The first Presidential debate: Trump trumps as sick Biden implodes
Well, if that was a skull-splitting disaster for American democracy, it was even worse for Democrats. In the immediate aftermath, it’s even questionable if Joe Biden is still in the race by the time I finish writing this response. Maybe even by the time I put the full stop at the end of this sentence.
The talk before the debate was about how the format had been tweaked to suppress Trump’s bad behaviour. The moderators had the power to mute the microphones of both candidates. Some thought it might do Trump a favour, enabling him to present a version of himself in better control of his temperament than is the reality. None of that was needed. Trump didn’t need to be disruptive. His opponent was imploding.
From the start, Biden came out looking nervous. Some of this was just Biden: moving stiffly, the numbness in his feet giving a slightly robotic shuffle to his walk. He pointed at the podium as if telling himself to move in that direction. It was bad but also very much the Biden we’ve come to expect. What we didn’t expect was that his voice would be hoarse, tight, weak, and sounding so very very old.
Trump emerged looking a little dishevelled, his big blue suit hanging a little more loosely around his bullish round-shouldered frame. Yet he sounded like the Trump of the past twelve months: loud, rambling, confident, and spouting disconnected nonsense. Make no mistake: it was an abject performance by Trump, but what people will have seen and heard is a faltering Biden struggling to articulate facts that should largely have been on his side.
Not long into the debate, news emerged from the White House that Biden has been struggling with a cold but, if that is true, it should have emerged earlier in the week so viewers could have calibrated their expectations accordingly. It also rings quite hollow. After the debate, Biden appeared before a crowd of supporters and his voice sounded normal. It looks increasingly like Biden was hit by nerves. Bad nerves. The kind of nerves that cause adrenaline to contract the elastic muscles of the throat.
The result was not just a weak performance from Biden. It was excruciating. This made the sweating Nixon of September 1960 look like a healthy golden labrador frolicking under summer skies. Tonight might go down as the preeminent example of how one presidential debate can change the course of an election and American history. Even Biden’s supporters must acknowledge that and, based on reaction immediately after the debate, they are.
The US networks were aglow with levels of panic inside the Biden campaign normally associated with reactor leaks. It was telling how quickly California Governor Gavin Newsom and then Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on the networks to clean up the mess Biden had made. They might have done a smidgen of that but they also reminded Democrats that there are people on their side who could have taken Donald Trump out at the knees.
Based on this performance, there will (and should) be real questions about whether Biden’s candidacy should be confirmed by Democrats in Chicago in August. This was not the Joe Biden of the State of the Union. This didn’t even sound like the Joe Biden of last week. He seemed overwhelmed by the moment or simply overprepared. If it’s true that he spent a week in debate prep, he left his voice back in the prep room.
There were moments when Biden was marginally better, and there was a slight improvement in his performance throughout the debate, just as the opposite was true of Trump who became more likely to descend into incoherency. The President seemed angered by Trump’s wild allegations about late-term abortions. He grew animated by Trump talking down the United States. Biden’s best moment was perhaps on the matter of Trump’s crimes. “You have the morals of an alley cat,” he said, after listing some of Trump’s crimes. “The only person on this stage who’s a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now.”
Divorced from their performances, the actual things being said were notably divergent. Biden described a situation closer to reality than the elaborate fiction Trump constructed but that is where Trump’s was a masterful performance of bluster and spin. Nearly everything he said was typically overstated, understated, or wrong, but he did it with that typically robust self-belief. It’s to the shame of the CNN moderators that they never once challenged Trump’s claims. He even denied his comments after Charlottesville. More bizarrely, he boasted that he’d just won “two club championships — not even senior, two regular club championships”.
On foreign affairs, Trump repeated his usual claims that should worry America’s NATO allies, and Biden did not do enough to counter them. He confused names. He fell into typically bad Biden habits, such as framing everything around lists. “Number One… Number Two…” But sometimes Number Two never came after Number One.
The first break came after about 50 minutes (in a 90-minute debate) and it couldn’t have come early enough for Biden. If this were a boxing match, there’d be work for the team in his corner. He needed a cold sponge on his neck. He needed somebody’s voice in his ear. He needed some water across his dry larynx. As it was, the candidates were not allowed contact with their teams.
After the break, Trump made false claims about his work to help black America and the environment, whilst Biden continued to hide facts in often confused mumbling. He improved, somewhat, countering Trump on the matter of the former President’s refusal to accept the result of the last election. “You’re a whiner,” he said and, in that moment, his voice seemed to recover a little. Democrats will at least have a few soundbites they can clip out of the night.
Biden’s team will now have to work hard to counter the damage done by this performance, and it also places a huge amount of significance on the second debate. Biden has set the bar so low that he’s almost assured of being better next time. Trump’s team will feel pretty good about the night. Trump was typically the Trump of 2024, which is a notable step down from the Trump of 2020. It makes strategic sense if Trump now withdraws from the second debate. Biden has inflicted so much damage on his campaign, it’s hard to see what Trump might gain except he might smell blood and look forward to increasing Biden’s pain.
The closing statements were messes from both candidates. Biden rambled about lead pipes and drug prices. Trump rambled about immigrants, China, and America’s standing in the world. The only thing he didn’t repeat from a rally was the shark-based material.
The best that Democrats can hope for is that Trump did so little in this debate it’s hard to imagine he grew his vote by much. Any half-decent Democratic candidate could have torn into Trump’s performance, riddled as it was with fantasies and braying ego. If Biden does progress past the Democratic Conference in August, then America should be hopeful that Trump progresses straight to prison. America deserves better than these two candidates. In an ideal world, America would start this election again. If it were Hollywood, this franchise would now require a reboot.
@DavidWaywell
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