On Thursday night, President Donald J. Trump arrived to participate in a town hall on NBC with questions from a variety of voters, some undecided, some committed to Joe Biden, and others who had voted for him in 2016 and planned to do so again.  The hostess for the latest series of questions from the public was Savannah Guthrie.  Instead of being a mature and reasonable facilitator of the encounter between the president and the public, Guthrie revealed herself as an updated Queen of Hearts right out of the Lewis Carroll classic Alice in Wonderland.

Who is the Queen of Hearts?  She is not as concerned with public issues and understanding policies as she is with absolute rule and execution.  The Queen has been defined in three ways. First, she is a force of fear even though she is only a playing card perpetually shouting "Off with his head!" to various citizens of her kingdom.  Second, she actually does not execute anyone when she shouts "off with his head," because her King finds ways to commute her sentences.  And third, the Queen reveals that Wonderland is devoid of substance. 

President Trump, like Alice before him, refused to prostrate himself before NBC's outrageous queen.  Just as Alice looked the Queen directly in the eye, our president looked straight at Guthrie and answered her vehement and extended vituperations and criticisms.  He did not backpedal, backtrack, hem and haw, equivocate, dissemble, evade, or distort.  He explained his views as though he were talking to an informed, temperate, and reasonable individual.

Incredibly, this woman literally debated the president for the first twenty minutes of the town hall (this writer clocked it).  In rapid order, she brought up every malicious and tendentious claim of the MSM and his woke-ocratic political opposition.

For the first eight minutes of the twenty, she insisted and argued that he had not been tested for COVID the day of his first debate with Biden.  Imagine: this president might have put Biden at risk for getting this disease, which would be one of the worst acts of negligence in the history of the world.  Imagine if he were merely working on policies that impact the lives of 340 million people and actually might have missed taking the test on one day.  This ignorant commentator literally took eight precious minutes intended for communication with the public to insist on the president's neglect in possibly not having had a test the day of the first debate, and not remembering definitely if he had had one or not.

Surely, that would have been an insidious blunder, would it not?  Fortunately, this president is unflappable; he treated her with respect though she was a whirlwind of disrespect and ill temper. "Were you or were you not tested on the day of that first debate?"  She repeated this question multiple times, becoming more fierce and disgusted with each repetition of the question. 

Finally, she moved on to such national issues as whether Trump disavows white supremacists.  Here she took a lesson from the first debate's moderator, Chris Wallace, but was even more malign in tone and persistence than Wallace.  She took it upon herself, like her colleague, to debate the president of the United States though she represented a constituency of one.  Like the Queen of Hearts, her bad temper and ill conceived, vicious partisanship clearly were coming to nothing.  She was just a cheap playing card in the game of "gotcha" dressed in a purple pantsuit trying to puff herself up with indignation, revealing the infertility of her mind.

Then, in her twenty-minute attack-dog "debate" against the President, she raised again the question of his handling of the COVID pandemic with regard to the Bob Woodward interview that was a cause célèbre for about 12 minutes a couple of weeks ago.  Again, the President recounted that he had stopped incoming travel from the People's Republic of China and from Europe, which saved tens of thousands if not millions of lives while, at the time, he was being lambasted by Biden for being xenophobic.  She tried to castigate him for not saying how dangerous the disease was and for putting too positive a face on our ability to cope when he had been told that it was airborne and quite contagious.  He passionately held to the view that his presentation had been the right way to notify the public, to encourage people, provide hope, and not to panic the population.  In her persistent criticism, like the Queen of Hearts, she revealed herself as devoid of substance.

Lewis Carroll himself describing his nasty Queen wrote, "I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion — a blind and aimless Fury."  The final point of aimless fury by the Queen was her attack on the president's taxes as reported illegally by the N.Y. Times.  She had the audacity to ask him if he paid only $750 in taxes, and if he was facing incredible debts after he leaves office.  She asked him repeatedly why he did not release his tax returns, which she insisted repeatedly that he could do even if they were being audited. 

Just imagine if a total stranger started interrogating you about your tax forms in an accusatory and angry tone of voice when his knowledge about that tax return is second- or thirdhand, and when it is illegal for him even to have any access to it.  Then imagine that the tone is implying that you are a tax cheat and fraud, and that American society is being ill served by your tax form and desire for confidentiality.

The offensiveness and ignorance of Guthrie's questions were not lost on the president.  He reminded her that she and other Trump-hating colleagues ("Trump-hating" is this writer's term, not the president's) had claimed for a long time that he was lying when he said he was under audit, but at least the Times article showed that he was telling the truth about that.  While he was allowed to release his tax returns when under audit, he told her and the audience that it would be against common sense to do so because his lawyers were in regular communication with the IRS.  Further, he said he was "under-levered" and there was nothing out of the ordinary or threatening or criminal in what the Times had illegally revealed.  And although he did not use the word "emoluments," he referred to the fact that there were no improper financial revelations regarding other countries. 

The NBC Queen showed she had no heart, no love of country, and no respect for the president or for the town hall or television audience.  To suggest a pun, she was decked.

Image: CNBC via YouTube.