U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, August 24, 2020. /Xinhua
Editor's note: Chris Hawke is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a journalist who has reported for over two decades from Beijing, New York, the United Nations, Tokyo, Bangkok, Islamabad and Kabul for AP, UPI and CBS. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.
Soothing Mister Rogers or your crazy uncle – this is the choice facing U.S. voters with less than three weeks before the presidential election.
Polls show Joe Biden with a decisive lead in the polls, but Democratic voters are still uneasy, haunted by Donald Trump's unexpected victory in 2016.
In one of the strangest moments of an already strange election year, Biden and Trump held competing town hall meetings at the same time on competing television networks, instead of a second presidential debate.
Biden gave a commanding, steady and boring performance, putting to rest any questions about his mental agility, and doggedly avoiding controversy. A GOP operative bitingly compared Biden's town hall meeting to an episode of the old children's show "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," misreading the national mood. People now love Fred Rogers, and a calm, soothing and good-hearted presence is exactly what the U.S. is craving.
During Trump's rival town hall meeting, the president was predictably combative and disrespectful, with an even wilder torrent of lies than usual.
He seemed to partially endorse the QAnon conspiracy, which moderator Savannah Guthrie described as "this theory that Democrats are a Satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior of that."
Trump claimed to know nothing about the group except that it fights "very hard" against pedophilia.
Guthrie repeatedly pushed back, at one point saying she couldn't understand why he would spread false conspiracy theories. "You're the president. You're not like someone's crazy uncle who can retweet whatever."
When former Hillary Clinton adviser Phillippe Reines reached out to Trump's niece Mary Trump for a "rebuttal" on Twitter, she simply replied "Actually..."
Trump is on track to lose the 2020 presidential election, and lose decisively. The reasons are not mysterious. The economy is tanking. People are out of work and need help, and Republicans have been too thrifty to provide it.
The coronavirus epidemic in the U.S. has not disappeared as Trump promised, but is instead building toward a third peak.
And then there is Trump himself. He has never commanded the support of the majority of Americans, polling consistently in the mid-40s throughout his presidency. He was elected due to quirks in the electoral college system that give rural voters an outsized say in who becomes president.
His approval rating took an extra hit with his spectacularly inept handling of the coronavirus epidemic, crowned by a super-spreader event at the White House.
In the final run-up to the election, he is becoming increasingly erratic as well. At a time his prospect of winning the election is fading, he is alienating key constituencies.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden embrace as they speak from Brandywine High School in Delaware, as participants from across the country are hosted over video links from the originally planned site of the convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., August 18, 2020. /Reuters
For example, he tweeted an image of Joe Biden photoshopped into a wheelchair an old age home with the slogan "Biden for Resident," a move unlikely to endear him to seniors. He used condescending, sexist language toward Guthrie at the town hall, and called Biden's running mate Kamala Harris a "monster," just as he is losing the support of suburban women, a key voting bloc.
Trump represents a special kind of freedom, the freedom of a spoiled teen. Like a spoiled teen staying out past curfew, driving drunk, bullying other kids and throwing hamburger wrappers out the car window, Trump has broken international obligations, failed to take a global leadership role in tackling the coronavirus, stoked divisions between Americans and fueled climate change.
The polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight.com predicts Biden has an 87 percent chance of winning the presidential election. However, the site's founder Nate Silver points out that this does not mean Biden is certain to win, noting that a game of Russian roulette has roughly similar odds.
Silver says a 2020 Trump victory would be the greatest election upset since Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey in 1948 – unlikely but possible.
Alluding to Trump's maneuvers to destabilize the election, Silver also points out that his model only works if the voting process proceeds normally and is not disrupted.
Even if Trump loses, the 40 percent of the Americans who strongly support him will not suddenly vanish. These are the Americans who insist on continuing to pollute the earth without paying a price, who refuse to wear masks unworried they will infect other people, and who want to maintain a social status quo with white people on top.
These are also largely the people who feel left behind as elites from both parties sacrificed blue collar jobs on the altar of globalization, and courts and government regulations erode their bigoted "religious" values such as opposition to gender equality and gay rights.
Biden, if he wins, faces the challenging generational task of bringing these people into the fold of mainstream society, and persuading them that the people of the U.S. and this world face a common set of problems that can only be tackled by working together.
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