Biden was lost but Trump didn’t win the debate. These are our best presidential candidates? | Opinion

Democrats’ worst fears materialized Thursday night at the first and perhaps only debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump when Biden looked and sounded every bit like the oldest presidential candidate in history. He showed none of the vigor of his March State of the Union address, which some observers said may have been the best speech of his life.

Was that only three months ago? Everyone can have a bad night, and Biden aides began texting journalists mid-debate to say he had a cold. But a cold doesn’t explain the disastrous evening Biden had, and unlike in the NBA, there isn’t another game in a couple evenings to erase any doubts that someone has a fork stuck in them.

Instead of clearing the low bar of seeming capable and cogent alongside a convicted felon and serial liar who often exaggerates his accomplishments, Biden came across as doddering, blowing his biggest opportunity yet to set anxious voters across the political spectrum at ease and emboldening former president Donald Trump to keep lying with zero recourse or remorse. Did Trump win the debate? Only by default, only if you forget character matters.

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale counted 30 false or misleading claims from Trump, age 78, and nine from Biden, age 81. Ultimately, that tally may be irrelevant because of Biden’s bad showing.

Biden, who famously has a stutter and more famously has a history of verbal gaffes, needed not only to have far fewer of his own misstatements but also to forcefully and specifically call out Trump’s facility with falsity. He didn’t.

CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did little fact-checking of their own in real time as the 90-minute debate progressed in Atlanta — though format changes aimed at focusing the debate on, you know, the issues did just that, calling the candidates’ platforms into sharp relief.

Tapper and Bash drew out major candidate differences on abortion, immigration, the war in Ukraine and climate change. But moderators repeatedly told Biden he had more time to answer questions, showing just how ill-prepared he was despite a week of debate prep at Camp David.

The evening cast a pall over the country and a question long asked by everyday Americans, especially young people, became the elephant in the room: This is the best we can do for our nation? A con man and an old man? A septuagenarian crook and a feeble octogenarian?

At one point, they even argued over their golf games but first each dubbed the other the worst president ever. Trump repeatedly called Biden’s administration the worst in history, and Biden’s defense of himself fell short, if only because he couldn’t remember the number of historians whose survey actually found Trump’s was the worst. (It was 154, not the number Biden recalled.)

Trump refused to answer several direct questions, even when repeated, on how he would make child care more affordable and how he would help Americans addicted to opioids that are killing so many each year. Pressed, he said he would accept the results of the election after any legal challenges, regardless of the outcome, then again repeated his lie that the 2020 election was so fraudulent it was “ridiculous.”

In fact, there is no evidence of widespread fraud in that election, as election officials in all 50 states and Trump’s own attorney general have acknowledged, and more than 60 legal challenges to the election were rejected in court. The 2020 election was legitimate.

Yet contrasted with Trump’s forcefulness, Biden’s comments trailed off or were just incoherent. He stumbled and mumbled his way through answers on several issues, including abortion rights, a big issue on many people’s minds.

Biden said he supports the Roe v. Wade court ruling that was the law of the land for 51 years. Trump said he supports states resolving the issue though he believes in exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Would he support a federal ban? It’s unclear. In his first term, he said he would support a ban at 20 weeks. In April, he said he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban if Congress sent him one if he were elected to a second term. He didn’t elaborate on Thursday.

“I’ll veto it,” Biden said. “He’ll sign it.”

It was one of several moments where the current president made points that were succinct, something that might only become apparent to the few people who read the entire transcript of the debate. But as has been the case in this country since John F. Kennedy came across as energetic and photogenic and Richard Nixon just looked ill in 1960, it’s the candidates’ appearance and presentation and demeanor that matter most.

After that first debate between Kennedy and Nixon, the Republican’s running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, reportedly, said, “That son of a bitch just lost us the election.”

You don’t have to imagine the comparable text messages Thursday night.

Pundits were sharing their dumpster-fire assessments and saying Democrats were discussing how to replace Biden at the party’s convention in mid-August in Chicago as soon as the debate mercifully ended. That convention begins in 51 short days. For now, there’s supposed to be a second debate in September after both parties nominate their candidates, but do we really need to see Biden and the GOP’s Trump square off again in 2024? No thanks.

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said at one point to address Biden’s inarticulate answers. “I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

As debates go, this one was just sad. Did Biden really tell Trump, “You have the morals of an alley cat”? Did Trump really tell Biden, “I didn’t have sex with a porn star”? They did.

Trump has repeatedly denied having an affair with actress Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. But he was convicted in New York on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in connection with a $130,000 hush money payment to her, something Trump has repeatedly called the “weaponization” of Biden’s administration against a political opponent.

That case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, not federal prosecutors, although a former top official in the Biden administration’s U.S. Justice Department delivered the opening argument as a prosecutor in Bragg’s office. The Justice Department later prosecuted Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and he was convicted of three felonies in a federal gun trial. To neutral observers, it seemed the justice system might actually be working.

Such detail was sorely lacking in the debate, though. And the merciful absence of a Jerry Springer-esque audience, a split screen that showed both candidates while the other spoke and the fact that microphones were cut off when the other guy was talking worked more to Trump’s advantage, making him seem more measured than he really is while calling attention to Biden’s lack of energy. Biden upended his campaign with halting and meandering answers. Trump’s bluster and bravado, meanwhile, were magnified by staying on message.

His supporters will no doubt see that as a victory, facts and nuance and civility be damned.

Trump was able to stick to talking points about how the U.S. border is “the most dangerous place in the world” (It isn’t), how he had “the greatest economy in the history of the world” (He didn’t), and how the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, after 20 years of conflict was “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country’s life.”

That day was truly terrible: 13 U.S. service members died in a bombing at Kabul’s airport, the Taliban seized control of Kabul 10 days later, 78,000 Afghan allies were left behind, and some 900 Americans had to subsequently be evacuated two years after the exit. But the U.S. State Department blamed bad decisions by both the Trump and Biden administrations for the tumult.

Of course a debate with two-minute answers and one-minute responses and moderators who refused to seriously fact-check either candidate in real time left little space for such complexity.

It’s worth noting that debate stages are rarely the be-all and end-all of a presidential campaign.

In an evening with echoes of Thursday’s, President Barack Obama President put Democrats into a “sheer panic” when his first debate against Republican Mitt Romney went awry in 2012. Romney shot himself in the foot in Debate No. 2, with a comment about “binders full of women.”

And who can forget Ronald Reagan, 73, looking so old in his first debate with challenger Walter Mondale, 56, in 1984? In the opponents’ second debate, a moderator noted that Reagan was already the oldest president in U.S. history and asked whether he was ill-equipped for a crisis.

“Not at all,” Regan replied. “I want you to know that, also, I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Clearly, Biden at 81 lacks the Great Communicator’s verbal wizardry at 73. Whether Biden has a comeback of his own will be the biggest question in coming weeks as the “nattering nabobs of negativism” keep asking if he’s unfit for office and voters get polled on their thinking.

Between now and the Democratic convention, Joe and First Lady Jill Biden will have to discuss privately and with their closest advisers whether the president will step aside and release the delegates in Chicago.

But even if that hard-to-imagine free-for-all is considered best at the moment for the uncomfortable Democrats who are panicking over Biden’s sadly lacking stage presence Thursday night, it would be horrible for a nation for a major party to pick a new candidate for the November ballot without the monthslong primary calendar used every four years. There is a reason that millions and millions of people help select the nation’s most powerful public figure and get a say in who becomes the world’s most influential person.

It’s all starting to feel like a no-win situation.

Did their closing arguments Thursday night even matter?

Biden pledged to have a “fair tax system,” bringing the conversation back to the real economic and inflationary concerns that were the subject of the very first question in Thursday’s debate and that Americans worry about daily at grocery stores and gas stations from coast to coast. Trump said Americans are “living in Hell” and that “the whole country is exploding because of you.” By that point, there was no doubt many Americans had tuned out, their minds made up about for whom — or if — they’ll vote on Nov. 5.

A lot of them are burned out on elections and turned off by candidates up and down their ballots already. If turnout is low, this is why. No one won this debate. Not the candidates and not the moderators. In fact, the country lost.

Biden’s mental acuity is the big story now, not only for the next election but for the nearly seven months that he has left in his current term. That these are the best candidates either party can put forward is a sad state of affairs, sadder than those 90 debate minutes we’ll never get back and that should haunt us forever.

Send me 250-word letters to the editor here, 650-word guest essays here and email here. Say hi on X anytime.