Republican presidential nominee President Donald Trump faced some pointed questions at the Miami town hall with NBC news on Thursday with the moderator asking him to come clean on his recent retweet of a conspiracy theory that Osama Bin Laden was still alive.

“You are the President, you’re not somebody’s crazy uncle,” plucky moderator Savannah Guthrie retorted when the 74-year-old President said he just retweeted for ‘people to decide’.

Earlier this week, the president retweeted an account linked to the QAnon (far right) conspiracy theory that promoted the claim that Barack Obama and the US Navy SEALs had staged the 2011 raid in Pakistan that apparently killed the al-Qaeda leader.

“That was an opinion of somebody. That was a retweet. I put it out there. People can decide for themselves,” he told the moderator.

“I do a lot of retweets, and frankly, because the media is so fake and so corrupt if I didn’t have social media…I wouldn’t be able to get the word out,” Trump said.

The sharp exchange was one of many in Trump’s town hall where Savannah Guthrie refused to back down and held on to her ground despite some aggressive stancing by the President.

When asked if he denounced the white supremacy, the President twisted the question to say, “I denounce white supremacy, I denounce Antifa (an anti-fascist movement), I denounce people on the Left. I know how they are burning down cities run by Republicans.”

Asked about QAnon, Trump said he couldn’t repudiate it because he didn’t know enough about it. “I do know they are very much against pedophilia,” Trump said. “They fight it very hard.”

Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden were scheduled to hold the second presidential debate on Thursday but it had to be called off due to Trump’s recent COVID-19 infection. They instead competed for TV audiences in dueling town halls.

Trump scheduled the event at the last minute, and NBC drew criticism for agreeing to host the event at same time as Biden was holding his town hall with ABC News. Trump’s campaign chose to withdraw from the debate that had been scheduled for Thursday night after the debate commission changed it to a virtual format in response to the president’s coronavirus infection.