My Take on Tonight’s Trump Biden Debate

Yes, I watched the CNN debate.

It’s a choice I’ll regret for the rest of my life.

So that you don’t have to watch the CNN debate, I live tweeted the whole thing over on X/Twitter.  I’ve been covering Donald Trump’s political career for so long, it didn’t seem right to not tune in.

I don’t ever want to think about what I just watched again, but I’m going to summarize my thoughts briefly. Really, it doesn’t need a lot of depth.

Biden is, at a conservative estimate, fifteen years older than he was four years ago. His pep is gone. His voice is hoarse. He has less control over his stutter. The man who snarked “Geez, can you believe this clown?” is long gone.  I want to stress that I do not think Biden is actively senile. I think the gaslighting about his supposed dementia is just that, gaslighting. I think Biden is a man in his eighties who had a bad throat cold and wasn’t on top of his game. But his lackluster performance had me worried.

Trump was noticeably less coherent than he was four years ago as well. He still has that toxic reality television charisma, but he doesn’t have as much. And every word that came out of his mouth was a lie. It wasn’t just spin, it was fantasy. I don’t even know where to begin refuting his lies. No, it is not legal to murder infants after birth and it’s never been a Democratic goal to make it legal. No, there aren’t millions of escapees from mental hospitals bringing drugs across the border. No, these imaginary immigrants haven’t stolen forty million jobs from the Black community. No, the environment wasn’t the healthiest it’s ever been under Trump. No, the price of groceries hasn’t quadrupled. He lied, ridiculously, for ninety minutes straight.

Biden calmly refuted him with facts, in a scratchy voice. A few times in the beginning, he completely flubbed what he was going to say and that was painful to watch. Two or three times, he mixed up numbers and quickly corrected himself, saying “trillion” instead of “billion” and then saying “no, I’m sorry” and reversing it. Later, he found his stride and was much better at getting his taking points across. But it wasn’t entertaining. He didn’t have Trump on the ropes. I don’t know if it made Trump look weak or just made both of them look foolish. Time will tell.

CNN did not provide any fact checking of the things that Trump said in real time, not even once. They never pushed back on his statements. They never made him defend his obvious falsehoods. They let Biden do that. And they did not ask about Project 2025 which is an existential threat to our democracy, or about student loans, or any number of other important questions. It seemed as if they were desperately trying to seem fair by stacking the deck in Trump’s favor.

Finally, the whole thing devolved into madness as Trump boasted about his senility test and his golf score and Biden teased him for his weight. I was embarrassed just watching.

If you read a transcript of the entire debate, I think you’d find it clear that Biden won handily. But this wasn’t a written debate. This was a filmed performance by two men. Trump was the better performer. That frightens me.

And now all I see the media discussing is whether Biden is too feeble to be president. Don’t  get me wrong, I’m nervous about that as well. But hopefully they eventually get around to discussing the fact that Trump is a pathological liar, a narcissistic sociopath who wants to be a dictator and turn the Department of Justice against everyone he doesn’t like.

I really don’t even know what to say.

I have no idea where that leaves us.

I don’t think Biden lost the election tonight, but he might have won it tonight with a slick performance and he certainly didn’t.

And we’ve still got the Supreme Court ruling on Trump’s immunity to look forward to, possibly later this morning as I’m writing this after midnight Friday. And then there are the conventions, and a whole other debate.

Maybe I’ll go hide in the woods until November.