'But the Emperor has nothing at all on!' said a little child
Lies and spin about Biden’s capacity - which are actually dangerous - exposed as painfully and cruelly as possible.
I watched the debate between Biden and Trump on Friday with one of my sisters. She’s a follower of US politics and very much of the “team blue” persuasion.1 Like everyone in our family, however, she’s fatalistic enough about politics to be detached in her partisanship. There’s no sense in getting upset about things you can’t control or refusing to accept the evidence of your eyes and ears which is a good way to be.
It’s also how most normal people are.
Even so, I think she was at least a little bit surprised at the extent of Biden’s decline. She had not brought into what we can now consider the lies of administration figures and some journalists about Biden remaining as sharp as a tack. Neither of us, however, were quite prepared for what unfolded.
It’s not like Trump was a model of articulation and persuasiveness. There has been decline there too, of course, and the 2024 Trump is clearly a couple of steps behind the 2016 version. But he managed to get some good lines off and generally exceeded expectations when it came to details.
He is and remains a world champion bullshitter first and foremost.
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The debate format was a good one and was clearly designed with curbing Trump’s excesses in mind. There was no audience from which he could generate heat and the microphone was switched off for one man while the other was talking. The moderators acted like traditional moderators, facilitating argument instead of trying to be the stars of the show by actively arguing with him.
This last point is crucial. It was clearly frustrating for some people that Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did not remonstrate with Trump. However, you need to remember that his other superpower is his incredible talent for whinging and complaining, which is why antagonistic debate moderation has tended to help, not hurt the former president in the past.
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All of this to say is that things were reasonably stacked against Trump, which is probably why his campaign was whinging and complaining before hand. All that needed to happen was for Biden to show up and call Trump on his BS in a structured way as the debate was structured to allow him to do. All that was needed was some minimal extemporaneous competence on the president’s part.
It was like a game of children’s T Ball, where Tapper and Bash were the coaches. They set up the ball on the tee and guide the participants to the plate. However, ultimately, it is up to the players to swing the bat and hit the ball. The coaches could only do so much, and it was ultimately up to Biden to make his points, which he was unable to do and it’s not their fault that he wasn’t up to it.
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