So Joe Biden debated Donald Trump last night and it was… not pretty. In a debate format that spotlighted his shortcomings, Biden was mumbling, sputtering, often unable to complete thoughts or even sentences and, in the absence of such basic communications skills, babbling incoherently, while spending nearly the entire debate looking glassy-eyed, slack-jawed and confused. At 81 years of age, Biden could have passed for 101. Trump, by contrast, sounded sharp, confident and on-point, despite a few obvious stumbles, and landed repeated haymakers simply by making cutting references to Biden’s ongoing gibberish. Even as everything coming out of his mouth was bullshit — and usually outlandish bullshit — Trump faced no real pushback from his addled opponent, who couldn’t lay a glove on him and who, himself, fumbled even the easiest layup questions. It was a dreadful spectacle. If Biden loses this election, as seems even more likely than ever now, future historians will, fairly or not, look back on this evening as where that loss happened.[1]
That “fairly” is a caveat because, of course, none of this is new. This is how Biden has been since he launched his presidential campaign in 2019. Regular readers have seen this writer go on about this for years now, and I’m only one of many.[2] This is, in fact, exactly how Biden performed in nearly all of the 2020 Democratic primary debates and, as I wrote more than once at the time, how I expected debates between Trump and Biden to go as well. But the 2020 debate format allowed the candidates to argue with and talk over one another while an audience of partisans cheered, booed and rooted them on — and drowned out a lot of the discordance. Last night, there was no audience, the moderators controlled the participants’ mics and there was just the cold glare of the camera.
Something that was new, though, was the reaction to Biden by corporate press pundits and Democratic elites. In the 2020 primary debates, they’d gone out of their way to cover for him (I’ll return to that in a moment). Not so last night. On CNN, which hosted the debate, John King reported that this had been 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. It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now. It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers, and they’re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal and which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket and they’re having conversations about what they should do about it… I can tell you, it started minutes in, it started with the first couple of answers and it has continued throughout the night from an ‘Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Oh, my god!” to a ‘what do we do about this?’”
“The panic that I am hearing from Democrats,” said Abby Phillips, “is not like anything that I have heard in this campaign so far.” NBC political analyst Chuck Todd:
“I’ve been talking to a lot of leaders in the Democratic party, electeds, um, coalition leaders. There’s a full-on panic about this performance. Um, not like ‘oh, this is recoverable.’ It is more of a ‘ok, uh, he’s gotta step aside.’ There’s a lot of that chatter. This is… this is about as bad of a performance that Biden could have delivered… The panic level, particularly among elected Democrats who have to share the ballot with him, um, there’s a full-on panic tonight.”
That was the story across media from the beginning of the debate — bubbles very dramatically bursting. Democratic elites who had, for years, tried to gaslight the public into believing that, contrary to all appearances, Biden was actually an energetic, engaged executive saw all of their efforts in this vein very suddenly and permanently go up in smoke. Those who had been misled by them were made to suddenly face the no-doubt shocking truth. Those who’d understood Biden was cognitively impaired saw this dramatically confirmed again. Reactions ranged from fear and panic by Dems terrified of a return by Trump to anger that a broken system had resulted in Dems once again being saddled with this pathetic creature as their party’s standard bearer to, in the case of MAGA Republicans, sheer ecstasy, as they felt victory was definitely within their strongman’s grasp.
How did we get here? When he presented himself as a candidate for the presidency in 2019, Biden had been largely out of the public eye for years, and his cognitive decline was pronounced and shocking. Recognizing that it could sink him, his handlers mostly kept him off the campaign trail, letting the corporate press do the job of promoting him to a Dem electorate focused on defeating Trump as the “electable” candidate, as opposed to his main progressive opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was smeared as some fringe radical who would lose a general election, cost Dems the congress and lead to a downballot bloodbath of Dems in state and local elections. Acting as essentially a super PAC for the Biden campaign, the corporate press overcame the “threat” of a progressive victory and carried their guy to the Democratic nomination. Before it was over, the covid pandemic was underway, bringing a halt to nearly all traditional campaign activity. Biden wasn’t really participating in much of that anyway, and the virus allowed him to basically just hide away in his basement through most of the general-election campaign and let the weight of months of covid-imposed hardship and a failed presidency drag Trump to oblivion. Even then, he barely won. Without covid, it’s unlikely he would have.
Much of that campaign season proved a darkly surreal farce. A moment that has, for years, stuck out to me as a defining one — and after last night’s fiasco this seems particularly true — was a debate during the lead-up to the Democratic primaries. I’ve written about it more than once. This account is from the introduction to a version of an article I wrote, in 2019, about Biden and his career:
On 12 Sept., 2019, the Democratic candidates for president held a debate in Houston. During the course of it, Joe Biden referred to his rival Sen. Bernie Sanders as “the president.” At another point, Biden forgot Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s name and fell back to referring to her as “my distinguished friend, the senator on my left.” At still another, he seemed to forget Pete Buttigieg’s name and also settled for “my friend.” He boldly declared “I’m the Vice President of the United States,” a declaration that would certainly come as a surprise to Mike Pence.
Biden was asked a question about the legacy of slavery. His response, rattled off in the rapid cadence of one who is quite sure of himself, was so utterly incomprehensible it’s difficult to even transcribe:
“Well, they have to deal with the — Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved I started… dealing with that. Redlining. Banks. Making sure that we’re in a position where — Look, talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from 15 to 45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise that equal raise to getting out… the sixty-thousand dollar level. Number two: make sure that we bring into the help the — the student, the, the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need — We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are reca — Now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have, make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four, and five year-olds go to school — school, not daycare. School. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t wanna help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, the — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the-the-the-the phono… make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”
At this point, the questioner thanked Biden but he wasn’t done yet — if his comments weren’t already baffling enough, he then plunged down a rabbit hole that left everyone scratching their heads:
“No, I’m going to go like the rest of them do, twice over, okay? Because here’s the deal. The deal is that we’ve got this a little backwards. And by the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela. I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro. Number two, you talk about the need to do something in Latin America. I’m the guy that came up with $740 million to see to it those three countries, in fact, change their system so people don’t have to chance to leave. You’re all acting like we just discovered this yesterday!”
All of this in answer to a question about the legacy of slavery. When Biden referred to “record player,” a medium of decades past, he’d caught himself and appeared to be in the process of offering “phonograph” as a substitute before catching himself again.
On health care, Biden said, “the option I’m proposing is Medicare For All” before catching and correcting himself and retreating to “Medicare For Choice.” Biden rather viscerally opposes the progressives’ Medicare For All proposal and had been attacking it using the same rhetoric as Donald Trump (something he has continued to do). Biden described his plan (which, if one is honest, isn’t really a plan at all but just something slapped together to pretend as if there is one):
“If you want Medicare, if you lose the job from your insurance — from your employer, you automatically can buy into this. You don’t have — no pre-existing condition can stop you from buying in. You get covered, period.”
Minutes later, Julian Castro noted that his own plan doesn’t require a buy-in and contrasted this unfavorably with Biden’s, at which point the former Vice President insisted the Biden plan, contrary to his own clear words only minutes earlier, didn’t require a buy-in either. It led to a testy exchange in which Castro challenged, “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?”
The allusion to Biden’s obviously impaired cognitive state brought gasps from the audience. Biden didn’t hear what Castro was saying and had to lean over and ask Bernie Sanders about it.
Nothing about any of this is unusual for Biden. It is, in fact, typical of his public appearances. He wasn’t just having a bad night. This is what’s left of him now. When I wrote this article — weeks prior to that Houston debate — I described Biden as “a real mess — confused, forgetful, stumbling over words and slurring them like a drunk, displaying lots of arrogance and bluster but no command of basic facts, including those regarding ‘his’ proposals, which are clearly as much a mystery to him as to everyone else…” Biden’s September debate performance would have immediately ended the campaign of any other candidate as dramatically as it would have completely.
This is why I’ve gone into it here:
CNN’s Chris Cillizza:
“Overall, Biden looked strong and presidential although it wasn’t perfect… [A] good night for the vice president.”
Dan Balz of the Washington Post:
“With all the leading Democratic candidates on the same stage for the first time this year, former vice president Joe Biden on Thursday delivered the kind of performance his supporters have been waiting for — combative when needed and in the thick of the action throughout.Biden did not dominate from start to finish and did not make it through the evening mistake-free. But on balance this was the kind of evening he needed…”
Doug Shoen of Fox News:
“[T]he first 30 minutes of the debate during the health care discussion were arguably Biden’s best moments on the campaign trail to date. Though the former vice president’s performance was not perfect, he exhibited a much-needed display of strength and preparedness. He was the night’s big winner.”
T.A. Frank in Vanity Fair:
“In Houston, Biden managed to be combative without being nasty, and he was one of the few candidates onstage who stayed in the realm of genuine argument rather than sloganeering… [O]verall he seemed alert and presidential…”
Stephen Collinson, CNN:
“Joe Biden was as good at Thursday night’s debate as he’s been in the entire campaign and perhaps close to as good as he could be.”
And so on. Such gaslighting wasn’t universal across corporate media by any means but it was disturbingly common. Biden was widely declared the winner of the debate, his endless fumbles written off or barely even addressed. More to the point, Biden’s painfully obvious cognitive decline was neither treated as an important story, nor, beyond a handful of small outlets, as any real story at all. It’s as if it doesn’t exist. Perhaps worse still, Julian Castro, the only candidate who raised a question relating to it, was ubiquitously condemned for doing so — he got three days of bad press out of it. That isn’t just covering over the problem; that’s aggressively trying to discourage anyone from talking about it.
In the 2020 cycle, the corporate press simply refused to treat Biden’s cognitive decline as any sort of story. Most of the most mind-melting things he’d say went almost entirely unreported in mainstream outlets, which would, on rare occasions, note some stray Biden “gaffe,” as if it was just some perhaps-charming personal quirk but uniformly declined to treat the matter of cognitive impairment in any systematic way. The truth is that Biden was every bit as much a mess then as he is now. There are some differences between that primary debate and last night. One is the size of the stage — a presidential general election debate will draw a vastly larger audience than a Dem primary debate. Another is the debate format — besides the differences already covered, the impact Biden’s stumbles should have produced back then was somewhat diluted by the multitude of candidates. But the biggest and most important one is the newfound (perhaps temporary?) unwillingness of press pundits and Dem elites to run cover for Biden — to, in effect, commit systematic fraud on the public on his behalf— by pretending as if nothing is wrong. After last night, they are, with nowhere left to run and no way to lie their way out of it, finally — finally — having to concede the conspicuous and sound the alarm.
That 2019 primary debate and the reaction to it is one step along the way — perhaps not even a standout one, as Biden, as a matter or routine, said and did things that would have instantly ended any prior candidate in any prior campaign — but it’s a microcosm of how we got where we are now, suffering from a fundamentally broken system, a whole network of them, that, in an alleged liberal democracy, produced and continues to produce and impose on people outcomes no one wants. Americans have made clear, though not always putting it in these precise terms, that they’re sick to death of the entire Clintonite right project; Biden’s tired “nothing will fundamentally change” regime isn’t what they either want or need. It was inevitable that his presidency would prove a dismal failure with them, as, indeed, it has; his approval numbers went into majority-disapprove only a few months into his administration and have stayed there. Supermajorities of Americans and even supermajorities of Biden’s own party have, for years now, made crystal clear they didn’t want him to run again, didn’t want the Democratic party to renominate him, said he was “too old” — by which they mean cognitively impaired — to be president, but entirely heedless of all of this, Biden insisted on an incumbent’s reelection campaign, which had the usual effect: the party apparatus circled the wagons around him, refused to allow any meaningful primary contest and Dems ended up stuck with him again.
None of this had to happen. With institutions that functioned properly, none of it would have happened.
What Biden has yet again proven, beyond any doubt, is that he shouldn’t have been elected in the first place, shouldn’t have been the Democratic nominee in 2020 and is unfit to serve as President of the United States. To note the obvious, that last is, one suspects, a conclusion many millions more now share than did just yesterday afternoon. Some more Obvious: Unless one is simply pulling for Trump, it’s no longer possible to pretend as if throwing Biden against him is in any way advisable; if Trump must be defeated, that is, for the sane, off the table as an option; anyone still pushing for it just wants Trump to win (or has judgment more impaired than Biden’s own). Obvious #3: Biden isn’t going to get any younger with age. Obvious #4 is Trump, what he is and what he’ll do, and the fact that he’s been beating Biden in the head-to-heads since mid-Sept. of last year — before last night’s debate. Why should Dems needlessly throw an easily winnable election and sacrifice the presidency — and perhaps a great deal more — to Joe Biden’s vanity? While any remotely solid Dem contender would clean Trump’s clock, the difficulties of launching a new nominee at this late date is Obvious #5 and make an early-as-possible Biden exit even more imperative. If those Dem elites care about America, they’re going to be bringing immediate and major pressure on Biden to drop out. If Biden cares about America or believes any of his own rhetoric about democracy itself being on the line in the Fall, he’ll finally do the right thing and step aside, but if he cared about any of that, he wouldn’t have run in the first place, so the prospects of him suddenly growing a conscience that outpaces whatever ego remains in that hash of a brain he has left seem pretty minimal. We’ll see, I suppose.
So buckle up, Americans! If it has taken you this long to discern it, you’re about to find out exactly what you mean to Biden and the Dems!
— j.
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[1] Historians looking to get even more granular can even pinpoint the moment, only a few minutes into the debate.
[2] Though I am the one who wrote what was perhaps the only lengthy treatment of Biden’s cognitive decline and the press treatment of it.
