Thread by @LarryGlickman

The irony of the 60 Minutes interviews is that Biden faced much tougher questions. They asked him, and not the guy who recently bragged about acing a dementia test, whether he was senile. They asked him, and not the guy who just got out of the hospital, about his health. /1

https://twitter.com/mckaycoppins/status/1320589342801301505

When Trump couldn’t name a policy priority, rather than zeroing in on his inability to do so, Stahl changed the subject to “Who is our biggest foreign adversary?” Other than COVID, she didn’t ask him to defend or explain any of his policies or about his personal tax avoidance./3

To be fair, Stahl had more questions that she didn’t get to ask because he walked out early, but there was nothing about his threats to free and fair elections, about about kids in cages, or about tax cuts for the rich, about corruption in his administration, or climate change./3

Although Trump has presided over a ballooning deficit, it was Biden who got (from Norah O'Donnell) the deficit scold and "how are we going to pay for it" questions./4

When Biden said he would only raise taxes on people making more than 400K/year, she asked, "You think it's a good idea to raise taxes when the economy's in dire straits?"/5

Embracing GOP talking points, O'Donnell employed one of their traditional smear phrases in separate questions to each: she asked Biden if his administration might be a "Trojan Horse for liberals" and Harris if it would be "a Trojan Horse for socialist policies."/6

Employing another tainted phrase that dates back to Nixon, O'Donnell asked Biden, "There's a sense that there's a divide out there, that in order to address systemic racism that it's anti-police, that you would not be a law and order president."/7

I don't blame Stahl, who said she had many more questions to ask when Trump stormed out (and did ask about his health care plans, which I should have mentioned above)./8

But the starting point of some of O'Donnell's questions were similar to GOP talking points in a way that was not true of the questions that Stahl asked Trump, which were mostly asking him to explain/defend his actions or behavior. /9