Weekly Roundup: Trump's Debate Coup and How the Office Warned us About 2020
On an abbreviated Weekly Roundup Brad discusses the first presidential debate, the media's inability to call out Trump's threats of violence and election delegitimization, the ways White Catholics and young Evangelicals might be souring on the president, the new documentary that shows how the White House worked with churches to radicalize marginalized people, and how "The Office" warned us about the 2020 hellscape.
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AXIS MUNDY Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Skidmore College.
We're not going to have a weekly roundup this week on Friday.
I am unable to be available on Friday due to some previous plans and things going on.
And so I just wanted to provide a kind of short bit of analysis on the debate from Tuesday night and some of the other news stories that have happened related to Trump and white evangelicals and religion and so on and so forth.
Some of you were were tagging me on Twitter and wondering what I was going to think about the debate last night.
And first of all, I think it was obvious that it was just an incredibly sad display of statesmanship.
And I'll put it this way.
It seems really unfair to me to have the media characterize it as a kind of both side situation.
There were definitely times that Joe Biden was frustrated.
He said, shut up.
He said, keep yapping and that kind of thing.
OK.
But, you know, if you are in a situation where someone barges into your home and starts overturning your furniture and destroying things, your reaction to that is going to be, you know, somewhat unnerved.
And it's going to it's going to garner strong emotions in you.
OK.
Well, that's what happened to me in terms of what I saw last night.
I saw Donald Trump having no interest in a good faith debate, having no interest in dialogue, having no interest in wanting to talk about the issues.
His interest was in being a bully.
And we know that's what he is.
OK.
He did not want to get into a substantive argument about climate change, about health care, about COVID, about the military, about any of those things.
OK.
This leads to, I think, the thing that was the most disappointing for me last night, and that was Twofold.
One, Trump continued to gesture towards violence in regard to the election.
He was asked about white supremacists, and as everyone knows by now, he told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by.
He did not disavow them.
He then, when asked about a peaceful transition, said he'll have to wait and see, and that he's asking his supporters to go into the polls and watch, and to look, and to investigate.
Okay?
As soon as the debate was over, I was watching it on ABC.
They went to George Stephanopoulos and the whole crew.
And it turned into a referendum on how both men had given a display of uncivil dialogue and both men were just ready to fight and shout.
And it was kind of embarrassing.
And I turned to my partner and I was so upset.
And I said, this is how democracies die.
We have one guy who wants to turn this thing into an ugly, gross, name-calling, bantering kind of debate.
But while he's doing so, he casually insists that he may not accept the election results, and that he's encouraging his supporters to go in and disrupt the voting process, minutes after he refused to disavow white supremacists and told them to stand by.
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