathmatch. Or, at least, that’s how it felt. After more than a week of inter-campaign sniping, furious Twitter denouncements, fretful consultations with public health experts, and a last-minute surprise scheduling coup, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden squared off on dueling town hall stages—one on NBC, the other on ABC. In a matchup that was head-to-head rather than face-to-face, the two presidential contenders did less to paint their pictures of the America they hope to lead than they did exemplify the two sides of the […]