The Democrats wanted and needed a compelling performance from Joe Biden last night: a rebuttal to the concerns about his age and ability. Instead, his performance was disastrous. His voice was hoarse, he rambled, frequently lost his chain of thought and sometimes couldn’t even get to the end of his sentences. Donald Trump was composed (not usual for him) and was as sharp as Biden was weak. When Trump went into his traditional hyperbole, Biden was unable to answer. It was perhaps the worst performance from any Democratic candidate in the television age and will now lead to panicked questions as to whether he can still be the candidate.
Trump was heading for the White House before this debate. He may well be heading for a landslide after it
The (televised) scenes in the spin room afterwards said it all: huge queues for reporters waiting for people able to say that Biden had done well. Very few came to spin. The best Democrats have been able to say is that Biden had a cold and warmed up. True, to an extent, but his warmed up was disastrously cold. Trump is not hard to outclass. But Biden ended up ribbing Trump for his weight and at one point bizarrely challenged him to a golf match. So Trump ended up the one saying: “let’s not act like children”. Their positions had reversed. Biden incinerated every obvious advantage.
One exchange summed up the evening: when Biden was crashing mid-sentence, saying he’d make sure that ‘we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to deal with. The covid. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with… what if we finally beat. Medicare.’ No one had a clue what he meant. Recognising this gift, Trump replied: ‘He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death. He destroyed Medicare’. The split-screen format means facial expressions matter – and Biden often seemed to freeze, as he has recently done so often, when Trump was his loquacious self. “I don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said at one point. “I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
Trump chastised Biden for backing Ukraine, repeating his lie that Zelensky leaves with $60 billion every time he comes to the US. Biden could have jumped in then pointed out how emboldened Putin would be if Trump lets him trample Ukraine – but his answer was weak, unmemorable. Biden said no US troops had died under his watch. But Trump had a decent point about Biden’s failure of deterrence: ‘the whole world is blowing up because of him.’ Biden had nothing to say in response. Biden did try to go on the offensive accusing Trump of ‘having sex with a porn star while your wife was pregnant’ and having ‘the morals of an alley cat’. But Trump didn’t get rattled, and replied that the public ‘know it’s a scam’. Trump was strong on his pre-Covid economic performance: ‘I gave you the largest tax cut in history… a country where the stock market was higher than pre-Covid’. Biden tried to blame Trump for the inflation, rather than his borrow-and-spend.
But it wasn’t really what was said but how it was said. Trump, 78, looked as vigorous and as watchable as he was in the 2016 debates. But this time, Trump looked presidential next to the mumbling Biden, 81, who looks a different man to that who ran for president four years ago. Few voters will have really been following his recent deterioration and will have tuned in to the horror for the first time last night.
American television news now is full of quotes from anonymous Democrats saying that Biden was awful and needs to be pulled as a candidate. Some are going on the record. “Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight and he didn’t do it,” said Claire McCaskill, a former Democrat senator. “He had one thing he had to accomplish, and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age. And he failed at that.” She said her phone was “blowing up” with Democrats saying that Biden needs to stand down.
So the debate after the debate is not about what was said last night. It’s about what the Democrats do now. How their fundraising will be hit by last night’s calamity. And their options: or lack thereof. Kamala Harris, the vice president, is more unpopular than her boss. The best that is being said of Biden is not that he did well last night, but that it might be an aberration. “You don’t turn your back because of one performance,” said Gavin Newsom, the (Democratic) governor of California. “What kind of party does that?”
The answer is simple: a party that wants win. The Democratic convention is coming up. This is their chance to choose a new candidate or send into a battle a candidate who has just exposed himself as fatally unfit. Biden is the one who called for this debate and the video debate clips how circling around the world will solidify opinions about him. He will not get another chance this summer. The next presidential debate is not due until 10 September.
Trump was heading for the White House before this debate. He may well now be heading for a landslide after it.