First, instead of worrying about the worst thing, which is rooted in what Donald Trump and the Republicans say, let’s say this: Biden had a very bad night on a very bad night to have a bad night. Second, let’s leave it at that.
Here’s my good-faith assessment of Thursday’s debate. The president struggled in the beginning, which is probably the part most people watched, if they watched, but he rallied over time and ended strong. Even so, altogether, it was a bad night, maybe a terrible night, because it seems to have reignited nuissance arguments about his age and whether the Democrats should pick someone else as their nominee.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump lied and lied and lied and lied. He lied so much not even the great Daniel Dale could keep up. It wasn’t just the number. It was the size. Trump accused Biden of favoring abortions all the way up to birth, which would be, you know, murder. And that’s just one galaxy-class example. His lies were a goddamn meteor shower.
That’s the part that was missing from yesterday’s arguments over the debate. If Biden looked like he was struggling, and he was, it was in the context of Trump’s nonstop, malicious lies. Biden seemed genuinely shocked when Trump said he favored killing babies after they’re born. No president has ever talked that way, Biden said, and he was right. Meanwhile, his ignored questions of substance to rehash of hoary conspiracies – Biden “opened the border,” for instance. He efused to admit the J6 insurrection happened or accept the results of the election if they don’t mean his idea of fairness. (Hint: they never will.)
I think the president’s biggest mistake, and I’m not talking about things beyond his control, like “optics,” was trying to pick a lie in order to fact-check it. You could see on his face the question of where to begin countering all the bullshit. Biden was best when he stopped doing CNN’s job and said he’d never heard so much malarky in his life. He was best when he lost patience and called Trump a fool and a child.
Turns out that firehosing lies, which Trump does naturally without thinking about it, has a name: Gish galloping. Professor Heather Cox Richardson cited it Friday. “It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.”
To me, that explains the look on Biden’s face.
You can interpret the look to mean anything, even cognitive decline. But as someone who recognizes in Biden a variety of neurodivergence – he stutters; I have ADHD – I also saw in him what happens when lies are coming at you like a torrent. It’s paralyzing, temporarily. I mean that literally. You don’t know what to do. And while your brain is firing in all directions simultaneously, you look like someone, as my friend Hussein Ibish said, who “couldn’t keep his train of thought together most of the time and had difficulty forming coherent sentences.”
And Trump’s lies weren’t the only thing. So was his habitual incoherence. The longer Trump speaks in public, the less sense he makes. That was evident Thursday. He came out strong in the first 30 minutes, which is probably the part most people watched, if they watched, but he unraveled as the minutes ticked by. There were moments when even the deepest rightwing conspiracy theorist would have scratched head in bewilderment. It’s hard to know where to begin countering bullshit. Where do you begin countering word salad?
Still, Biden didn’t look good. He seemed tired. His voice was hoarse. When he got mad, which was frequent, the emotion was barely above a whisper. (He apparently had a cold and he was taking medicine, but that was revealed during the debate, not beforehand when it should have been revealed.) And everyone knows who Trump is. If his lies were going to be a problem, why wasn’t Biden more prepared?
The worst part wasn’t that Trump “won the debate” or won swing voters to his side (according to Roll Call’s Niels Lesniewski, he almost certainly didn’t), or even that the Times has accelerated its nasty habit of making of fetish of Biden’s age, but rather this: Some liberals and Democrats seem to have lost a measure of faith in their man. And I’m not talking about liberal commentators like Paul Krugman. I’m talking about normal people who watched the debate and asked themselves whether Trump and the Republicans were right about Joe Biden.
I’ll pay attention later to the tedious debate on whether the president should drop out. I’m going to ignore it now, because I want to say something directly to liberals and Democrats who are feeling a crisis of confidence. First, instead of worrying about the worst thing, which is rooted in what Donald Trump and the Republicans say, let’s say this: Biden had a very bad night on a very bad night to have a bad night.
Second, let’s leave it at that.
It’s July. There’s time to recover. The president held a rally the next day in North Carolina. I watched it very closely. The difference could not have been more pronounced. His voice was low and firm. His face was clear and alert. He came out swinging, too, calling out Trump’s lies. The audience, meanwhile, was roaring. Both seemed to know he flubbed the debate. Both seemed to know democracy is on the line.
Could he have another bad night? Yes, but I doubt it. I’m not the first to recall what happened after Barack Obama sleepwalked through his first debate with Mitt Romney in 2012. Like Trump, Romney firehosed him with “lies, non-sequiturs and specious arguments.” Everyone said Obama lost, and lots of liberals, Democrats, donors and allies panicked. But by the time of the second debate, he was a laser canon. It took a major high-stakes screw-up to get him properly focused, and he was.
To be sure, the comparison is imperfect, but you get the idea. If you don’t, well, lots of Democrats do. As I said, they were roaring for Biden in North Carolina, as if their champion needed a boast when everyone, including the Times – over and over and over – seems to think he should quit. If that rally is any indication, normal Democratic partisans are getting more energized, not less. If any of them could afford complacency before, none can now. We won’t know until the end, but perhaps Biden’s very bad night was just the jolt Democrats needed.
The last thing I’ll say is this. You will find all the confidence you need when you consider the choice. Forget about replacing Biden. That’s not going to happen. Democrats don’t want it. Democratic Party leaders know it. It’s going to be Biden and Trump. One candidate is trying to win the White House. The other is trying to take it. You can keep fighting or you can give up now. I hope you will keep fighting.
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