For the past several weeks, the media has condemned President Trump for not showing enough empathy given the state of the country. After the conclusion of the RNC, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell and the Washington Post's Philip Rucker declared on Friday that such attempts to show empathy don't matter because they're not real anyway, with Rucker going so far as to declare that Trump pretended not to be a racist during his speech.
Mitchell summarized RNC speakers as, "trying to redefine the president as warm, empathetic, kind, and specifically saying this is not the guy you see but we know him better."
She had a difficult time trying to match this with, "an incumbent president, a candidate for re-election, who is known for his personality on Twitter and in person, and yet everyone is trying to tell us there's a different person."
Coupled with how the convention portrayed Trump's handling of the pandemic and economic fallout, Mitchell declared, "So it's believe the speeches and not your lying eyes."
Rucker also had a hard time believing that Trump is not an uncaring monster:
Yeah, Andrea, it was really striking. This of course is a president who prides himself in presenting his raw, unvarnished id to the American people day in and day out. We see him, he answers questions from reporters a lot, he vents his personal thoughts on Twitter and yet to believe White House officials in some of the speeches they were giving last night, the president we've all been seeing with our own eyes the last four years is not the real Donald Trump
He made clear he wasn't buying that "The real Donald Trump is compassionate and empathetic and not at all racist" because "his performance and his rhetoric and the way he's conducted himself in office would tell you otherwise."
Rucker concluded his remarks by arguing that the speech was an effort to back suburban white women voters in swing states, to which a skeptical Mitchell replied: "You know, it's a difficult -- it's difficult, a double-sided game to be playing to try to soften the edges at the same time as fear mongering."
This segment was sponsored by Jaguar.
Here is a transcript for the August 28 show:
MSNBC
Andrea Mitchell Reports
12:05 PM ET
ANDREA MITCHELL: Phil, one of the things that was also really striking was that all the speakers were trying to redefine the president as warm, empathetic, kind, and specifically saying this is not the guy you see but we know him better. Obviously his daughter and others throughout the week. Which is really striking, that you have an incumbent president, a candidate for re-election, who is known for his personality on Twitter and in person, and yet everyone is trying to tell us there's a different person. That's the same also about the pandemic, trying to say that he's handled this brilliantly and it's -- you know, and you're not feeling the unemployment and the other ravages of the pandemic and the way the economy has been crippled. So it's believe the speeches and not your lying eyes.
PHILIP RUCKER: Yeah, Andrea, it was really striking. This of course is a president who prides himself in presenting his raw, unvarnished id to the American people day in and day out. We see him, he answers questions from reporters a lot, he vents his personal thoughts on Twitter and yet to believe White House officials in some of the speeches they were giving last night, the president we've all been seeing with our own eyes the last four years is not the real Donald Trump. The real Donald Trump is compassionate and empathetic and not at all racist, when, you know, his performance and his rhetoric and the way he's conducted himself in office would tell you otherwise. It was clearly an effort to try to soften his edges. And we saw this over the last four days in an appeal in particular to suburban white women who were critical to his success in 2016, but fled Trump and voted for Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Trump is trying to win at least some of them back to give himself a fighting chance in states like Pennsylvania and Florida. And part of the way to do that is to soften the president but also to present Biden as some sort of radical who can't be trusted and would destroy America's suburbs and democracy and what have you. You played the clip earlier.
MITCHELL: You know, it's a difficult -- it's difficult, a double-sided game to be playing to try to soften the edges at the same time as fear mongering.
