President Joe Biden's widely criticized debate performance has been followed by very different reactions from critics of presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
The editorial boards of the New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution are arguing that Biden needs to drop out of the race, while Biden's defenders — from liberal MNSBC host Mika Brzezinski to Never Trump conservatives such as The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson and veteran conservative strategist Stuart Stevens — have maintained that Democrats shouldn't give up on Biden because of one very bad debate night.
In an MSNBC opinion column Monday, liberal journalist Paul Waldman laments that Biden's debate performance is overshadowing how shamelessly deceptive Trump is.
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"Thursday's debate between President Biden and Donald Trump was novel in at least one way: For the first time in six such debates over the last eight years, Trump finally 'won' one, according to snap polls and the consensus of reporters," Waldman argues.
"That reaction, of course, had nothing to do with Trump himself, and everything to do with Biden's halting performance. But to declare Trump a 'winner' loses sight of the Trump we saw on that stage."
Waldman continues, "The former president wasn't just everything we've known him to be; he was worse. It was truly a bravura performance of mendacity and deceit. Reading through the transcript, it becomes clear that there was not a single answer Trump gave that did not include some awful prejudice, a preposterously misleading statement or an outright lie, often more than one."
Trump's distortions during the debate, Waldman notes, ranged from claiming that "Biden wants to quadruple everyone’s taxes" to making the "preposterous" claim that " Biden is trying to put undocumented immigrants on Social Security."
Trump, Waldman emphasizes, lied repeatedly during the debate and will continue to lie in the months ahead.
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"One of the worst things about the debate was that Trump served up one opportunity after another to cut him down to size," Waldman laments. "Had Biden been better able to hit back, viewers would have better understood how Trump was deceiving them. This debate proved yet again that no one is quite sure how to deal with Trump's blizzard of deception: not the news media, not his opponents, and not the voters."
The journalist continues, "He won't be shamed into telling the truth, his supporters don't seem to care, and his lies only grow uglier as time goes on. But even if no one can make him stop, the worst thing would be to pretend it doesn’t matter."
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Paul Waldman's full MSNBC column is available at this link.