If there was any winner in tonight’s first presidential debate, it was CNN. If there was a loser, it was absolutely Joe Biden.
Throwing the already tight race into a tailspin for the faltering incumbent almost from the very beginning, the most memorable line maybe Biden’s inability to finish some of his own sentences. Otherwise, Donald Trump’s declaration that “I didn’t have sex with a porn star,” and his rival’s badly delivered line that “you have the morals of an alley cat” could be what history remembers.
What anyone who saw or heard the Jake Tapper and Dana Bash moderated clash between the 45th and the 46th POTUS’ can’t deny is that the 78-year-old Trump was energized and relatively succinct. On the other hand, as Trump ramped it up, the 81-year-old Biden was rambling and halting over the course of the night even with his command of issues foreign and domestic.
Finally coming alive in the last minutes and calling Trump a “whinner,” but it was way too little, too late for Biden.
Long story short: It was not a good night for the President of the United States. In fact, it was such a bad night, the unthinkable may now be being discussed – should Joe Biden drop out of the race?
“It was a game changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party,” said CNN’s John King right after the debate ended. Former White House Communications Director and Biden loyalist Kate Bedingfield called her ex-boss’ performance “disappointing.”
On Fox News, a somewhat surprisingly circumspect Sean Hannity said “Joe Biden is not fit to be president, Donald Trump clearly is.”
Jumping into the fray fast and furious, Vice President Kamala Harris was scheduled for a sudden appearance on MSNBC after the debate to seek a reframing of what we all saw.
California Governor and 2028 hopeful Gavin Newsom stressed was on before the Veep, telling Alex Wagner that Dems and voters should “worry less and do more.” Newsom was selling hard on Biden’s record, but no one was buying.
What made a bad situation even worse was that the Biden swagger of the State of the Union showed up when the President spoke at a post-debate watch party in Atlanta.
In the Biden fallout, there was a lot of history on the map Thursday.
Held in the Peach State metropolis and hosted exclusively by CNN, tonight’s debate is the earliest ever in a modern presidential campaign. It’s the first showdown of a current president and a former president. It is also the first time presidential contenders have had a debate without an audience in attendance since JFK and then VP Richard Nixon went head-to-head in the first televised POTUS parley in 1960.
Sixty-four years ago, it was two of the youngest men ever to seek the White House. This year, no matter who wins, it is the two oldest.
To that, Thursday’s war of words certainly wasn’t pretty, especially for Democrats
. Simultaneously disputing and confirming Cormac McCarthy’s assertion that America is no country for old men, tonight’s unprecedented entirely made-for-TV event had the potential to be the ugliest debate of our lifetimes.
Instead, it was a very sad affair.
From muted microphones, a palatable distain the two men have for each other, salvos of performance enhancing drugs, and two moderators with the most thankless job in America for at least 90-minutes tonight, the first of two scheduled face-offs for 2020 vets Biden and Trump was a risky move before anyone stepped on the stage.
Making up and rewriting history in real time, Trump benefited from the format of the debate. The guardrails prevented Trump from the temper tantrums that characterized the debates of the 2020 and allowed him to play moderate, in relatively terms.
As to whether the ABC-hosted debate in September even happens after tonight is a hard call for either side. As Barack Obama’s terrible performance in his first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012 showed, everyone has a bad night. Tonight, whether he has a cold or not, Joe Biden had to have a much better night in this debate than even his biggest donor or MSNBC host has to admit he actually had.
That can’t be said of Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.
Ripped by Republicans in the days leading up to tonight, Tapper and Bash on the other hand stayed very much in a natural stance.
Keeping themselves out of the interactions perhaps to the greater determent or not, Tapper and Bash didn’t fact check Trump for most of the primetime event. Not a word when Trump even brazenly called Biden a “Manchurian candidate and said his opponent was driving the globe towards World War III. Having said that, Joe Biden didn’t make much of an effort to hold Trump’s feet to the fire of facts – which is distinctly his job, and the only way to keep his job.
Overall, the shameless Trump flipped the script to turn accusations of his incompetence, corruption and anti-democratic tendencies on to Biden, who often seemed to be staring off into space. In response, over topics of the economy, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, immigration, the military and veterans, and more, the President barely hit back with meekly shot back with terms like “malarky” and “worst president ever.”
Throughout the debate, political operatives from both the GOP and Democrats texted calling Biden’s stint on the debate stage a “disaster” and “painful,” even with a slight surge by the incumbent in the last 30 minutes of the event.
With a weak voice from the get-go and an often even weaker performance, incumbent Biden was on the ropes for most of the debate. Showing his age and the weight of his office, the 81-year-old POTUS will find his spin room surrogates in a very hard position tonight. Biden will find himself in an ever more difficult position getting his reelection off the mat – no matter what his VP exclaims.
Suffering real time blowback for that on social media during the debate, Tapper and Bash also stayed away from the unusually disciplined Republican’s criminal conviction and other scandals. Yet, in a role truly unique in American history, the CNN duo weaved a narrative that brought out the worst and the not-so-worst in the former president and the current president, who allegedly has a cold.
In that, Tapper and Bash’s superpower was holding both men to the rules of the interaction, for better and worse.
Whoever wins this election, branding the Hell out of the debate, the simulcast of the primetime event on ABC, NBC, CBS, C-Span, PBS, MSNBC, NewsNation and even Fox News may deliver the Mark Thompson-run cable newser its largest domestic viewership ever. Add to that the prestige factor, the pole position automatically makes CNN the gold standard for the election with other superruns like the ABC-hosted second debate in the fall set up to fail in comparison.
With a poll declaring that around 60% of Americans planned on watch the Biden and Trump face-off in some form of fashion, tonight’s debate also comes as a significant number of Americans are disinterested in either candidate.
It’s not hard to see why.
When Tapper asked Trump about the bloody January 6, 2021 siege on Congress by a MAGA mob half an hour into the debate, the 45th POTUS deflected the horrors of that day. When the 46th POTUS called out Trump for his support of the insurgents and tried to shame him, the former Celebrity Apprentice host simply ignored him. Unleashing a multi-pronged attack on Trump’s legal cases, convictions, and moral character, Biden saw his rhetorical lunge miss the mark.
Literally offered an opportunity on Trump’s boost towards the end of the debate that he would free the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich from Putin’s prisons if elected, Biden acted as if his foe never even implied he was holding an American’s life in his hands for political gain.
Having once declared in the 2020 campaign that he aimed to be a transitional POTUS, octogenarian Biden has launched an ambitious and aggressive domestic and foreign policy agenda since taking office in the depths of the pandemic. Promising to be a dictator only on “day one,” Under the faded Make America Great Banner, Trump’s designs for another term read like a mix of vengeance, spite over proving he actually won the 2020 election and a cascade of Christian nationalism and White nationalism policies.
Both are very much locked in with their respective hardcore base, with the incumbent displaying an edge with independents depending on current events and outreach metrics. Overall, Trump has led Biden on most issues with the very noticeable exception of abortion.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade two years ago, a woman’s right to choose has become the Democrats deadliest weapon against the GOP in midterm, local and now the general election. The devastating electoral result for Republicans across the nation, has seen Trump alternating depending on his audience between bragging about killing Roe and downplaying his role in the decision.
Two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Donald Trump was looking for a middle road on abortion in tonight’s presidential debate – and he may have found it. At least for a few minutes until the issue turned into an ugly dispute over the horrors of rape and murder between Joe Biden and his predecessor.
In the closing minutes of tonight’s perhaps overly hyped debate, the mask on the schoolyard status of this race fell off. “Let’s not act like children,” whined Trump after a few slight cuts by Biden. “You are a child,” replied the President.
Again, a very sad affair. Sad for Joe Biden. Sad for America.
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