I saw the video .....he knew what he was doing
The look of horror on his face a split second after everyone starts laughing belies your comment. It looks to me like he was in fact completely surprised at what he said and how his audience received it.
“I saw the video .....he knew what he was doing”
I agree entirely. This absurd claim by Banfield is a manifest lie:
“ Also tried to stop the crowd with his hands. Kept doing this (gestures).”
If you watch the tape, he makes this gesture exactly once and it’s after a very long pause—well AFTER the lie in which in said “That’s what I heard.” A much more straightforward view of his “gesture” was that he got off his script and was thinking of something else to say (the “that’s what I heard” line looked like an ad lib to me). It reminded me of that campaign speech where he got totally bollixed up and kept umming and uhhhing and saying practically nonsensical lines, then finally laughed and used the same gesture and told the crowd that he couldn’t hear himself think.