{"id":767,"date":"2024-11-11T12:31:27","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T12:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/trump-is-terrible-at-town-halls-he-should-keep-doing-them\/"},"modified":"2024-11-11T13:39:43","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T13:39:43","slug":"trump-is-terrible-at-town-halls-he-should-keep-doing-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/trump-is-terrible-at-town-halls-he-should-keep-doing-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump is terrible at town halls. He should keep doing them."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Town hall-style events offer presidential campaigns a counterpoint to the one-way discourse of massive rallies. Candidates typically use these events as a way to humanize themselves, and voters are more than happy to directly question the candidates trying to earn their votes. But because dialogue is the last thing that former President Donald Trump<\/a> wants, the town hall is a uniquely horrible format for him.<\/p>\n

From cutting off questions so he could \u201cdo a music\u201d<\/a> (his words), to rambling far beyond the original point of the questions asked of him, each of Trump\u2019s town halls over the last week has been uniquely disastrous. There were a few moments between his meandering diatribes<\/a> in which he mustered up the pretense of caring about his supporters\u2019 concerns, but by continuously pulling the spotlight back to himself, again and again Trump missed opportunities to show empathy with struggling Americans.<\/p>\n

By continuously pulling the spotlight back to himself, again and again Trump missed opportunities to show empathy with struggling Americans<\/p>\n

\u201cBased on the inflation and weak job market, it seems like a big stretch that I\u2019ll ever be able to own a home,\u201d a college student who\u2019ll be voting for the first time<\/a> told Trump at a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania<\/a>, on Sunday. \u201cWhat is your plan to help bring down inflation and make life more affordable for Americans like me who are just starting off?\u201dMost candidates would love to get that kind of opportunity to offer up specific plans to appeal to the youth vote and talk about housing<\/a>. Trump instead thanked the young woman for using the term \u201cAmerican dream,\u201d which she didn\u2019t use, and then he ranted about zoning laws and interest rates:<\/p>\n

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The biggest thing, two things. Make the economy good, so you get a lot of money, right? Make the economy good. And the other thing is interest rates. We\u2019re going to get interest rates. Right now, you can\u2019t get money. Even if you had a good job, you\u2019re paying 10%, you\u2019re paying 11%, 12%, and you can\u2019t get it. When I was president, it was 2.2% interest, and now, and the money was all over the place, and now you can\u2019t get the money. So we\u2019re going to make sure that you can get the money.<\/p>\n

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That\u2019s not how any politician who cares about a voter and her concerns would answer that question, and the reductive wonder that is \u201cmake the economy good\u201d couldn\u2019t have been very inspiring. Most candidates would spend these final days working on being more responsive to what voters are asking. What stands out about Trump\u2019s town halls then is his utter disdain for audience members in favor of pivoting back to his poorly thought-out talking points.<\/p>\n

While the impromptu music-listening session at last week\u2019s town hall in Oakes, Pennsylvania, drew more attention, it\u2019s worth clocking how far afield he went while responding to one of the few questions that he took. As The Washington Post\u2019s Philip Bump noted<\/a>, Trump\u2019s answer to a question about how he would lower grocery prices included accusations that immigrants are taking \u201cBlack population jobs and Hispanic population [jobs],\u201d a boast that the Border Patrol endorsed him and the lie that he won\u2019t let go about Haitian migrants in Ohio. His answer also encouraged everyone to go out and vote on \u201cJanuary 5th.\u201d You may notice that none of those remarks addresses grocery prices. In fact, Trump\u2019s mass deportation plan, if carried out, is a surefire way to cause food prices to skyrocket<\/a>.During his women-only Fox News town hall<\/a> on Wednesday, an audience member told Trump that during the previous year she\u2019d broken her neck, was denied assistance, and couldn\u2019t pay for daycare. She asked what he was going to do to help parents afford children. This was his full response<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s not fair. You never heard of Ivanka, right? Ivanka. My daughter drove me crazy on this. We had the simplest, most beautiful tax \u2014 you know, I gave you the largest tax cuts in the history of our country, OK, larger than the Reagan cuts, larger \u2014 but my daughter Ivanka, she said, \u201cDad, we have to do tax credits for women,\u201d you know, for the child tax credits. She was driving me crazy. Then I did it and I got it just about done. \u201cDad, you\u2019ve got to double it up.\u201d I said, \u201cIvanka!\u201d It was actually more complicated than the entire bill, but I got it done, and what we\u2019re going to do and I\u2019m going to \u2014 because I understand exactly what you\u2019re saying. We\u2019re going to readjust things so that it\u2019s fair to everybody, \u2018cause it\u2019s really not fair to everybody. But we have a lot, and we\u2019re going up higher, but we\u2019re also going to readjust because you have to make some readjustments. It\u2019s unfair to some people and we\u2019re not going to have that. But she was the one that got it started. You know, those were our credits, those were not the Democrat credits. A lot of Republicans said rightfully, \u201cDon\u2019t do it because we\u2019ll never get credit for that.\u201d You know, we\u2019re not known for that. But the truth is, I wanted to put it all in the form of the tax cuts. So I got the maximum tax cut, but we\u2019re also bringing down the taxes for companies and for people. We\u2019re bringing it down to 15% and for companies, only if you make your product, build your product in the USA. Otherwise you don\u2019t get it.<\/p>\n

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Unlike the other events he\u2019s participated in lately, Thursday\u2019s Univision town hall<\/a> with Hispanic voters featured questioners who were skeptical of Trump but looking for a reason to back him. In what was a disaster from start to finish, Trump did not deliver on that opportunity. Viral reactions from audience members help illustrate how poorly Trump responded to a former supporter<\/a> who was looking for a reason to support him again.<\/p>\n

But such empathy comes rarely, if at all, from Trump. <\/p>\n

These failures to connect are striking when you compare Trump to his predecessors. Former President Bill Clinton was the master of the town hall, adept at connecting with voters, answering their questions and acknowledging their struggles. It was his performance in the second presidential debate<\/a> in 1992, the first to be held in a town hall format, that likely clinched the election for candidate Clinton. Even former President Barack Obama, who could come across as too cerebral and lecturing<\/a> at times, at least was able to empathize<\/a> with the problems Americans were facing.But such empathy comes rarely, if at all, from Trump. Voters bring him problems he could potentially solve if he were elected president, and many seem to quickly realize they\u2019ve wasted their time. The town hall is supposed to foster conversations or at the very least give voters the impression that they\u2019re being heard, rather than just listening to another stump speech. But in pitching their concerns to Trump, they may as well be talking to the wall he\u2019s still promising to build.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hayes Brown<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for BLN Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Town hall-style events offer presidential campaigns a counterpoint to the one-way discourse of massive rallies. Candidates typically use these events as a way to humanize themselves, and voters are more than happy to directly question the candidates trying to earn their votes. But because dialogue is the last thing that former President Donald Trump wants, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":768,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":934,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions\/934"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}