I was reminded, during the first presidential debate, of Emily Litella (a recurring character on Saturday Night Live, portrayed by Gilda Radner). Emily would appear during the Weekend Update segment of the show to reply to an editorial that she hadn’t quite heard correctly.
Related: Last night’s debate was anything but ‘presidential’. …
(Example: What’s all this fuss I keep hearing about violins on television?) When informed of her error, she would say, ‘Oh, that’s very different’, before turning to the camera to say sheepishly, ‘Never mind’.
During the debate, the moderator noted that Joe Biden launched his candidacy as a direct result of hearing that President Trump had voiced support for neo-Nazis and white nationalists after the tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. The moderator then asked Trump if he would condemn white supremacists.
It’s not clear whether Trump was able to stay on track long enough to actually issue such a condemnation during the debate. But he didn’t really need to, because he already issued one back in 2017. That is, at the very same press conference where he made his widely-reported ‘fine people on both sides‘ comment, he also said this:
I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.
In Biden’s defense, he probably didn’t hear this part of Trump’s comments, because they were just as widely unreported. Even now, you have to do some digging to find them.
(It’s harder to give a pass to the moderator, who is ostensibly a professional journalist at a major news outlet. Just by asking the question, he displayed a startling lack of either competence or candor.)
But eventually, someone is going to have to break it to Joe that the thing that convinced him to enter the race never actually happened.
Once he finds out about his error, we can only hope that he’ll handle it as gracefully as Emily Litella would: ‘Oh, that’s very different. Never mind.’
