They both did their terrible best to make us lose hope in our species of democracy.
The genius and stupidity of man is a sight to behold. We’ve conquered our environment to create massive interconnected steel and concrete landscapes. Just a few years ago, our best minds created the Parker Solar Probe, which was able to reach the surface of the sun, not only without disintegrating, but designed to exploit the gravity of Venus to make additional trips.
We’ve also created a system where the election for the highest office in the most powerful and influential country ever comes down to, on the one hand, an old man that should be on a rocking chair somewhere and a complete moron on the other. Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off on Thursday in a presidential debate that embarrassed not only America but humanity in general.
“We had it. We had H2O.” These were the words uttered by Trump in his response to a question about what he would do to address climate change. Without context, this makes no sense. With context, it somehow manages to make even less sense. The context is that Trump spent the entire debate engaging in his favorite pastime: trying to scare people.
Trump didn’t mean to suggest that we don’t have water anymore. But he was so single-mindedly focused on trying to frighten people about the possibility of a second term for Biden that he inadvertently suggested that we’re out of water. His predominant instinct is to sow as much hysteria and panic as possible about as many things as possible.
He went on and on about how terrible our country is, how everything is falling apart, how no one respects us, how immigrants are stealing all of the jobs, and how inflation is killing us. He claimed that we’re a failing nation and that we “probably” won’t have a country anymore if Biden is reelected. According to Trump, everything that he did during his administration was incredible and everything that Biden has done is literally destroying America.
That sounds less like a competent leader and more like a Jim Jones wannabe. This kool-aid doesn’t kill you, it just makes you shun your morals to support a degenerate clown who lacks even the smallest sliver of human decency.
No one can spin what Biden did on Thursday. The White House tried to, claiming that Biden was getting over a cold. Sometimes, the obvious is just too obvious for propaganda – Biden didn’t look his age, he looked older. You could feed me a fifth of whiskey and then throw me head first into the deep end of an empty pool and I’d still sound more coherent than Biden.
Things are not going well for a speaker when you get so tired of rewinding trying to understand what they’re saying that you just give up. Unfortunately for the Democrats who have been attempting to assuage our concerns about Biden’s mental fitness, there is nothing left to defend.
If it sounds like I’m neglecting to analyze the actual content of each candidate’s answers it’s because there isn’t much content to analyze. They both did their terrible best to make us lose hope in our species of democracy.
You see, Trump either lied in his answers or outright refused to answer questions. Not just lies, but the most absurd, easily-disproved lies such as his claim that some Democratic states kill babies after birth.
Trump is so inept that he is unable to recognize when he has obviously contradicted himself. He falsely claimed that “everybody without exception” wanted the abortion issue to be left up to the states. These fictional masses were satisfied, according to him, because of his nomination of conservative Supreme Court justices. He then accused Biden of supporting a Roe v Wade that left it up to the states how far into a pregnancy abortion is permitted. The contradiction that his simple mind fails to appreciate is that he is simultaneously supporting and condemning state choice on abortion.
Biden on the other hand failed to articulate comprehensible answers and regularly appeared to lose track of his own thoughts. In what was probably the lowest point in the debate for Biden he said, “Making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the […] with the COVID, excuse me, with um, dealing with everything we have to with, um […]”. “Look, if we finally beat Medicare”. As you can see, the only thing to analyze here is how Democrats thought it was a good idea to nominate Joe Biden again.
Each party has looked us in the face and endorsed their respective candidate. They’ve told us that their candidate is fit to lead our country even after spending time with them and seeing first-hand how utterly inadequate they are. If you hadn’t realized it already, the lesson of the debate is that neither Biden nor Trump have any business leading anything more complex than a finger painting class.
Rafael Perez is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com
