America Lost the First Biden-Trump Debate
Joe Biden lost the first debate. And he’s put his candidacy — and the country — in a profoundly difficult place.
It’s hard to say it more clearly. From the opening exchanges, the incumbent appeared hoarse, unsteady, and at times confused. He seemed to embody the right-wing caricature of the president as an old man who has lost the plot.
One moment epitomized Biden’s troubles. Answering a question ostensibly about the national debt, Biden first got tripped up about whether the 1,000 richest people in America are “trillionaires” or “billionaires.” He haltingly corrected himself — before starting to dive into the need to “continue to strengthen our health care system.”
It was then that Biden became disoriented. He launched into a meandering sentence about “making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the Covid, excuse me, with… “ As he tailed off, he seemed stuck. Glitched. “With everything we have to do with… Look… If…”
Seconds of silence ticked by. And when he finally lurched into gear, Biden alone had changed the subject, declaring: “We finally beat Medicare.”
If it had been a prize fight, the referee might have stopped it there. The moment took the oxygen out of Democratic supporters and liberal columnists on social media, who almost immediately began musing about replacing the incumbent at the August convention in Chicago.
The debate continued, of course. And, in fairness, Biden slowly picked himself up off the mat and began to steady his performance. Fortunately for Biden, Donald Trump was not landing haymakers. In fact, the 45th president repeatedly exposed his own weak chin, digressing — if more energetically than Biden — into bouts of verbal diarrhea, as when he said of Biden, “He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him because he’s a very bad Palestinian.” Or when he alleged of Biden, nonsensically: “He’s the one to kill people with the bad water including hundreds of thousands of people dying.” Trump, also flashed menace, pushing dark lies about Democrats seeking to murder babies “after birth,” while making bizarre claims about his environmental record: “We had H2O, we had the best numbers ever.”
This debate was a disgrace. It will stand as a low-water mark in American electoral politics. Despite profound differences on policy, neither man seemed capable of clearly outlining their intentions for the country’s future — beyond scattershot talking points intelligible only to their biggest fans.
The CNN moderators frequently had to redirect the candidates from extended tangents, as when Dana Bash asked of Trump, who was then waxing on about Ukraine’s beautiful “golden domes”: “The question was, ‘Will you accept the results of the election, regardless of who wins?’ Yes or no, please.”
The second half of the debate, for Biden, was stronger. He found a reserve of energy that eluded him in the opening minutes and strung together more cogent, though far from eloquent, answers. The president was at his strongest when he went on the offensive, hammering Trump with one liners, calling him a “sucker” and insisting he had the “morals of an alleycat” for “having sex with a porn star on the night — while your wife was pregnant.” (Trump for his part denied the alleged tryst at the center of his criminal convictions, insisting: “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.”)
And then, just when it seemed impossible that these were the two men whom millions of voters have chosen to compete for the most important job in the world, Trump and Biden began a spat about their golf games — which one had the lower handicap and the longest drive, and who would beat whom on the links: “I’m happy to play golf if you carry your own bag,” Biden said awkwardly. “Think you can do it?”
Outside of the candidates’ performances, the debate was in many ways unprecedented: It featured the first felon on the presidential debate stage, thanks to Trump’s conviction on 34 charges relating to his falsifying records to hide hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign. Both participants — Biden 81, Trump 78 — were also older than any candidates to ever take the debate stage. (By contrast, hoary Ronald Reagan was only 73 in 1984.)
The matchup also featured, for the first time in modern history, a current and former president squaring off. Debates usually give the challenger a leg up — with the opportunity to Monday-morning quarterback three-plus years of the incumbent’s presidential performance. But here both Biden and Trump had recent presidential records to defend. And Trump’s single term ended in the ignominy of defeat to Biden, a failed insurrection, and a second impeachment. In a high point, Biden hammered Trump on his election loss: He repeatedly called Trump a “whiner” who simply can’t accept the fact that didn’t win. “Something snapped in you when you lost last time,” Biden said.
If there’s any saving grace from this debacle it’s that it was also the earliest debate in the modern era of televised debates — by a matter of about three months. The contests have typically been scheduled in late September and into October, well after the rush of summer and as voters are actively weighing their decision.
This debate came close to the beginning of the general election — before the party’s national conventions have even locked in the nominees. The pressure is already building among Democrats for Biden to recognize that his rudderless performance is reason for him to step aside and let the Chicago convention pick another standard bearer.
That said, the impact of presidential debates is almost always oversold. There’s little scientific evidence that even the closing-week debates have a meaningful impact on voter behavior. And it may work to Biden’s advantage that most normie American voters aren’t thinking about November, and are likely more focused on their July 4 cookout plans than how they’ll cast their ballot on Election Day.
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