Last week’s presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump was historic. It was also disappointing. And in many respects, it was sad. But it cannot be said that the candidates’ performances were surprising.
The single most significant issue about Biden’s candidacy is concern about his age. As a result, Biden’s goal was to show vigor and mental agility during the debate. He failed. Trump’s charge was to keep his cool and behave civilly. He largely succeeded. Trump won the debate because Biden lost.
Biden seemed to have difficulty focusing. At times, he looked confused. Many of his responses were rambling and disjointed, and several times he lost his train of thought and struggled to complete sentences.
In contrast, Trump stayed largely on message, even if that meant ignoring the questions he was asked and spinning hyperbole with a barrage of falsehoods and exaggerations. Trump made grand and forceful declarations, and no one forced him to back them up with facts. Biden struggled to recall, organize and articulate his talking points and to present them coherently. He missed several opportunities to challenge Trump on his claims.
Trump seemed relaxed. He knew he was ahead in the race. He knew that Biden was struggling to achieve parity. And he understood that his best chance of prevailing in the debate was to do what he has been doing all along — pitching to his base, focusing on hot-button issues like immigration and the economy, adjusting inconvenient facts to fit his narrative and promising a brighter future for America.
Neither of the two CNN moderators acted to fact-check Trump or Biden during the debate, although they repeatedly encouraged both candidates to answer the question they were asked when they veered off topic.
In fairness, fact-checking isn’t the moderators’ job. The debate format was designed to allow the participants to fact-check one another. Here, too, Biden failed. Sure, he accused Trump of “a bunch of malarkey” and of having “the morality of an alley cat,” but those lines would have been a lot more effective if they were preceded or followed by the statistics, information and arguments that his staff worked so hard to drill into Biden in the days
before the debate.
Perhaps Biden was overprepared. Perhaps he was tired from the rigors of intense preparation, travel and the late-night start of the debate. And maybe he really did have a cold that his staff belatedly blamed for his raspy voice and sluggish manner. But the picture Biden projected was not encouraging.
Immediately following the debate, Republicans rejoiced as Democrats asked themselves some hard questions and struggled to find positive talking points about some aspect of the debate. And in the days that have followed, pressure has been mounting on the Biden family to take a hard look at the realities of Biden’s candidacy and to have a frank discussion about the future.
As of now, the second Biden-Trump debate is scheduled to go forward, as planned, on Sept. 10. It probably won’t happen.
Yes Biden lost the debate and contrary to the above Exponent’s editorial, Donald Trump won it legitimately. Here’s the real reasons that Biden was so badly trounced: Biden is in the throes of senility, a point that the Exponent weirdly missed and Biden’s policies have been a catastrophe, and its difficult to understand how the Exponent missed that too. Here;s another head scratch-er, the lies, not Trumps but rather Biden’s, used to cover up his weak and ineffective policies. The president claimed no American soldiers died while he’s been in office, tell that to the relatives of the thirteen killed in Biden’s bizarre rush to leave Afghanistan, or the three killed in Syria, and how about the lie that inflation was 9% when he entered office, or that his massive spending had nothing to do with it.
If Biden wins say hello to president Kamala Harris, yes the babbling, giggling incompetent whose still looking for the root causes of the illegal millions entering this country. Those roots are right in front of her and Joe, all they have to do is look in the mirror, The bottom line is Joe is washed up and the Democrats are stuck with these two fools. Elect them and this country is on its way down.