Ditch Biden. That Debate Performance Was a Disaster.

Trump also could not get out of his own way. He made bizarre accusations about Nancy Pelosi’s daughter and vile ones about Joe Biden’s son. He kept returning to one of his worst gaffes, his (alleged—but come on) denigration of American veterans as “losers and suckers.” Asked about Americans struggling with addiction, he instead went on a rant about his own personal grievances. He said the sentence “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.” It was a debate performance that should have reminded every single viewer about every single reason why Donald Trump is unfit to be president. He is a hideous narcissist. He is a weird freak. He lied in every answer—often several times. It should be self-evident that he is incapable of holding any position of responsibility, let alone the most important one in the country.

And yet. And yet. Joe Biden still somehow failed to look like the obvious, reasonable choice. Over and over again, he let Trump off the hook—about his fascistic effort to overturn the 2020 election, about his despicable racism, about his pivotal role in taking reproductive rights away from tens of millions of Americans, about the fact that he is a singularly dangerous figure in American politics.

Biden was, for much of the debate, barely coherent—hoarse and confused, he frequently seemed to doze off mid-sentence and then wake up in a different one. He was markedly and substantially worse than he was in either of the 2020 presidential debates against Trump. Again and again, when Trump presented him with an easy opportunity to attack, he let it pass, stumbling over clapbacks and talking points. He didn’t mention that Trump is a convicted felon until the forty-fourth minute of the debate. He let him off the hook for trying to violently overturn American democracy—and for presenting the goons that tried to do that as the real victims. At one point, he turned a question about his biggest strength—abortion—into one about his biggest weakness: immigration. Early in the debate, responding to a question about the pandemic—another strength!—he uttered this sentence, the actual meaning and structure of which linguists will be parsing for centuries: “Making sure we make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with Covid, excuse me, with umm dealing with everything we had to deal with. Look, we finally beat Medicare.”