What Joe Biden Really Owes the Country Right Now

But the net overall effect of the proceedings was to dramatize, on and off, for nearly two hours, Trump’s central argument: that Biden is weak and not in control of events. Biden’s failure to aggressively defend his record—along with his befuddled expression as Trump savaged him—reinforced impressions of Trump’s twisted but sometimes-effective animal dominance, granting him a wholly unearned aura of authority.

None of this is fair. The fact-check-free CNN debate format probably created the impression for millions of lower-information voters that everything Trump was spewing was largely unobjectionable or even true. The format absurdly treated Trump’s insurrection as just another issue among many in a conventional political debate. And in an unhappy accident, when Biden took notes during Trump’s broadsides, the lower edge of the screen mostly obscured that from view, creating the impression that Biden was merely looking down, absorbing Trump’s criticism, almost in submission and defeat.

But two things can be true at once: CNN indefensibly let down the country with this format—yet at the same time, Biden did blow a major opportunity to work within it to dispel the single biggest voter concern out there about him. When asked directly about his age, Biden could have leveled with the country by forcefully articulating something like this: