Get Him the Hell Out of There

President Biden’s debate disaster has Democrats panicking, and for good reason.

President Joe Biden during the first presidential debate, June 27th, 2024.

“Telling people they didn't see what they saw is not the way to respond to this,” tweeted former Obama advisor and MSNBC political commentator Ben Rhodes following the first 2024 presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump — and possibly the last. It was a night of historic firsts. It was the first time a current president debated a former president, the first time a general election presidential debate was held before party conventions, and the first time Americans saw the ambiguous signs of mental incompetence in a debate.

From the moment President Biden shuffled onto the stage like the Tin Man and began speaking in a mumbling, feeble rasp, the debate was already over. The fatal blow came about 10 minutes in, when Biden was asked a question about the national debt. In his incoherent attempt at a response, he confused trillion with billion, billion with million, stumbled over his words, and then just froze, eventually murmuring something about “beating Medicare” when moderator Jake Tapper had to come in and save him. Trump actually looked sorry for Biden on the split screen, which was every bit as devastating as the cognitive breakdown itself.

Throughout the debate, I found myself worrying that Biden could collapse at any moment as he forced slurred words out through an agonized and squinting grimace. When he wasn’t completely malfunctioning, his responses actually contained far more substance than Trump’s, but the manner in which he spoke was so distracting, halting, and garbled that it was difficult to actually pay attention. Every time he opened his mouth, the half-memorized talking points were drowned out by the train wreck we all witnessed

Biden, we’re told by his campaign, had a cold. That could explain the laryngitic voice, but the excuse can only gets you so far. After watching this performance, no one — not moderates, not independents, not lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool Democrats — thinks that Biden could make it to the end of a second term in possession of even the faintest wisps of sanity. At one point when Biden was rambling about border policy and had to be cut off again by Tapper, Trump finally took a swing at his acuity. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence — I don’t think he knows what he said either.” I laughed out loud, despite myself. It was either that or cry.

Going into this debate, the GOP hive mind consolidated around the talking points that Biden was colluding with the moderators, would have answers fed to him through an earpiece, and was going to be “jacked up” on performance-enhancing meds. These tactics are straight out of the Trump playbook: sow baseless, conspiratorial, undemocratic doubts about the fairness of the contest ahead of time so that if you lose, you can claim the other side cheated. In the final analysis, those shenanigans were completely unnecessary. Biden had a single mission last night. Nobody tuned in to hear policy substance or soaring rhetoric. 63 million Americans watched the debate on television, with tens of millions more watching online to see whether Joe Biden had the physical and mental wherewithal to continue carrying out his duties as president. We got our answer.

Trump, for his part, didn’t exactly give the performance of a lifetime. He lied constantly, denied verifiable facts, ignored questions he didn’t want to answer, and went off on quintessentially Trumpy tangents at every opportunity. But he did the one thing he needed to do: he refrained from taking his pants down, defecating on stage, and throwing his excrement around.

The muted microphones, a new feature intended to prevent candidates from talking over their opponents, ended up helping Trump by forcing him to behave. In a near-total reversal of the 2020 dynamic, Trump needed only to sit back and watch Biden torpedo himself, which he did throughout the debate. Trump just looked on with a smirk playing around his eyes. He lost his cool only once, when Biden slammed him over being a whiner who lost the 2020 election and couldn’t handle it. But the side-by-side comparison throughout couldn’t have been more stark. Trump, for all his myriad flaws, came across as a guy who could pick up a telephone, recognize the voice on the other end, have a conversation, and be able to relay what was discussed several minutes later. Biden did not — he couldn’t even leave the stage without the aid of First Lady Jill Biden.

Once the debate was finally over, the panic fully set in. CNN’s Van Jones looked shell-shocked, describing Biden’s performance as “painful.” Asked how, after a week of extensive preparation, Biden was unable to fill the time of his allotted one-minute responses, CNN’s Chris Wallace said, “Honestly, I think the question answers itself. He wasn’t capable of doing any better than he did [...] You can’t come back from that.” CNN’s John King reported that Democratic leaders, whose reactions ranged from “Oh my God” to “What are we going to do about this?”, are scrambling to figure out whether Biden should step aside. Others have already made up their minds. Calls to replace Biden are ringing across the media and Dem establishment. “For all the people who said that the media was creating age as an issue,” former CNN journalist Chris Cillizza wrote, “This debate exposed that falsehood.”

Biden has been trailing in the polls, though often within the margin of error. After this debate, Trump’s lead appears poised to grow, possibly significantly. Whatever modest boost Biden got from Trump’s felony convictions is as likely to fizzle as a yorkie’s urine stream before a million-acre forest fire. The wisdom of holding the debate prior to the convention now seems manifest, but whether Biden will in fact step aside or be ousted is another question. Replacing a candidate this late in the game is not generally a recipe for success, but given the alternative, it may be preferable. How, then, can the president be convinced? When it comes to influence, family often trumps party leaders. There is probably no one in the world who can influence Biden’s decision more than the first lady. In the coming days, Jill Biden may play a more pivotal role than any first lady since Edith Wilson, who all but ran the country in Woodrow’s stroke-induced incapacity from 1919 to 1921. Now the future is in Jill’s hands. We can only hope she does the right thing.

See also: “Five Ways the Democrats Can Replace Biden”

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