Last night’s CNN debate underscored a grim reality; it wasn’t just President Joe Biden who lost. It was the American public. Both candidates, President Biden and former President Donald Trump, utterly failed to articulate themselves in a manner befitting their aspirations to serve another four years in the highest office of the land.
While much has been said about Biden’s poor performance – and it certainly was poor – it’s fair to say that President Trump didn’t do much better. Trump reiterated his usual boasts of overseeing the “greatest economy America has ever seen,” that the rest of the world now laughs at America, and all the rest of it. Anybody who has seen Trump speaking about his opponent for at least 60 seconds in any prior interview needn’t have watched last night’s debate. Trump’s words lacked substance. On multiple occasions, President Trump cut his responses short, sometimes by more than a minute, and failed to present a single new, visionary idea for improving America. Instead, Trump spent his time attempting to settle old scores, and utterly failing to do so.
If Trump wanted to prove that Biden was a liar, the inevitable claim that he had once called neo-Nazis at the Charlottesville rally “very fine people” was his opportunity for an easy slam dunk – but he even failed at that. Eager to dismiss Biden’s claim that his opponent’s praise of neo-Nazis was the reason he ran for office to begin with, Trump tripped up over his own words and seemed to imply that the Charlottesville really itself – and not the deceptively edited clip of his response to it – was completely fabricated. It left Biden, and likely much of the audience, befuddled by the former president’s suggestion that the protest never actually took place. Only those with prior knowledge of this story, and the edited clip in question, will have known what he was talking about. The rest of the country presumably thought he was delusional.
That being said, Trump’s lackluster performance does not excuse Biden’s abysmal showing either.
Throughout the debate, President Biden struggled to string his words together, often muttering under his breath instead of delivering clear, concise sentences. I found myself wincing and leaning towards the television as Biden looked as though he was on the verge of falling asleep. Trump did the same, glancing over in confusion as the president mumbled incoherently for several seconds, fell briefly silent, and then inexplicably exclaimed that he had “finally beat Medicare.”
A president’s responsibility goes beyond governing. He must also be able to communicate clearly with the American people, he must be able to defend his record, and he must be capable of presenting a positive vision for the future during an election. Good orators are capable of doing all of these things, and last night showed us that neither Trump nor Biden is a talented orator. They both failed, and remarkably, for the first time in history, one party seemed to admit that their candidate lost the debate. Biden’s own surrogates, supporters, and friends were quick to tell mainstream news outlets that they were concerned by his performance. Former Senator Claire McCaskill remarked, “Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight and he didn’t do it. He had to reassure America that he was up to the job at his age, and he failed at that tonight.”
Van Jones, in a post-debate interview with CNN, described Biden’s performance as “painful,” and the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Thomas L. Friedman titled, “Joe Biden is a good man and a good president. He must bow out of the race.”
The prospect of Biden being replaced by a younger candidate – something that was routinely dismissed by most Biden-backing media personalities before last night – is no longer just speculation. It’s not just the unfriendly news and media outlets discussing what it would take to replace him – it’s now also the networks that usually champion him through every scandal.
The most competent debater last night wasn’t even on the debate stage.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drew over 5 million live viewers for his “Real Debate,” a simulcast of the Trump-Biden debate that also gave him an opportunity to answer CNN’s questions. Kennedy’s debate offered us a look into an alternate universe where CNN abided by its own qualification criteria and allowed him onto the debate stage, and the independent candidate’s vastly superior performance likely left many in the DNC experiencing buyer’s remorse.
Out of the three, Kennedy was the only candidate who outlined new ideas and actually answered the questions. From childcare costs to addiction, Kennedy coherently outlined his vision for America while defending his record and criticizing his two opponents. After millions of Americans tuned in to hear what Kennedy has to say, Democrat officials must now be asking themselves why they stopped at nothing to prevent him from fairly competing against President Biden in the primaries, and why they’ve spent a fortune on legal efforts to prevent Kennedy from appearing on the ballot in states all over the country.
Speaking to News Nation’s Chris Cuomo after the debate, Kennedy said he’d be happy to talk to anyone in the DNC about replacing Biden as the party’s nominee, but his ardent and public commitment to destroying Big Pharma and Big Tech corruption means that conversation is unlikely to happen for as long as the Democrats rely on their financial support. It would also take convincing Jill Biden, who is reportedly determined to keep her husband in the race, to back down.
Ultimately, last night’s debate changed next to nothing. According to a CNN poll of registered views who watched the debate, 81% didn’t change their choice for president after watching the Trump-Biden showdown. Only 5% of registered voters said that the debate changed their mind.
A commitment to one candidate over another, however, doesn’t mean voters are particularly enthusiastic about their choice. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 67% of respondents said they were “tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new.” At the same time, just 18% said that they would not vote if Biden and Trump were their choices. The data reflects a broader dissatisfaction with the current political landscape, with only slightly more than half of the respondents expressing satisfaction with the U.S. two-party system.
So what can we learn from all this? Perhaps it’s that America needs to look inward. In some ways, we deserve better – but at the same time, this debate is the result of years of partisanship enabled by activists from both parties, by conservative and liberal media personalities, and by Congress. Republicans have chosen confrontation with the progressive left, rather than show some willingness to understand the grievances that drive them. Meanwhile, progressives increasingly treat conservatives as enemies, rather than political opponents with different ideas to solve shared problems.
Kennedy’s candidacy, in my opinion, represents an opportunity to bridge these divides, but skepticism about his chances of winning the election persists and will be hard for his campaign to shake.
The path forward is uncertain, but what is clear is that when Joe Biden and Donald Trump win their parties’ nominations – and whenever they take the stage on national television - America loses.
Jack Buckby is a New York-based author and extremism expert originally from the United Kingdom. His 2020 book Monster Of Their Own Making makes suggestions for dealing with the West’s crisis of political factionalism, and his 2023 book The Truth Teller makes the case for a Kennedy presidency.
Image Credit: Joe Biden/Flickr Page.
