On the menu today: What do you think? Most presidential debates turn out to be not all that consequential, and mostly forgettable other than a moment or two. Last night’s matchup between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was so disastrous for the incumbent — top to bottom, beginning to end — that the Democratic Party may well choose to not nominate Biden for another four year term.
Biden’s Debate-Stage Disaster
Look at the bright side, Democrats: No one will believe that Biden was on speed, meth, or steroids Thursday night.
Go figure, the debate did live up to the hype. It lived up to the hype because for about 90 minutes, without a teleprompter, without prepared notecards, without a staff around him, without any protection, under the hot lights, and in the relentless glare of a television camera, 81-and-a-half-year-old Joe Biden was irrefutably exposed for what some of us have suspected he is for years — a man far too old to be president, who’s getting by with smoke and mirrors and minimal public appearances.
(The Morning Jolt, August 19, 2021: “Something Is Wrong with the President.”)
Joe Biden just can’t speak easily in complete sentences anymore. It’s more than just a stutter; the president pauses, awkwardly and for long stretches. He lost his train of thought several times and offered a lot of barely coherent mumbles. He looked and sounded exactly like what he is: a geriatric senior citizen who can barely maintain the appearance that he can handle the duties he has now, never mind until January 20, 2029.
The official explanation from the Biden campaign was that Biden had a cold. Yes, his voice was hoarse, and he coughed several times. But Biden didn’t merely look sick. He looked out of it — spaced out, exhausted. You would think he spent the entire afternoon chugging NyQuil.
If Biden really had a cold, he and his campaign should have asked for the debate to be postponed until Friday or early next week. Yes, Biden would have gotten some grief and accusations that he was trying to duck the debate, but if your candidate is temporarily having trouble speaking, you don’t put him out on live television for 90 minutes.
But there’s little reason to think that Joe Biden was or is temporarily impaired in his ability to think on his feet and speak extemporaneously and explain his decisions.
For years now, Biden, the First Lady, and the team around the president have acted like he has something to hide. He rarely holds formal press conferences or agrees to sit-down interviews and is increasingly dependent upon a teleprompter or notecards. He doesn’t do many events before 10 a.m. or after 4 p.m.; he spends almost every weekend at one of his houses in Delaware; and he rarely appears for a day or so after traveling overseas. Biden spent the last five days at Camp David preparing for this debate. Thursday night, for 90 minutes, we saw why Biden’s staff works so hard to minimize his time on camera taking questions. It’s not just that his body is old, it’s that his mind doesn’t work the way it used to.
Perhaps the worst element of the night for Biden were the split-screens while Trump was talking. Time and time again, Biden seemed to stare off into space, mouth hanging open, a confused, bewildered look on his face. We’ve seen that look on Biden at public events before, usually when someone else was blathering at a podium during some White House ceremony. But this was during a presidential debate, mano a mano against a man that Biden deems a threat to American democracy! If you’re not going to look alert and engaged then, when are you going to do it?
A candidate ought to look at his opponent, and when he’s getting attacked, shake his head sadly or otherwise express nonverbal disagreement. (In his debates, Mitt Romney used to have a perfect, faux-sympathetic, “You poor man. I hope you get the mental-health treatment you so desperately need” expression.) Biden stared at the floor or around the room, shifting his weight from one foot to the next so much he nearly leaned out of the camera’s frame.
(A minor but revealing sign that Biden just didn’t have his head in the game: It took him 45 minutes — or 20 pages of the debate transcript — to bring up Trump’s felony convictions.)
Joe Biden looked like a man ready for the Shady Acres retirement home.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from some of my Washington Post op-ed page colleagues.
Perry Bacon: “The president just struggled to answer questions at times.”
E. J. Dionne:
There is no question that it was a bad night for Biden. I was honestly surprised that he was not ready to go after Trump with energy and clarity. I had assumed that the Biden who often rose to the occasion would be the person on stage tonight. I am very sad to say that I was wrong and that we did not see that Biden tonight. And given that many Democrats went into the night nervous, they will come out of the night even more so. Even staunch Biden fans I have been in contact with are worried.
Shadi Hamid:
I do think after tonight Democrats need to have a conversation about whether Biden should still be the candidate and whether there might be some way to pressure him to stand down. I think that’s where we’re at here. It was that bad. And I think we have to speak frankly about that.
As our Phil Klein and others have observed, the mechanics of replacing Biden are difficult if the president refuses to withdraw from the nomination; Biden’s delegates to the convention are committed to him, and him alone. This means a Biden delegate is pledged only to Biden, and is not obligated to support Kamala Harris if Biden suddenly was no longer a candidate.
(Honestly, after last night, is it too outlandish to suggest that Biden’s cabinet should have invoked the 25th Amendment by now? Does Joe Biden look like a man who can execute his duties?)
The president’s performance on Thursday will have done nothing to allay their worries. He lost the debate from the first moments. His voice was weak and hoarse, shockingly so. At times, he struggled for words and appeared to lose his train of thought. It was a drastic contrast from the vigorous Biden who delivered a robust State of the Union speech in March.
Immediately after the debate, CNN’s John King reported that “there is a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party. It started minutes into the debate and continues right now. They’re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal.”
Democrats thought they had an octogenarian who could keep it together for 90 minutes. They bet wrong, and the whole world was watching.
You know who’s looking really vindicated tonight? Special counsel Robert Hur.
You know who else is looking vindicated? Former Texas Democratic representative Julián Castro, the lone 2020 presidential-primary rival who was willing to go after Biden’s memory and mental capacities in one of the primary debates, and insisted afterward that he didn’t regret it. (It didn’t help that Biden called Castro “Cisernos” a month later.) Julián Castro might as well have been cast into the Phantom Zone for daring to question Biden’s memory and mental acuity.
Donald Trump had far from a perfect night, but he looked like a man with the energy to be president for the next four years. Trump served up a bunch of his trademark weird moments, labeling Biden “a very bad Palestinian” and speaking in his usual online shorthand — “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “the 51 intelligence agents,” “the new thing with the 16 economists.” (You and I know what Trump was referring to in those phrases, but the average voter at home might not.)
But the former president appeared comparably enthusiastic and in command. He was his usual hyperbolic self, insisting everything was roses and sunshine during his presidency, and that under Biden, “We’re living in a rat’s nest” and “for three and a half years, we’re living in hell.”
Compared to a normal presidential candidate, Trump played fast and loose with the facts and offered the audience at home an insufferably large serving of braggadocio. But compared to Biden, he looked like Cicero.
Late in the debate, Trump and Biden teamed up to offer Americans what they have always yearned to watch in a presidential debate: a 78-year-old and an almost 82-year-old arguing about who is the better golfer.
Two other comments from the past that are worth revisiting this morning:
Chris Cillizza, writing at CNN, August 19, 2021:
Scott, Hagerty, Hewitt and Geraghty are not doctors. Or medical professionals. . . . This is the sort of gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life. If Republicans have some sort of proof that Biden is declining, they should bring it forward. If they don’t, they should stop doing what they’re doing. Immediately.
The Morning Jolt, June 20, 2022:
I think the single most predictable “bombshell” of the coming years is that sometime in 2025, someone like Bob Woodward or Robert Costa will publish a book with a title like “Perpetual Crisis: Inside the Biden White House,” and we will “learn” something like:
The president’s official health report said he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klain, and Susan Rice were deeply concerned the president’s health was rapidly declining, and that he would soon be unable to perform his duties. His speech was becoming less and less coherent, his thinking more erratic, his mood shifts more intense, and he angrily lashed out at routine advice or recommendations. He insisted he had not been told things he had been briefed on and that his wrong statements were correct. He repeatedly insisted the U.S. had committed to protecting Taiwan, when no treaty required it. When asked about this, Biden insisted no policy had changed. At almost every public appearance, no matter how much he had been instructed to stick to the teleprompter’s prepared remarks, Biden would go off script and add some comment or outburst — like “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!” — that undermined his message and created new foreign-policy headaches.
But the first lady, Klain, and Rice all concurred that Biden’s problems could be hidden from the public, at least for now, and that Vice President Harris taking over was unthinkable — both because it would be too traumatic for the country and because they had little faith in Harris’s ability to defeat Trump or DeSantis in 2024. Either man entering the Oval Office in January would put nothing less than all of American democracy at risk. For the good of the country, Biden had to stay in place, and his cognitive decline hidden — much as FDR’s disability, JFK’s back pain, and Woodrow Wilson’s stroke had been hidden before.
Though it will be treated like a bombshell revelation, the fact is we all have eyes and ears and can see and hear Biden.
I was far from alone in concluding that Biden was succumbing to the effects of old age. You didn’t need to be a doctor to see that; you just needed to watch and listen to Biden and remember what a normal president’s schedule was.
But far, far too many people in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media attacked anyone who observed this and said so publicly, and offered nonsense spin that Biden was so energetic, “I can’t keep up with him,” or that Biden has more energy now than when he was in his 40s. Videos of Biden looking old and doddering had to be “cheap fakes.”
It was all nonsense. They lied to us. And we knew they were lying to us. Because if Biden was the energetic, sharp, top-of-his-game guy they described, sooner or later, that guy would come out where we could see him.
Last night, someone shared a beautiful, powerful quote from HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl, which every figure in public life ought to remember: “When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
ADDENDUM: I have a marathon day of podcast taping and television this Friday — the usual Three Martini Lunch podcast, a Washington Post op-ed page podcast, The Editors podcast, and then an appearance on NBC News’ Meet the Press Now.