MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said during her network’s coverage Tuesday night of the presidential debate analysis that President Donald Trump spewed “a monstrous cavalcade of just increasingly wild and obscene lies.”
Maddow said, “Yeah, the first time you’ve ever had to give the American people a reason to imagine a future where the voters decide the outcome of an election, not a strong man who says he’ll refuse to go because any election that doesn’t reinstate him in power is by definition illegitimate. I mean, I didn’t have the night that I expected to have as a person involved in this coverage. I spent the last few days and weeks and certainly many hours preparing my knowledge base so that we could do some, you know, sober, rapid-fire fact-checking on what both candidates said from the stage. We’ll do that. That will happen in days ahead. We’ll do some of that tonight. But what happened on that debate stage was unlike anything that’s ever happened on a presidential debate stage ever before. The clear choice that the American people have to make doesn’t much feel like a choice between Biden and Trump. It feels like a choice between a type of civic, formal politics, where there are debates which have rules, where people on both sides may talk over each other a little bit, but at least they are participating in the same process. And we ultimately decide which one of them we want to be the leader. Or we have what we have seen tonight, and what this incumbent president is promising, which is a monstrous, unintelligible display of logorrhea which has nothing to do with civic discourse, with debate, or even with the integrity of the contest they’re about to approach.”
She added, “The fact that they ended this by him saying the election doesn’t matter to him, that ballots, that 80 million ballots will overwhelm the system, you know it. Therefore the ballots shouldn’t be counted. He is not participating in a re-election campaign. He’s arguing that he should stay in office and the election should be negated. He treated the debate that way, with a monstrous cavalcade of just increasingly wild and obscene lies, including lying about the vice president’s dead son in Iraq as a way of trying to score points on it.”
She concluded, “This is the sort of thing that shouldn’t happen. This sort of debate shouldn’t happen in a democracy.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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