Rachel Maddow Declares Trump’s NBC News Town Hall A Catastrophe

Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 12:16 pm

With just over two weeks until votes are counted, Donald Trump needed to show up at Thursday night’s town hall event and do something to peel voters away from Joe Biden.

Unfortunately for his struggling campaign, Trump may have done just the opposite.

As Rachel Maddow said following the president’s town hall, “I know why the president didn’t want to do a second debate with Joe Biden. I don’t know necessarily why he wanted to do this.”

To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.

“It did just feel like he got run down, run over by most of this,” the MSNBC host added, pointing out that Trump even raised new questions about the money he owes to foreign interests – not something an incumbent president wants to be talking about at the end of a campaign.

Maddow said:

When asked specifically whether he might owe money to foreign sources or a foreign bank, he said probably. So that’s news in terms of the president copping to owing more than $400 million probably to a foreign source and maybe he’ll us who it is. I know why the president didn’t want to do a second debate with Joe Biden. I don’t necessarily know why he wanted to do this. The news that I just gave you in terms of the admissions the president made there, all those things alone are not directions in which the president wants to be steering the national political discussion two and a half weeks from the election. But that’s what we did. It did just feel like he got run down, run over by most of this.

Trump doesn’t know how to behave outside the MAGA bubble

Town halls are arguably Donald Trump’s worst format because they force the participant to act like they care about average voters who are asking what can sometimes be tough questions.

Trump, of course, has proven time and again that he lacks basic empathy. He simply doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t impact him personally, so it’s impossible for him to sincerely connect with voters.

At the end of the day, Donald Trump doesn’t know how to behave when he steps outside of the Fox News-MAGA bubble, and he proved that again on Thursday night in a catastrophic town hall performance.

Follow Sean Colarossi on Facebook and Twitter

Sean Colarossi

Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.