Election Countdown, 130 Days to Go: A Bad Night for America.
Election Countdown, 130 Days to Go: A Bad Night for America.
Let me count the ways.
Deb and I watched every minute of the dreadful “debate” tonight on CNN. I grabbed the remote to turn off the TV the instant the pundit-panels kicked in. A man can take only so much.
So what follows is my own “certified organic” reaction to what I just saw. It may or may not match the prevailing reaction tone—I haven’t seen or listened to any of it. That’s for the morning. Apologies in advance for inevitable late-night typos.
1) The overview: A disastrous start.
Thirty minutes in I tweeted out this summary:
Things shifted—in Biden’s favor, and against Trump—as the night went on. But I can’t imagine that many people stuck it out as long as I felt obliged to. And what made the opening-minutes performance so striking is the “range” point I mention in the tweet, which is a version of the famed “expectations game.”
—Biden’s range. Everyone know that Joe Biden is old. And everyone has seen the way his carriage, his gait, his facial expressions have become stiffer and more labored during his time in office.
But anyone who has watched Biden in office has seen him time and again “exceed expectations”—seeming to shake off the years and come on strongest when the stakes were highest. The best-known recent example was this year’s State of the Union address. In the days before, Fox and the GOP were presenting him as comatose. On the day after, they were saying that he’d shouted too much and must have been on pep pills — what else could have made him come across so forcefully?
The State of the Union wasn’t the only example. Biden also did very well with his big D-Day address just this month, with his commencement speech at Morehouse before that, and in most other recent performances. His trademark had become “beating the spread,” rallying when it counted most.
That is what I was expecting tonight. The Trump forces must also have been expecting it, given their revival this week of the “pep-pills” line to pre-discount a strong Biden performance.
So that is why his halting, raspy, fact-clogged, uneasy-sounding first set of answers was so startling. Without consciously realizing it, I had gotten used to the idea that in a crunch he could sound younger than he looks. This time he sounded (and looked) very old. That’s what I meant by the bottom of his range.
—The range for Trump. Everyone knows that Trump rambles and rants and makes things up as he plays to the crowd. And in its sentence-by-sentence content, what he said this evening was as outrageous a slurry of insults, nonsense, narcissism, and lies as any of his standard rally speeches. I can type fast, but I literally could not record the lies as quickly as he uttered them. Daniel Dale and others at CNN tried to keep up in an online tally here.
But sentence by sentence, the Trump of these opening minutes sounded more polite, less ranting, more concise, and generally more “normal” than the man who spins his stories about sharks or shouts that everything is rigged. That’s what I meant about the high end of his range. In one of the debate chronicles I wrote back in the pre-Trump era, I noted that sometimes you can judge a debate’s effect by watching it with the sound turned off, and just noticing the expressions and body language. In tonight’s case, if you listened “with the words turned off” — ignoring content and just listening to tone of voice — you’d hear Trump sounding much more confident and forceful, and, bizarrely, calmer, than Biden did.
—And for CNN. The moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, are both fully capable of very tough follow-up questioning. They did almost zero of that tonight, presumably because of whatever pact CNN had to sign to make the debate happen.
As a result, Trump could reel off one preposterous, defamatory, easily disprovable lie after another—for instance, that Biden is a “Manchurian Candidate” paid by the Chinese government, or Trump’s repeated claim that Democratic governors favored making it legal to kill babies “even after birth”—and Bash or Tapper would respond with, “Thank you. And now to you, President Biden…”
Even at his best, Biden wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the torrent of lies. No one could: You can get out a lie in one sentence, but it will take three or four to explain the truth. (For instance: Trump’s claim that Biden was going to “wipe out” Social Security and Medicare by putting “millions and millions” of illegal immigrants on the rolls. In fact, immigrants improve the finances of those programs, because they are on average young. But, as you see, it takes more words to lay that out.) And Biden was far from at his best.
The net effect: Trump started out the debate lying but sounding controlled; Biden started out fact-burdened and sounding unsteady; and CNN became the sluice for this toxic lie-dense fare.
2) The two oddest lines.
Number one, from Joe Biden: “You have the morals of an alley cat.” Sounds like it was from a 1930s movie, but came across as authentically Bidenesque.
It would have been even more movie-esque if that line had ended with “Donald.” But Biden never addressed him that way. Trump, by contrast, several times called him not “Mr. President” or “President Biden” but “Joe.”
Number two, from Donald Trump: right after the alley-cat line, “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.”
Hoooh boy. Apart from everything else—ie, that absolutely no one believes his claim—this is the weird punctiliousness that caused Trump such trouble in the Stormy Daniels trial. (You remember how this worked: If Trump hadn’t insisted on denying the encounter, then the prosecution couldn’t have called Daniels as a witness, and then ….) Among the many mysteries of Trump are the points of vanity or pride he simply won’t let go. Which leads us to…
3) The most preposterous exchange.
Perhaps no one dares tell Trump that he looks ridiculous when he brags about “acing” a screening test for incipient dementia. Because he won’t stop talking about it. Even in a debate like this. From the CNN transcript:
I took two tests, cognitive tests. I aced them, both of them, as you know. We made it public. He [Biden] took none. I’d like to see him take one, just one, a real easy one. Like go through the first five questions, he couldn’t do it. But I took two cognitive tests…
I’m in very good health. I just won two club championships, not even senior, the regular club championships! To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way.
And this is the person who started out the debate sounding more “normal.” Giant meteor, please strike us now.
4) A lie that won’t go away.
On the Atlantic’s site before the debate, Jeffrey Goldberg had a post about a revelation that apparently gnaws at Trump more deeply than the nuttiness about cognitive-test scores. It was Goldberg’s report, now backed up by multiple sources, that Trump had referred to American soldiers in World War I military cemeteries as “suckers” and “losers.”
Biden introduced the quote, and Trump blew up:
First of all, that was a made-up quote, “suckers and losers.” They made it up. It was in a third-rate magazine that’s failing, like many of these magazines. He made that up…. I’m so glad this came up, and he brought it up. There’s nobody that’s taken better care of our soldiers than I have.
To think that I would, in front of generals and others, say suckers and losers – we have 19 people that said it was never said by me. It was made up by him, just like “Russia, Russia, Russia was made up.”…
He [apparently Biden] made up the suckers and losers, so he should apologize to me right now.
We have not heard the last of this story.
5) As the evening wore on.
Joe Biden was notably stronger in the final 30 minutes of the debate. And Trump became notably nastier, more sweeping in his claims, more direct in his insults. Gesturing toward Biden, he said “Our veterans and our soldiers can’t stand this guy.” This guy being the Commander in Chief. “They can’t stand him. They think he’s the worst ‘commander in chief,’ if that’s what you call him, that we’ve ever had. They can’t stand him.”
And
He is the worst president in the history of our country. He’s destroyed our country…
He wants open borders. He wants our country to either be destroyed or he wants to pick up those people as voters. We just can’t let it happen. If he wins this election, our country doesn’t have a chance. Not even a chance of coming out of this rut. We probably won’t have a country left anymore. That’s how bad it is. He is the worst in history by far.
This was Trump back down in his familiar range. Was anyone still watching or listening at that point? Would it give anyone who is “Trump-curious” second thoughts? Who knows.
6) The worst omen for the planet from the evening.
Dana Bash asked Trump what he would do about climate. He answered on an entirely unrelated topic. She came back:
BASH: 38 seconds left, President Trump. Will you take any action as President to slow the climate crisis?
TRUMP: So, I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it… We had the best numbers ever. We were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever.
That was essentially it.
7) The most un-American parts of the evening.
It’s a contest of two. One was Trump’s insistence, especially toward the end of the debate, that the US had become what he used to call a shithole country. For instance:
For three-and-a-half years, we’re living in hell…
The whole country is exploding because of you [Biden], because they don’t respect you. And they have to respect their president and they don’t respect you throughout the world.
We’re in a failing nation, but it’s not going to be failing anymore. We’re going to make it great again.
Candidates challenging an incumbent always say the country has problems. “We’re living in hell” is a further twist.
But the more significantly anti-American note from Trump was his flat-out refusal, under follow-up questioning from Dana Bash, to say that he would accept the results of an election. (By the way, neither moderator asked Trump, “Who won the 2020 election?” Perhaps that was part of an agreement as well.)
The follow-up exchange, after Trump had avoided answering the first time:
BASH: President Trump, the question was, will you accept the results of the election regardless of who wins? Yes or no, please?
TRUMP: If it’s a fair and legal and good election – absolutely.
If. That is the same qualifier he always uses. This exchange should get as much coverage from this “debate” as Biden’s hoarseness and hesitation.
8) What happens now?
I hope someone has a clearer idea on this front than I do.
For now, good night, after a bad night.
I also wish the leaders of the Democratic Party in Washington would invite Anne Applebaum to Washington as soon as possible to flesh out the brilliant solution to the Democratic Party's predicament that she outlined in her article entitled "Time To Roll The Dice" in the Atlantic Magazine.
We too watched the debate in its entirety. It was a sad night, thinking that our oldest grandchild, casting his first vote, will be faced with a choice between a senile old man and a convicted felon. Then the next night we went to opening night at the Santa Fe Opera, where the season always begins with the orchestra playing The Star Spangled Banner and the audience standing up singing. We do have a great country, and I marvel at how we have let it come to this.
There are many one could blame. I would start with the Clintons. After what, in my opinion, was a great presidency, we had them trying to make a Boomer Comeback 16 years later, when we all should have been celebrating the fact that "the torch [had] been passed to a new generation." Then there is Ruth Bader Ginsburg who allowed her ego to set the stage for the undoing of much of her life's work and legacy. Now we have Biden who doesn't know how to quit. It all reminds me of The Old Man and the Sea who lost everything because he "went out too far."
I will vote for Biden, of course, if it comes to that. There are millions of people I'd rather see as President than Donald Trump, including many Republicans. But our country is better than the choice we are putting out there, and we ought to get about fixing that problem before it's too late.