Special Garage Sale! First 2020 Presidential Debate
I didn't watch. I was pretty sure
of what would go down.
Apparently, I was right.
Here's a bouquet from across
the internet.
Trump mayhem takes over first debate
The president interrupted and bullied. Biden called the president a “clown.” Chris Wallace, the moderator, despaired.
Biden didn’t.
Trump just left viewers worse off for having sat through the whole, weird thing.
The president interrupted and bullied. Biden called the president a “clown.” Chris Wallace, the moderator, despaired.
“The country would be better served,” the veteran journalist said to Trump, “if we allow both people to speak with fewer interruptions."
The result was a circus that will be viewed as one of the strangest confrontations in modern presidential history.
At one point, when Wallace asked Trump, as he did repeatedly, to let Biden finish one of his answers, Biden responded, “He doesn’t know how to do that.”
The debate was unwatchable, in some ways a fitting conclusion to a day that began with Republicans peddling conspiracy theories about Biden wearing an earpiece.
He wasn’t, Biden's campaign says. Nor was there any evidence, despite Trump’s suggestions, that Biden was on drugs.
What is clear — just as much after the debate as before it — is that Biden is ahead in this race and Trump will leave the debate still desperate for something to pull him down.
He is running out of time, with early voting already underway in some states and few voters still undecided .
Here are the the takeaways from Tuesday's debate:
Biden stood his ground
Trump’s nonstop interruptions might have worked had the bulldozing made Biden look small.
It didn’t. Instead, it served to align Biden with Wallace — and through the moderator, viewers at home. Trump labored to talk over them both.
The effect of the chaos was that Biden could do little affirmatively to make his case for president. But as the frontrunner, the onus was not on him to.
Instead, he stood in for the onslaught, at times laughing Trump off, at others belittling him.
“You’re the worst president America has ever had,” Biden said. “Come on.”
Trump had to know that Biden would be more difficult to flatten than he’d once anticipated. For months, Trump had portrayed Biden as confused and mentally “out of it,” and everyone could see right through the course correction when it came.
Biden was an “uneven” debater, Trump said Sunday — sometimes “okay,” but probably because he used performance enhancing drugs. Before the debate, insinuating the presence of an earpiece (a claim Biden’s campaign denied), Trump’s advisers asked for a pre-debate inspection of Biden’s ears.
It was too late. Trump pushed expectations for Biden so low that his supporters turned on their televisions expecting to see Biden — teleprompter-less — collapse in a puddle of his own drool. Since he didn’t, they were in for a deflating night.
The kernel of truth in Trump’s assessment of Biden is that he has, in fact, been an uneven debater. Viewers of the Democratic primary debates will remember him telling parents to keep “ the record player on ” at night, promising to “ keep punching ” at domestic violence and imploring an audience to “ go to ‘Joe 30330 ,’” as if they could text a website.
Biden wasn’t eloquent on Tuesday. But he didn’t need to be. Americans have already grimaced through reels of Joe Biden gaffes — and they don’t seem to care. He didn’t need a standout performance, only a stable one. And because of Trump’s wildly undisciplined exercise in expectation setting – and bizarre commitment to interruption – Biden only needed to come off as sane.
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Trump was asked to denounce white supremacy. He wouldn’t.
The president not only didn’t condemn white supremacy, but actively stoked it by telling the Proud Boys to “stand by.”
“You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out antifa and other extremist groups. Are you willing to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and say they need to stand down and not to add to the violence in these cities as we saw in Kenosha and in Portland?” Wallace asked.
“Sure, I’m willing to do that,” Trump first replied, with Wallace asking him to do it, before Trump turned the discussion away from white supremacists and shifted blame. “But I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.”
Trump then spoke directly to a noted hate organization : “ Proud Boys , stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody has to do something about antifa and the Left.”
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Proud Boys Cheer Trump Shoutout As He Refuses To Condemn White Supremacy
Moderator Chris Wallace tee’d up the question for the President. And it was a softball: “Are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.”
Sure, Trump began, “I’m willing to do that, but…”
“Then do it!” Joe Biden said.
But Trump didn’t: “I would say almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not from the right-wing.”
Wallace pressed again, but Trump asked for specifics: “What do you want to call them? Give me a name.”
White supremacists, Wallace said.
“The Proud Boys,” Biden interjected, referring to the right-wing street gang that relishes physical confrontations.
Trump wound up, then let out a dribbler.
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing problem.”
Within minutes, a social media account for the Proud Boys had turned Trump’s quote into a celebratory graphic . Their leadership cheered Trump . Joe Biggs, a prominent Proud Boy in Portland, subsequently wrote , “Trump basically said to go fuck them up! this makes me so happy.”
“President Trump told the proud boys to stand by because someone needs to deal with ANTIFA…well sir!” Biggs wrote separately. “We’re ready!!!
It was anything but a condemnation, as civil rights groups pointed out.
“This is all they’ve wanted since 2016,” wrote Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, referring to the Proud Boys leaders’ posts and Trump’s non-condemnation.
“Trying to determine if this was an answer or an admission,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt , CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.
“@POTUS owes America an apology or an explanation. Now.”
The President Is a Sociopath. And 60 Million Americans Like It.
The Cleveland debate revealed everything and changed nothing.
Who won? I don’t know. Honestly: I cannot understand how anyone with an IQ over 80 could have watched this disgrace and not come away understanding that the president of the United States is a sociopath.
But I’ll try to put myself in the mind of voters and tell you what I saw.
Donald Trump dominated the debate. Utterly and completely. He was a doughy, orange honey-badger, yelling, shouting, cajoling, needling and—this is the important part—never shutting up. He kept ploughing ahead, no matter what. He bulldozed Chris Wallace. He bulldozed Joe Biden. He turned every question into what he wanted to talk about. He hit all of the notes he wanted: Burisma, stock market, shutdowns, Pocahontas.
If you are a fan of the Trump lifestyle brand—if you have a Trump flag on your boat and wear a MAGA hat because you love pissing off the brown girl with the nose ring at Starbucks—then I suspect that you thought this was the greatest performance by any debater in the history of debates.
So I’m going to guess that people were very happy on Parler.
On the other hand, it’s not clear to me that Trump’s act was effective with undecided voters.
And I say this because Trump treated the debate like he was trying to win an argument between two baby mamas on a trash daytime show, while Joe Biden made a concerted effort throughout the debate to pretend that Trump wasn’t there, often talking directly to voters.
Examples: When Biden brought up the Woodward tapes and Trump’s lying to America about COVID because he didn’t want to panic the country, here’s what Biden said, as he looked straight into the camera: “You don’t panic. He panicked.”
After Trump blubbered about how great the economy is right now, Biden looked straight into the camera and asked, “You folks at home—how well are you doing?”
On one of Trump’s attempts to beat up on Hunter Biden, the vice president gestured straight into the camera and explained, “This is not about my family or his family, it’s about your family.”
The net effect of this was that Biden had a coherent message throughout: I’m on your side.
I can, however, tell you with complete certainty who lost the debate: America.
If you care at all about this country, then there are four things that should terrify you.
(1) The president of the United States was asked to condemn white nationalists and refused. He hemmed and hawed. He tried to shimmy out of it. And in the end the best he could muster was to tell the Proud Boys to “stand by.” The Proud Boys heard his message and saw it as a call to action .
(2) The president of the United States was asked to pledge to tell his supporters to remain calm following the election and to not preemptively declare victory. He flatly refused.
(3) The president of the United States said that “They came after me trying to do a coup.” And that: “We’ve caught them. We’ve caught them all.” And that one of “them” is his opponent.
(4) More than 60 million Americans are going to vote for the president of the United States.
Regardless of who wins this election, how are we supposed to make this thing—here I am referring euphemistically to our glorious experiment in self-government—work when 40 percent of the country wants this shit —here I am not being euphemistic—from their president?
Because these preferences are not based on policy differences concerning marginal tax rates or trade policy or deregulation.
A serious question: Do we need more debates?
I ask for two reasons. First, because that debate felt like it was 7 hours long. It was emotionally, spiritually, physically exhausting. And for no payoff. Nobody learned anything from this debate. And no one is going to learn anything from more debates.
In fact, I would suggest that having two more of these spectacles can only further demean our country and erode the standards we hold for the conduct of people who serve in government.
But the political reality is that Biden has to endure more of this insanity. Canceling would look weak. Voters always prefer the guy who’s willing to work hard for their votes. And this is trite but true: If you want the job of facing down Xi Jinping, you have to be able to face down a reality-show host.
Will this debate matter?
Probably not. The race is stable for a reason.
Now that in itself is bad for Trump. He’s down large and there’s very little time left on the clock. But even that doesn’t so much matter because—as Trump said at the end—his victory scenario no longer entails winning more votes.
If you take anything from Tuesday’s debate, it should be this: The president of the United States’s re-election strategy is to claw his way to victory after the fact by using the courts to throw out votes that have been cast for his opponent.
The entire affair left me feeling like Dr. Leonid Pavel.
The most important fact about this debate is that going into it President Trump was clearly behind. He needed to shift the dynamic of the race, force some major error, introduce some new factor. That didn’t happen. I saw nothing tonight that seems at all likely to improve things for President Trump. Nothing.
Biden did fine. Not great. But fine. I’d say he had a B performance with some B+ or even A- minus moments. But for him that’s fine. He’s ahead. He’s not running as best debater. He’s not running as most dynamic figure. He’s not competing for most unstable affect. He’s running as the guy who will end the nightmare. If that’s the goal he turned in just the right performance.
To the extent there was any strategy to Trump’s ranting – and I think it was mainly instinctual – it was to create chaos in the hope that it would throw Biden off his stride and prompt some scattered or damaging moment. That didn’t happen. It was really just Trump yelling. That was the strategy his surrogates previewed. And if he had triggered some embarrassing flub perhaps it would have been a winning strategy. Everybody knows Trump’s a bully and a loudmouth. That’s not new information. But maybe it would be worth it if he forced some major error from Biden. He didn’t. And so what we had was Trump ranting, visibly angry, launching off on numerous digressions, lying. It was ugly, unhinged and exhausting – a good summary of Trump’s entire presidency.
One thing that struck me was that the few times when Biden was able to speak uninterrupted for 30 or 60 seconds he was actually devastating against Trump. I was thinking, Trump’s right to keep interrupting. When Biden gets to talk it’s terrible for Trump.
Biden spent a lot of time simply laughing at Trump. That made for a good visual and it also clearly enraged the President. That spurred Trump to be even more self-injuring. It made him more spluttering. Donald Trump is the President of the United States. And yet half the time during this spectacle he looked like the loudmouth yelling taunts and insults outside a party he’s pissed he wasn’t invited to.
He looked weak and angry.
There are definitely people who think Biden didn’t seem strong enough reacting to or containing Trump’s tirades. Basically I don’t think this is right. Clearly Biden isn’t really quite able to keep up with Trump’s antics. I don’t say that because of age. It’s just characterologically beyond him, for better or worse. But Biden’s not running for arguer. He held his own and simply showed himself to be a very different kind of person, a very different kind of potential President. That’s a win for him.
Trump talked a lot more. In a sense he did “dominate” the debate. But most of it was self-injuring.
I think there’s a decent chance this performance will be quite damaging for Trump. But who knows? Other outrages have rolled over him like water over a duck’s back. What I’m very confident of is that Trump needed to change things in his favor. He failed to do that. Since he’s behind, and significantly behind, that is a huge missed opportunity and a big loss.
No More Debates
In Cleveland, our national humiliation continued.
Yes, some observers can criticize Chris Wallace’s performance as moderator. Others can point out that Joe Biden wasn’t always as quick or as sharp as he might have been. But let’s not fall into the trap of some sort of fake even-handedness.
Tuesday’s debate in Cleveland was a disgrace because of the behavior of one man, Donald Trump. The interrupting and the bullying, the absence of both decency and dignity—those were Donald Trump’s distinctive contributions to the evening, and they gave the affair the rare and sickening character of a national humiliation.
There should be no more “debates.” For the sake of the country, Joe Biden should refuse to appear again on the same stage as Donald Trump. Biden can have weekly or twice weekly town halls, including with Trump supporters. He can do all manner of interviews and forums. He can make clear he’s happy to engage with the American public in all kinds of ways. But he should not put the nation through another ordeal like that.
Let Tuesday night have been Trump’s final, disreputable appearance on a nationally televised stage. Let him conduct the rest of his campaign desperately yelling to crowds of true believers as his defeat grows ever nearer.
As for the debate’s effect on the horse race, I suspect Biden ended up benefitting. Trump was surely off-putting to any but those true believers who were already for him. So the odds of a Trump comeback are, I would judge, lower now than they have ever been.
Biden supporters should welcome this result. But Americans of all stripes should be ashamed of what we saw—what the world saw—on Tuesday night.
Donald Trump is a shameful figure.
But that he will have been our 45th president is our shame as a nation.
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The debate could be watched in China, and it was. I watched on the CTV (Canada Television Network) web site. I also saw the tail end of a discussion about the debate on Chinese English language TV (CGTN) and heard a final comment that Trump was "CHILDISH", and he sure as hell was. I can't wait to see the comments from other countries. They will be guarded, of course, but I'm sure will make the point that Trump was an embarrassment for America.
There was some talk of "Proud Boys". It made me wonder how many Trump-supporting newstalker members are PROUD of the performance of their champion.
Virtually everyone in the mainstream media says Trump embarrassed the country as it has never been embarrassed by a sitting president before. Trumpsters say who cares about the mainstream media.
Evidently Trump supporters respect someone who acts like a rabid dog.
The adult population of the United States has to realize that we are in war for the determination of what kind of a country we will have. In war you have to be forceful, and the good people of the country have to speak out as best they can that we have to end the Trump regime and the plague of Trumpism.
I saw a tweet yesterday that was part of a transcript of an interview with Miles Taylor, the guy who was a high level deputy in the Department of Homeland Security that either quit or was fired ( I dont remember which) and has since been very critical of Donald Trump. In this interview Taylor says that he has been told by someone currently in the White House that Trump and Stephen Miller are planning a "shock and awe" campaign against immigrants in a second Trump term. Under maniacs like Trump and Stephen Miller "shock and awe" could be something terrifying.
These people have to be stopped.
Trump Can’t Do Anything But Amp Up Threats Of Election And Transition Chaos
In a relentless and head-spinning rant, the President at Tuesday’s debate refused to promise a peaceful transition in the event of his defeat, he threw out some of his most sensationally bogus claims about mail-in voting yet, and he made clear that he’s counting on the Supreme Court to take a “look” at the ballots.
The tirade was shocking but not surprising for a President who claimed falsely that the 2016 election that he won was nonetheless marred by “millions” of fraudulent voters that explained his defeat in the popular vote.
On Tuesday, he predicted baselessly that the 2020 election will feature “f raud like you have never seen.” He conjured bizarre images of ballots of “found in creeks,” “dumped in rivers” and “sold” by “mailmen.”
The diatribe was kicked off by simple question from debate moderator Chris Wallace: What would each candidate do in the next month and a half to assure the American public that the next president was the legitimate winner of November’s election.
Former Vice President Joe Biden urged Americans to put aside all the fear-mongering Trump was doing about the election, and to embrace the power they have to end his presidency by voting him out of office.
“ This is all about trying to dissuade people from voting because he is trying to scare people into thinking it’s not going to be legitimate,” Biden said. “ Show up and vote. You will determine the outcome of this election.”
When Trump’s turn was up, he jumped immediately into the baseless idea that he was somehow denied a “peaceful transition,” reiterating his frequent yet ridiculous claims that the Russia probe was an attempted “coup” on his presidency.
“So don’t tell me about a free transition,” he sniped at Biden.
“As far as the ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster,” Trump continued. He tried to walk through some of the overhyped claims of election irregularities that have been sensationalized by his allies, including his own Justice Department’s odd handling of an administrative error in Pennsylvania that affected a handful of military ballots. He then landed on what appears to be the focal point of his efforts to delegitimize the election by suggesting that any election that takes longer than Election Day night to report is somehow suspect.
“It’s nice, on Nov. 3 you’re watching and you see who won the election, and I think we’re going to do well,” Trump predicted. “But you know what? We might not know for months because these ballots are going to be all over.”
Wallace jumped in to pin down Trump on whether he was expecting the Supreme Court — including his nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett — to settle any disputes that arise from the election.
“I think I’m counting on them to look at the ballots, definitely. I hope we don’t need them, in terms of the election itself, but for the ballots, I think so,” Trump said, before he pivoted back to his claims of mail-in voting being a “horrible thing for this country.”
“This is not going to end well,” he predicted.
The emergency is happening right now
Trump’s Proud Boys and voting comments in the first 2020 debate reveal a country in the midst of a democratic crisis.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
The two biggest moments of the first 2020 Biden-Trump presidential debate , when put together, reveal just how much danger American democracy is in.
The first moment came when moderator Chris Wallace asked President Trump to condemn white supremacists and tell them to refrain from violence. When Trump demanded a specific group to criticize, Vice President Joe Biden supplied one: the Proud Boys . Trump did the opposite.
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” the president said, immediately adding: “I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.” “Standing down and standing by sir,” the group’s official account wrote on Telegram , a messaging app commonly used by extremists.
The second moment came at the very end, during a discussion of Trump’s (false) claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Wallace asked Trump if he would “urge his supporters to stay calm” and “pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified.” Trump responded by once again doing the opposite, calling on his fans to engage in behavior that sounds a lot like voter intimidation:
These were both moments when Trump was asked to explicitly affirm baseline principles of American democracy, the kind of thing so basic you can’t imagine them being asked in a previous presidential debate.
Instead, he told a violent far-right group to “stand by.” He called on his supporters to head to the polls and “watch” what’s happening — specifically in Philadelphia, a majority-minority city. Putting two and two together here leads to a very scary four: The president seems to be actively stoking violent conflict surrounding American elections.
“What would you say if you saw it in another country? A democratic emergency,” writes Brendan Nyhan , a political scientist at Dartmouth College.
Trump has smashed the rules of democracy
There have been ominous signs on the peaceful election front already. Trump supporters have already disrupted early voting in Virginia ; Donald Trump Jr. called on supporters to join a Trump “army” that would provide “ election security .”
We can’t yet know for sure whether Trump’s debate night rhetoric will escalate this, directly causing acts of violence related to the election. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.
But the fact that I even have to say “maybe” should underscore how profoundly fucked up this all is.
The president of the United States should not have a hard time condemning far-right militants and calling for a peaceful election. Trump’s behavior is the sort of thing you expect in very weak and young democracies , especially ones that had recently experienced civil war. These are places where key political actors don’t accept the rules of the democratic game and are willing to take up arms if they’re defeated. These are the kinds of places where leaders call on friendly militias to “stand by.”
But Trump clearly doesn’t care about democracy. The litany of anti-democratic behaviors — suborning neutral institutions like the Justice Department, turning foreign policy into an extension of his reelection campaign, openly stating his admiration for foreign dictators’ authoritarian behaviors — should at this point be familiar to every politically engaged American.
Proud Boys heckle Black Lives Matter protestors in Columbus, Ohio, on July 18, 2020.
Zach D. Roberts/NurPhoto/Getty Images
He has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the election will be rigged against him, including during the debate, and refused to promise a “peaceful transition” if he loses.
To put it crudely, Trump has adopted the political attitude of a would-be dictator or post-conflict warlord: My opponents cannot win, and if they do, I simply will not accept it. He has been able to get away with this because the Republican Party has refused to abandon him, and nobody expects the first debate to be a breaking point on that front.
The effects of all this on a democratic system are corrosive. At its most fundamental level, democracy depends on all major political players agreeing to accept what happens in elections. If one faction doesn’t, and simply refuses to abide by the rules, there’s nothing to force them to comply other than, well, force.
Terrifyingly, Trump has introduced that prospect into modern American politics. His approach to politics is one that, in other countries, causes the breakdown of democratic political systems and constitutional crises. Rhetoric that seems to stoke election-related violence is another significant step in that direction.
The debate was so bad that circus workers say it's offensive to call it a circus
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An Epic Moment of National Shame: The Debate Was an Embarrassment for the Ages
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Trump slammed for ‘avalanche of lying’ in brutal takedown by CNN fact-checker
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Bob Woodward Blasts Trump After Wild Debate Performance: ‘He Is Assassinating the Presidency’
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Frank Luntz Focus Group Describe’s Trump Debate Performance as ‘Horrid,’ ‘Un-American,’ ‘Bully,’ and ‘Crackhead’
From the last article. Coming from a long-time, top-level Republican operative lekie Frank Luntz, this is spectacular:
There are a few commentators out there who are trying to criticize Biden for calling Trump a clown and for telling Trump to shut up. Believe me, Biden was understated in his response.
Joe gave Trump a whooping. Deal with that...
lol. is that seriously all you have to say this morning?
assuming you haven't voted yet you still have a short time frame to reverse course and save your own dignity. either stay home or vote for biden. no good american will vote for trump after last night.
After That Fiasco, Biden Should Refuse to Debate Trump Again
The president was petulant and puerile, so what is the point?
And, I should add, a degradation of the presidency itself, which Trump had degraded so thoroughly already. He put on a performance so contemptuous, so puerile, so dishonest and so across-the-board repellent that the moderator, Chris Wallace, morphed into some amalgam of elementary-school principal, child psychologist, traffic cop and roadkill.
No matter how Wallace pleaded with Trump or admonished him, he couldn’t make him behave. But then why should Wallace have an experience any different from that of Trump’s chiefs of staff, of all the other former administration officials who have fled for the hills, of the Republican lawmakers who just threw up their hands and threw away any scruples they had? Trump runs roughshod over everyone and everything, and on Tuesday night in Cleveland he ran roughshod over the idea that two presidential candidates presenting rival visions for America should do so with at least a small measure of dignity and an iota of decorum.
Almost from the start, he talked over Biden, taunting him, demeaning him, trying to provoke him. He interrupted him and interrupted him and then interrupted him some more, all the while complaining that he, Trump, ever the martyr, was being persecuted once again.
“Mr. President, I’m the moderator of this debate, and I would like you to let me ask my question,” Wallace said early on, trying in vain to contain one of Trump’s tantrums and wrestle him into submission. I’d seen debate moderators get perturbed. Wallace bordered on plangent.
“I guess I’m debating you, not him, but that’s OK,” Trump shot back. “I’m not surprised.” Of course not. To be Trump is to be accustomed to an unjust world unimpressed with your majesty.
He plumbed uncharted presidential-debate depths of nastiness. When Biden, objecting to Trump’s reported dismissal of people who serve in the military as “losers,” brought up his son Beau’s tour of duty in Iraq, Trump brought up the past cocaine use of Biden’s other son, Hunter. And looked impressed and delighted with himself for doing so.
When Trump was challenged on holding huge rallies where supporters pressed tight together, the coronavirus be damned, he said that Biden would do likewise if he could just get anyone to show up.
When Biden said that Trump needed to get “smarter” about the pandemic, Trump erupted, a Vesuvius of petulance and pettiness. “Did you use the word smart?” he asked. “Don’t ever use the word smart with me. Don’t ever use that word. Because you know what? There’s nothing smart about you, Joe.” His voice was so thick with unwarranted condescension that it made my skin crawl.
When Biden noted that under Trump’s watch, our country became the world leader in recorded deaths related to Covid-19, with more than 200,000 Americans gone, Trump’s retort was a claim so hyperbolic that I didn’t know whether to laugh at its inanity or cry over its insanity. He said that if Biden had been president, two million people would have died.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that Trump was breathtaking, and I may even be paying him something of a compliment, because it takes a peerless combination of audacity and mendacity to pull off some of what he pulled off.
On taxes, for example: He turned the revelation that he had paid only $750 in federal income taxes for each of two recent years into an indictment of Biden , as a former senator and vice president, for creating so many tax loopholes.
On federal judges: His boast of appointing scores and scores of them segued into a rebuke of President Barack Obama and Biden for leaving behind so many vacancies, as if they’d simply forgotten about them. Not exactly. Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s Republican majority leader, blocked the Obama administration from filling many of them, and then, after Trump was inaugurated, abetted him.
On the integrity of the upcoming vote count: He pivoted from Wallace’s question about whether he would refrain from declaring victory “until the election has been independently certified” into a fresh exhortation that his supporters serve as poll watchers, looking out for sketchy activity. He’s going to get people hurt. I mean, on top of all the people he has hurt already.
Responding to this pile of bile, Biden was hardly a choir boy. “You’re the worst president America has ever had,” he said at one point. He repeatedly called Trump a liar and several times called him “this clown.”
“Will you shut up, man?” Biden said to him. “This is so unpresidential."
But Biden was right: Trump wouldn’t shut up, and wasn’t remotely presidential, and to the extent that Biden occasionally flung mud of his own, well, when you’re dragged into the pigsty, you have no other choice.
Mostly, though, Biden shook his head as Trump ranted and raged. He smiled dismissively. He looked at Wallace or at the camera or anywhere but at Trump, his lack of eye contact a suggestion that some nonsense — and some nonsense purveyors — are best ignored. His obvious strategy was to treat Trump as part spectacle, part joke, all embarrassment. Which is precisely how Trump deserved to be treated.
Who won and who lost? I know I’m supposed to make something of a determination along those lines, but that’s not how this debate went down. Trump talked more and faster and louder, which was clearly his strategy: Be so damned vivid that Biden would look even paler than usual.
In this Trump was successful. He had more fire — but dangerously, even dementedly, so. He never wore Biden down, but at moments he wore Biden out: Listening to Biden’s sentences peter out could be like hearing the air seep from a tire.
But here’s the deal, as Biden would say: Only one man on that stage persuasively communicated that he has the interests of the American people at heart. Only one man on that stage seemed at all interested in maintaining a tether to the truth. Only one man demonstrated any respect for Wallace or for the process. Only one man would be bearable for the next four years.
I needn’t spell out who that man is.
But I have a message for him, and I’m serious: Don’t do this again. You showed your willingness. You showed up. But another of these fiascos is beneath you. I’d add that it’s beneath America, if there’s even such a thing anymore.
I'm sort of undecided as to whether the next debate should use microphones that are turned off while the other candidate is within his own speaking time, or else just to allow Trump to make a fool of himself again.
Dunno.
TrumpTrueBelievers thought Trump was great. Maybe there are still a half-dozen undecided... but the debate does seem like overkill.
I would agree I see no point in Biden debating (a joke at best) Trump a second or third time.
Trump Sent a Warning. Let’s Take It Seriously.
Our democracy is in terrible danger — more than since the Civil War, more than after Pearl Harbor, more than during the Cuban missile crisis.
The president has told us in innumerable ways that either he will be re-elected or he will delegitimize the vote by claiming that all mail-in ballots — a time-honored tradition that has ushered Republicans and Democrats into office and has been used by Trump himself — are invalid.
Trump’s motives could not be more transparent. If he does not win the Electoral College, he’ll muddy the results so that the outcome can be decided only by the Supreme Court or the House of Representatives (where each state delegation gets one vote). Trump has advantages in both right now, which he has boasted about for the past week.
I can’t say this any more clearly: Our democracy is in terrible danger — more danger than it has been since the Civil War, more danger than after Pearl Harbor, more danger than during the Cuban missile crisis and more danger than during Watergate.
I began my career as a foreign correspondent covering Lebanon’s second civil war, and it left a huge impact on me. I saw what happens in a country when everything becomes politics, when a critical mass of politicians put party before country, when responsible people, or seemingly responsible people, think that they can bend or break the rules — and go all the way — and that the system won’t break.
But when extremists go all the way, and moderates just go away, the system can break. And it will break. I saw it happen.
I would like to think that such a thing could not happen in America. I’d like to think that … but I am very, very worried.
I worry because Facebook and Twitter have become giant engines for destroying the two pillars of our democracy — truth and trust. Yes, these social networks have given voice to the voiceless. That is a good thing and it can really enhance transparency. But they have also become huge, unedited cesspools of conspiracy theories that are circulated and believed by a shocking — and growing — number of people.
Without shared facts on which to make decisions, there can be no solutions to our biggest challenges. And without a modicum of trust that both sides want to preserve and enhance the common good, it is impossible to accomplish anything big.
“Politics needs a reference point outside of politics,’’ argues the Hebrew University religious philosopher Moshe Halbertal. “It needs values, it needs facts and it needs leaders who respect that there is a sacred domain of decisions that will never be used to promote political gain, only the common good.’’
Public trust is eroded, added Halbertal, when people feel that this notion of the common good doesn’t exist because everything has become politics. That describes the United States today. The institutions we have relied upon to be outside the game of politics so as to adjudicate what is right and true — scientists, certain news media, the courts — have become so ensnared by politics that fewer and fewer of them are universally trusted to define and pursue the common good. Even mask-wearing has become partisan.
You cannot sustain a healthy democracy under such conditions.
And that is why the only choice in this election is Joe Biden. The Democrats are not blameless when it comes to playing politics, but there is no equivalence to the Republicans. The Democratic Party sorted through all the choices, and, led by older Black men and women in South Carolina, rejected the Democratic socialist candidate and said they wanted a moderate unifier named Joe Biden.
The Republicans — who in the past voted for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, sane conservatives who could be counted upon to uphold the common good — have done no such equivalent thing. They have fallen in line lock step behind a man who is the most dishonest, dangerous, meanspirited, divisive and corrupt person to ever occupy the Oval Office. And they know it. Four more years of Trump’s divide and rule will destroy our institutions and rip the country apart.
To me, the only hope for America is to elect Biden and split the G.O.P. between the Trumpists and whatever is left of the moderate Republicans, and then hope that a big center-left and small center-right can agree on enough things to propel the country forward, heal the divide and act together for the common good.
Admittedly, Biden did not particularly shine in tonight’s debate. Alas, I have never seen him shine in any debate. But I have no doubt that the people, values and integrity he would bring into government would be of a quality that the nation deserves.
If Trump’s monstrous performance left you feeling that you want four more years of his presidency — that he will respect the outcome of the election if it goes against him, that he will reunite the country, that he will do the presidency proud and surround himself with people of the quality that the country deserves — then you and I were watching different debates.
To get back a semblance of unity and sanity, Biden has to win. And that is why I have only one answer to every question now: Vote for Biden — do it by mail early if you must, but if you can, please, put on a mask and do it in person. If enough of us do that, Biden can win outright with the votes cast on Election Day, instead of waiting for all the mail-in ballots to be counted, thereby giving time for Trump and Fox News to muddy the outcome.
So help register someone to vote for Joe Biden. Phone bank for Joe Biden. Talk to your neighbor about Joe Biden. Volunteer for Joe Biden. Drive someone to the polls to vote for Joe Biden.
Do it as if your country’s democracy depends on it, because it does.
Why Trump resorted to torching the debate
Unlike in 2016, he lacks a clear message or line of attack against his opponent. What remained was bullying, interruptions and ad hominem provocations.
Yes, that debate was everything everyone has already said it was:
“a disgrace,” (Jake Tapper),
“a s---show” (Dana Bash),
“a train wreck” (Ari Fleischer),
“The clusterf--- in Cleveland” (a POLITICO colleague).
But why? Why did Trump, down by six points in the polls and facing his last chance to turn things around, come into the first debate against Joe Biden with a strategy — if that’s what it can be called — of blowing up the event with 90 minutes of bullying, interruptions, and ad hominem provocations?
It’s not as if Trump is new to this or hasn’t previously had more canny approaches to these events. In 2015 and 2016 during the Republican presidential primaries, when there was an enormous field of candidates, Trump used theatrics, name-calling and a populist pitch on immigration and trade to make himself the center of every debate. He went almost wire-to-wire as the polling leader and won his party’s nomination.
In the fall of 2016, he shrewdly used the policy issues of immigration, trade and Obamacare, and the personal issues of alleged corruption, against Hillary Clinton. That formula yielded an Electoral College victory by taking three Midwestern states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — that had long voted for Democrats in presidential elections.
Those debate performances were always studded with Trumpian misinformation, gratuitous personal attacks and the strategic deployment of disrupting the proceedings. But Trump always had a core message and a well-honed argument about his opponents.
Tuesday was different for three reasons.
First, Trump, the king of powerfully simplistic political branding, no longer seems to have a message. In 2016 he had his four pillars of immigration, trade, Obamacare and corruption. He had slogans that were effective: “Make America Great Again,” “Build the Wall.” Quick, what’s Trump’s message in 2020? Nothing really leaps out. There is no Trump legislative agenda on Capitol Hill. He was asked recently by The New York Times what he wanted to do in a second term and the paper noted he talked about cutting regulations and taxes, appointing conservatives judges and border control. But the paper also somewhat mischievously recorded this meandering non-response from the president that became a popular meme:
“But so I think, I think it would be, I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done.”
The Trump campaign put out a second-term agenda , a hodgepodge of big ambitions (“Create 10 Million New Jobs in 10 Months,” "Eradicate Covid-19") and conservative buzzwords (“Teach American Exceptionalism”), but the president has been erratic in discussing the agenda or its key plank.
In 2016, Trump had a clear and concise line of attack against Hillary Clinton: She was a corrupt member of the Washington establishment and he was going to send her to jail if he became president. He discussed the alleged perfidy of her deleting personal emails with impressive discipline. But Biden has proven to be a more elusive target. Sometimes he is "Sleepy Joe." Other times he's a dangerous radical. At this point in the campaign in 2016, Clinton had become a despised figure among Trump’s hardcore supporters. Those supporters in 2020 can’t seem to muster the same amount of antipathy for the former vice president.
Finally, and most important, Trump in 2020 is burdened with a record, one that has sunk him into chronic unpopularity for several years now, even during the height of his economic boom. Trump was not the first American politician to successfully win an election by casting himself as a populist outsider taking on the corrupt establishment. That playbook is as old as the republic.
But those outsiders who suddenly arrive in Washington or a state capital with no experience and ill-equipped for the job suddenly realize the limits of the campaign schtick. (This happened to former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler who declined to run for a second term in 2002.)
When they could be heard through the fog of Trump’s insults and interruptions, the portions of the debate that were most devastating to Trump were Biden’s prosecution of the case against the president’s handling of the pandemic, the economy and health care, particularly the effects of gutting Obamacare.
Biden was by no means commanding on Tuesday. In the hands of a more nimble and energetic Democrat, these portions of the debate might have been more devastating for Trump. (Naturally people on the left thought so: “Bernie would have annihilated Trump,” wrote the New York progressive activist Jonathan Tasini.)
What it all adds up to — no message, no killer line of attack against Biden, no defense of his record — is that Trump resorted to strapping on an explosive vest. Perhaps the idea was to sully both Biden and the moderator, Chris Wallace, who was incapable of controlling the president’s interruptions. “Mr. President, please stop,” Wallace said at one point, seeming to speak for many viewers.
If Wallace and Biden were discredited, then nobody had standing to fact check Trump or probe his record. Meanwhile, the stream of interruptions, personal insults and attacks on Biden’s family made it nearly impossible for Biden, who is already a mild-mannered debater, to make a clear case for himself or against Trump.
Whatever the thinking behind what the strategy would accomplish, it was born of desperation from a candidate who is mired in a health crisis he can’t control, down in the polls and struggling to articulate a case for why he deserves a second term.
Election américaine : Donald Trump torpille son premier débat avec Joe Biden
Les deux candidats à la Maison Blanche ont débattu dans une ambiance électrique, mardi, lors de leur premier face-à-face télévisé à Cleveland, suivi par des dizaines de millions d’Américains.
The American election: Donald Trump torpedoes the first debate with Joe Biden
The two candidates for the White House debated in an electric ambiance, Tuesday, for the first face-to-face, in Cleveland, followed by millions of Americans.
Trump ensures first presidential debate is national humiliation
Analysis: Only one man looked remotely presidential on the debate stage in Cleveland, Ohio, and it was not the incumbent
Donald Trump at the first presidential debate with
Joe Biden in Cleveland, Ohio, on 29 September.
Brian Snyder/Reuters
More likely than not, according to opinion polls, his opponent Joe Biden will win the November election and bring the republic back from the brink. If Trump is re-elected, however, this dark, horrifying, unwatchable fever dream will surely be the first line of America’s obituary.
Only one man looked remotely presidential on the debate stage in Cleveland, Ohio, and it was not the incumbent. He interrupted, ranted, raged, spewed lies and interrupted some more. Oh, and he passed on an opportunity to condemn white supremacists, instead telling them to “stand back and stand by”.
The debate moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News , did not cover himself in glory either. He was a like a school supply teacher, hopelessly out of his depth as unruly children run riot. He did not enforce the rules or cut the president’s mic.
Facing this asymmetric bullying, Biden showed self-control and stood his ground. He spoke for tens of millions of Americans when he demanded: “Will you shut up, man?” – the Biden campaign rushed out this slogan on a T-shirt before the debate was even over.
Five weeks before the election, the debate pitted an ageing white male against an ageing orange male sweating like Richard Nixon in 1960. Anyone hoping for elegant verbal jousting or rapier-like wit was in for a disappointment.
Perhaps it was just as well that coronavirus guidelines ensured the men stood apart at separate lecterns on blue carpeted stage beneath an eagle symbol with the words “The union and the constitution forever”. No handshakes, no prowling by Trump as he did behind Hillary Clinton’s back in 2016, no physical violence. Katie Hill, a former Democratic congresswoman, tweeted: “I literally don’t know how Biden is not running over and punching him in the face.”
Trump looked more like a challenger than an incumbent, butting in and hurling petty insults such as: “Don’t ever use the word ‘smart’ with me … There’s nothing smart about you, Joe.” The hapless Wallace struggled to gain control as viewers heard only a cacophony of voices. “I am the moderator of this debate, let me ask my question,” he almost pleaded.
Sometimes Wallace was too easy on Trump, though he did tell him at one point: “Frankly, you’ve been doing more interrupting.”
Biden mostly kept his cool, preferring to laugh in world weary bemusement. “That was really a productive segment, wasn’t it?” he said sarcastically early on. “Keep yappin’, man.”
Other memorable lines included: “You are the worst president that America has ever had”; “The fact is that everything he’s saying so far is simply a lie. I’m not here to call out his lies. Everybody knows he a liar”; “It’s hard to get any word in with this clown – excuse me, this person”; “President Trump wouldn’t know a suburb unless he took a wrong turn.”
Joe Biden at the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on 29 September.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
And, on the coronavirus crisis, which has killed more than 200,000 people in the US: “‘It is what it is’ because you are who you are,” Biden said as he blamed Trump for mishandling the pandemic, and added: “ Maybe you can inject some bleach into your arm, that would take care of it .” At moments Biden cut through the chaos by looking directly at the camera and appealing to voters: “This isn’t about his family or my family,” as the attacks turned highly personal. “It’s about your family.”
He also avoided some of the missteps that plagued his Democratic primary debate performances. He brushed off the Trump campaign attack that he is beholden to the far left, insisting: “I am the Democratic party right now.”
Biden condemned Trump over recent reported comments denigrating dead soldiers as “losers” and “suckers”. He said of his late son Beau, who served: “My son was in Iraq. He spent a year there. He got the Bronze Star. He got Conspicuous Service Medal. He was not a ‘loser’. He was a patriot.”
Trump clumsily tried to change the subject to Biden’s son Hunter. Biden retorted: “I’m talking about my son Beau Biden,” and then addressed the attack on Hunter, falsely claiming he was dishonorably discharged from the military.
“My son, like a lot of people ... had a drug problem,” Biden shot back. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him.”
There was not on iota of sympathy from the president or effort to pay tribute to Beau son, who died of a brain tumor in 2015.
It was a brief moment of emotional clarity in an otherwise nightmarish, incoherent mess. Worst of all, when Wallace asked Trump if he was willing to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, the president couldn’t do it, saying: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by! But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”
It is hard to imagine Trump won over a single voter in the suburbs, where he is particularly trailing Biden, or anywhere else. Most viewers will have likely been left feeling angry or sad and may have switched off long before the end.
Wallace mused earlier this week: “If I’ve done my job right, at the end of the night, people will say, ‘That was a great debate, who was the moderator?’”
The near universal verdict was - expressed in the words of CNN’s political correspondent Dana Bash – a “shitshow”.
Is there anyone who has expressed pride in the way our President represented his office?
How does anyone justify a vote for trump after last night? He is not fit to hold elected office in the United States. We don't need fact checkers or statistics to tell us that, we just need two eyes and ears.
Your question is the essence of America today. Some people are profoundly worried that Trump will destroy the republic; others would be happy to have him succeed.
Would that imply that a significant part of Americans are neo-fascists? Yes.