This is not what Donald Trump wanted to hear
Donald Trump still isn’t over Michelle Obama’s speech from Monday night, to the surprise of absolutely no one. He spent nearly all of Tuesday in a tirade claiming she got the number of deaths wrong. It was probably the wrong detail for him to nitpick – because the number is now over 170,000 due to Trump’s stupidity and bewildering incompetence that has left the country in a dangerous and embarrassing position while other countries have gotten a handle on the crisis and are starting to reopen. Trump is still refusing to step up and assume any responsibility for this disaster, instead throwing tantrums about a former first lady’s speech on TV – meaning he’s not even trying to keep up any illusions about working to solve the COVID crisis.
It gets worse. While you generally get the real reasons he’d be worked up over Obama’s speech, there’s another big reason for Donald Trump to be unhappy about Monday and Tuesday night’s rounds of speeches by intelligent, well-spoken people who actually have ideas of how to solve the nation’s problems. On Monday night, MSNBC rated #1 across the country for broadcast and cable, beating out Fox News by nearly one million viewers as they aired coverage of the Democratic National Convention – an audience of 4.34 million. The audience was probably even bigger than that if you calculate all the people who streamed convention coverage.
You can expect these numbers to climb much higher when we hear from former President Obama and Joe Biden giving his speech as the nominee in the next two nights to go. It’s still gotten to Donald Trump that he can’t hold rallies, and has to accept the nomination from the White House, and probably doesn’t help him that in a time like this, people are looking for leadership, not more of the same demented antics he’s been pulling since 2015 that gave him free media coverage. He may boast about his ratings when the Republicans hold their convention next week, but they probably won’t put him or the party in a favorable light. If anything, it will be a prime example of why we need to vote them out on November 3.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making