I’m not sure I’d ever watched Donald Trump lie so incessantly, extravagantly and unabashedly, and that’s saying something. On Thursday night he lied about the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He lied about the violence in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. He lied about his relationship with the military, about his concern for the environment — about pretty much any and every subject that came up. He lied with a smile. He lied with a shrug. He lied with a sneer.
That should have been the main, maybe even the only, story of the debate, and it should have made him easy, pitiable prey for his opponent. But President Biden failed to take advantage of it. He seemed — there’s no getting around this — incapable of doing so. And that’s its own big story, one that will only grow over the hours and days ahead.
Biden, 81, came into his face-off with Trump knowing that many voters were concerned about his age and had doubts about his sharpness. His aides knew that, too. And he and they spent much of the past week devoted to preparation, preparation, preparation, pausing occasionally to assure nervous Democrats that Biden had this thing under control.
But from the moment the debate began, he seemed unsteady. Off. His expression was often frozen. His voice was often flat. He garbled words. He corrected himself midsentence, over and over again. He’d clearly memorized key talking points — key phrases — but he repeatedly used them without providing adequate context, swerved from one to another without any transition, halted sentences before they reached their destination, started sentences without giving them any bearings.
Ten minutes in, I had a knot in my stomach. Twenty minutes in, the knot was so tight, it hurt. “We finally beat Medicare,” he said early on, and I had no idea what he was talking about.
He got somewhat clearer as the night wore on. He found more animation. But the damage was done, and it may be significant. I shudder to type that, but there’s no sense in pretending. That’s perhaps what too many of his advisers have been doing up until now — ignoring or wishing away the obvious.
Then again, maybe Biden just had an uncharacteristically bad night. It’s possible. And even if this is now the diminished truth of him, it’s still preferable to the Big Lie of Trump, whose own sentences can be (and on Thursday frequently were) inscrutable, whose behavior is reliably unscrupulous and whose second administration would be stocked with corrupt, vengeful lackeys and would sully our democracy in ways from which we might never recover. As I’ve written before about the signs that Biden is past his peak, the presidency is more than the president: It’s the crew that the president assembles, the culture that the president creates. Biden at his least focused would establish a better crew and culture than Trump at his most.
But can Biden beat Trump? That question predated the debate and will be asked with even more urgency and panic in its aftermath. As will this one: Is it really too late for another Democrat to take Biden’s place? With stakes this high, mustn’t that be discussed one more time before the convention?
Again, I feel a bit sick saying that, because I believe that Biden is a decent man who, as president, has done a better than decent job. In both of those respects, he outpaces Trump by many miles, and if Republican politicians and voters had any decency of their own, they would have sidelined Trump long ago. (They had their chance. He was impeached twice, after all.)
But I’m not weighing in on Biden’s record. I’m evaluating his prospects. And I’m acknowledging that performances as shaky as the one he delivered on Thursday may hurt him badly with the small group of uncommitted voters who will decide what is almost guaranteed to be a very close election. Anyone and everyone who correctly understands the stakes of a Trump victory must grapple with that — and fast.
The best measure of Biden’s ineffectiveness on Thursday night was the dormant Vesuvius of Trump. He never even came close to erupting. Just as many people tuned in to the debate to see how much command Biden could muster and how much confidence he could project, many were curious about Trump’s degree of control. Would he rant, rave and remind voters of how dangerously erratic and fundamentally unpresidential he is?
He didn’t, at least not to the extent that he might have. Sure, he was pouty, petty and promiscuous with superlatives: Everything about him was the very best ever, while everything about Biden was the very worst. It was wholly unnuanced and utterly absurd. But he didn’t interrupt Biden. Didn’t shout. Didn’t scale the pinnacles of nastiness and mockery that he did in past debates.
And the reason was obvious in his bemused, pleased expression as Biden staggered through more than a few of his remarks. Trump realized that Biden was sabotaging himself. Trump reveled in that, at one point expressing puzzlement over some assertion that Biden had just made. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump scoffed. “I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
The astounding part was that Trump didn’t revel even more. The heartbreaking part was how Biden bungled what were clearly intended to be devastating lines. He connected the death of his son Beau, who did duty in Iraq as a major in the Delaware National Guard, to derogatory comments that Trump reportedly made about Americans who’d served in the military.
“My son was not a loser, not a sucker,” Biden proclaimed, but words that should have been immeasurably poignant just sort of hung there. “You’re the sucker,” Biden added. “You’re the loser.” I cringed. That’s Trump talk, not Biden talk, and its delivery was disjointed, unsettling, odd.
For most of the mere 90 minutes of the debate, Biden seemed to be grasping for something he couldn’t reach. I fear that’s a metaphor. I’m sure it’s a warning.
