MSNBC host Rachel Maddow claimed Tuesday that Donald Trump's erratic behavior gets downplayed because, inevitably, he follows it with more unhinged behavior while the media "sane washes" his statements to be more benign.
Joining "The View" ahead of the debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Maddow said that little is known about how Harris may debate.
But she added, "I feel like we know a bit about what Trump is like in a presidential debate in this time of his life."
"But if you look back, ... by the end of that debate [with President Joe Biden], Trump was, like, rambling about his golf handicap and was getting really weird. And he is a little incoherent now. And I'm interested to see whether he can kind of hold it together and whether that falls apart after the first few minutes, which is kind of his performance level right now.
"With Kamala Harris, she's a very good debater, but she hasn't debated anybody in four years."
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Co-host Joy Behar noted "erratic" Trump comments, playing a clip of him voicing fears of sharks and batteries along with his hatred of windmills.
"I never saw such insanity, but I think that the press has been a little easier on him than they were on Biden regarding his erratic talking and age," Behar complained. "He's not that much younger. He's going to be 80 in the middle of his next term so what's up with that?"
Maddow said Trump appears to get "graded on a curve" by the media, meaning the press compares all of Trump's comments to each other and highlights the most insane or the biggest headlines. So he's compared at the level of his last outburst, while other candidates are compared to a relative standard for the presidency.
"If you start saying I want to be electrocuted instead of bit by a shark, which will happen because of the way we build boats — but he's afraid of windmills too," Maddow said. "Who's afraid of windmills? It's really weird. I don't know."
Behar compared Trump to the literary character Don Quixote, a mentally ill man who dresses as a knight and fights windmills.
"So, when you say stuff like that, I'm going to lock up all my political opponents when you say it's going to be a bloodbath if I lose," Maddow said, quoting Trump. "All of those things are off the chart in terms of radicalism and bizarreness. Then every new bizarre thing needs to hit a really high bar to count as news."
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