“This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has” Heather Cox Richardson
I cannot believe the lack of support for Joe Biden and the lack of appreciation of his knowledge and statesmanship. Are we such a superficial society that all we can hear is a raspy, uneven voice and not the meaning of the words. I'm truly disgusted with the shallow analysis of the debate.
It's the nature of the media to focus on how people look, but Biden certainly didn't sound too good, either. Even so, the yapping will die down in a couple days.
Monique Pressley, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.”
Not the mainstream standard. What's important to our exceptional media is that an elderly man acted like an elderly man his record notwithstanding and that the Dems are in panic mode.
So excuse me for being a retarded idiot but after panic what do y'all do?
Idea! Since replacing Biden ensures a Trump victory, maybe we can get SCOTGOP to declare Trump the winner and maybe get a pointless majorirty in the Senate. (The DCCC is hard at work doing their best to ensure the Republicans keep the House.)
I reject your premise that replacing Biden means a Trump victory. I know it's inexact, but 'generic Democrat' outperformed Biden against Trump in all the earlier polls. I think sticking with Biden guarantees a Trump victory, and the only hope is a different candidate.
And what I said is hardly silly. Many people are saying the same thing. Probably many major donors as well.
This is a very helpful (to me) separation of the multiple ingredients of last night, particularly our reactions to it. Thank you for still being able to think and analyze. I myself fell onto the Do Something panic wagon, but my main concern is about the true dangers of DJT and the gush of sewage he spilled.
Here in a nutshell is everything that irks me more and more about libs: to reduce a huge group to an overly simplified diagnosis it's the manic-depressive attitude.
Roe results in mania that allows libs to consider the war won even as the resistance begins, even after the Hyde amendment, even after generations of Republicans run on reversing it and getting elected on that position. Memo to libs: a single battle won usually isn't the war being won.
And then there's the flip side: crushing, paralyzing depression because an elderly man with a pretty fucking good record as POTUS acted like an elderly man. Jesus fucking Christ, how dare a POTUS be human.
He acted like what he was while having about as good a record as any POTUS given realities political and otherwise could have. Stop the fucking crying and circle around him, support your candidate.
Too: electing a decrepit dotard (again: with a pretty good track record) wouldn't be an existential crisis for the nation. Restoring Trump would be even if we got with that strong (as in: as DINO-free as possible) Dem majorities in both houses of Congress.
And if you made it this far, I've no interest in exceptions to any rule or whatever. What I've noted above are real world trends or well documented acts.
Should maybe add that a nation that chooses to elect Republicans after refusing to learn better maybe deserves what the system allows: Republican domination, now featuring enough electoral fuckery that the nation maybe is a de facto one party state. Just like the Founding Fathers wanted.
I should add overshooting the target and going from optimism to full out panic without stopping at concern is distressing for one thing. Maybe shameful.
If we can't fight as needed there's no reason we don't deserve to get our asses whipped in November.
Yeah, I'm fucking pissed at our shameful response.
Why is this all about Biden? Why is the bar set so high for him and no bar at all for Trump who lazily spewed lies and unfounded attacks and refused to answer questions? I don’t understand how Trump keeps slithering and ramming past all notions of decency and intelligence. I feel like we’re stuck on a train in an alternate reality.
This is the question I keep asking and that no one seems to hear. Why are we not talking about the giant looming threat in the room? Why, why, why? We’re basically saying there’s nothing wrong over there! The only disaster is the one on our own side. It’s insanity.
I think it's more that the HUGE TARGET we could be shooting at has been so disgustingly normalized over the last nine years that we forget we could take aim at it at all. What an astonishing victory for the authoritarian right--and what a horrifying loss for us if we let them get away with it.
Thank you for this perspective and for laying out the process. I've gone the entire range of emotions since watching Biden walk out on stage last night to reading your post this morning. I was expecting the physical frailty but not the mental feebleness - it was just a huge lost opportunity for Biden. There were SO many chances for him to make a point (for example, when Trump said he was "running because Biden was horrible", that was Biden's chance to say Trump was running to stay out of prison...easy layup!). Biden seemed so befuddled like he had facts and figures swirling around waiting to be spewed out but unfortunately wasn't coherent enough to deliver effectively (I'm still in the angry stage this morning).
I feel betrayed by the campaign. If Biden is truly that frail mentally, they need to come clean with us. I even wondered if the campaign was risking a high stakes live 'intervention' to get Joe and Jill to come to a decision about his campaign; his campaign people couldn't possibly be that inept to go on with this debate if his head cold was a potential factor. In the days of preparation, there had to be some sign to them that this disastrous outcome was possible. I've had head colds and I know how that affects me - I'd have no business attempting a debate.
If Biden stays in the campaign, I'll still support him wholeheartedly, but I'm afraid our chances of getting undecided voters to vote for him has decreased substantially. I don't see how he recovers from this, let alone uses it positively in any way to help.
I think that last sentence is key. He/they/whoever let a lot of people down. There is really no excuse for this. I think Biden has done a great job, I am working my tail off for him, and now I have real doubts as to his competence, which I did not have before. Also, I don’t think I have read this today yet, but now at the least voters will think there is a good chance he won’t be able to serve four more years. I happen to think VP Harris is coming into her own, but I’m not sure enough voters do, and Trump’s team will ratchet up this argument.
Monique Pressley, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.”
I think what a lot of people missed last night is that he was clearly overprepped, stuffed full of stats and data that most people don’t care about, and told to focus on that rather than to do what he does best, which is to come out swinging against a raving menace. The moments where the real Joe came out were his strongest. If they’d just told him to go with that—to be the Joe we saw at the SOTU—we’d be having a very different conversation today. Though an even better question is who thought having a debate with an attention-seeking liar was a wise idea in the first place.
This is what I wrote last night at That's Another Fine Mess:
Once again, the Cretin News Network and the overage yuppies still stupid enough to continue to work there lived down to my expectations: no mic control, no holding El Jefe Del Mar A Lardo to the rules, and Alex Wagner proved how desperate she is not to get dropped at MSNBC like happened back in 2008 (I just canceled recording her show). I’ll laugh if he wins and they and the rest of the DC Press Corpse find themselves looking out from the wrong side of the barbed wire fence at the tent city in West Texas they’re confined to. They all fucking well deserve it, but we don’t.
Once again, I will say that if the DC Press Corpse and the rest of the cable news yuppies and the “Democratic Consultants” had been in the Navy between December 7, 1941 and June 4, 1942, someone would have thrown their useless asses overboard.
Oh, it’s terible! The enemy is winning! Whatever can we do??? Well, as Dick Best told me, “We did our jobs and didn’t think about losing because it was unthinkable.” And then on June 4, 1942, they cut out the heart of the Japanese in six deadly minutes.
Too many Americans act like professional-level nitwits. They’re the reason we didn’t get The GI Bill For Everybody in the Second New Deal that didn’t happen because they were (sniff, sniff, boo hoo) “disappointed” by the way the war had been going, so they didn’t show up to vote on the first Tuesday in November 1942…
Four days before the US Army landed in North Africa. Step One on the hard-fought road to Normandy.
And let me tell you from ten years’ experience as a “professional Democrat” that the term “Democratic Consultant” is a two word quickie for “over-educated otherwise-unemployable moron who’s a legend in his own mind”.
I agree completely with what Josh Marshall wrote to a TPM subscriber:
“It sucked. It was brutal. But this is where we are. And a million people in history have been in suck and brutal situations and they pushed forward. Maybe they were in a battle and then they all died. Or maybe that was the moment when they made the critical decision to pull together and they won. This is living in history where we don’t know which story we’re in. That’s life. It provides an immense psychic relief to break the existential glass and say he should withdraw. Okay, then what? This is where we are and we have to keep fighting because that’s the only realistic choice we have.”
One thing I can testify to with some certainty is that the mass media campaign is not where low information voters get their information/leanings. They have worked/been forced by life to screen out all that noise. Having worked in many cycles of real door-to-door campaigning targeting low propensity voters, they are only reached by personal contact, sharing feelings with an empathetic person in what can be a longish conversation that is not ostensibly about the merits of candidates. Obviously this is almost insuperably difficult for a campaign to facilitate at scale, though I would argue that the continued dominance of Dems in Nevada is the happy result of hotel workers organized by the Culinary union, UniteHERE, knocking on those doors. Where a small margin can yield a win, this can be doable. Look at Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto as the best example. But the same hotel workers have also had influence in the same way in PA and GA. Scale is very hard.
That's a great point. I had a line in the draft post that I took out to try to shorten it up a bit that said for the purposes of this argument I was defining low-information voters as basically anyone who didn't fit in a partisan camp. So not just low-propensity voters, but broader than that. Low-propensity voters are hard to reach and super expensive on a per vote basis.
Didn't watch the shitshow for exactly the reasons listed above: tRump lies...well, duh. That's his MO, and he's sticking with it, got absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by "flooding the zone" with lies and bullshit.
WHAT A SURPRISE!
CNN made it easy - no fact-checking...two lightweight "moderators" getting chumped by the master...this is EXACTLY the outcome CNN brass hoped for: tRump lying his fecking arse off non-stop, and "Sleepy Joe" fighting to correct the record, but buried in orange dreck.
NYT/Peter Baker coverage was MSM-typical: essentially tRump lied and bull-shitted with great vigor, hence he "won".
The post-mortems by "key Dem sources" are given without any hint of ownership why Joe Biden is their guy...until last night, that is.
Before the debate, I was 100% in the Biden camp. That is no longer the case. He has lost my confidence. I don't care if he was recovering from a cold, and his past experience is not the issue. He looked unable to function adequately to do his job. I felt like if someone had run up to him and whispered that Iran had nuked Los Angeles, he might have ordered attacking Mars in response. He just seemed lost. There are no circumstances under which I would vote for Trump, but I am convinced that Biden cannot do the job any longer. He should not only withdraw his candidacy, but he should also resign. Kamala Harris should publicly withdraw her name from consideration, and the convention should choose a Democratic governor or senator as the candidate.
This is directed to those who may feel dismay and those who still have hope following the debate. For those who say, “we’ve lost” or “Biden cannot stay in the race,” I hope that you will hold on a little longer. I am sorry your hope was so easily dashed. To those who are hanging on I say, it is not our hope that will keep D. J. Trump out of the presidency, it is our strength. Nobody says that this monumental campaign is going to run smoothly with no bumps in the road. President Biden, after multiple trips around the world, with a cold and a week of being subjected to his campaign staffers’ angst and push on debate issues, came and underperformed. This is one debate. Other presidents have bombed in a debate and went on to win their races. Take a breath and relax.
We all grow older; it is the human condition. It does not make us less effective in our decision making, it just takes a little more time. Biden’s decision-making strength comes from his weighing the numbers, the effects on people and our economy, and a multitude of other things. When asked a question he processes a lot, and processing and verbalizing in a two-minute window is a challenge for anyone, especially for an older individual.
Spewing lies is a much easier task. Which was done, as expected, but with no pushback from the moderators, other than a three time repeat of original, unanswered questions, by Diana Bash. I refuse to go into the fact checking Trump in this comment, I’ll leave that to the professionals.
Remember what a dark hole we are viewing in Trump’s Project 2025 plan. I plan to work for the elections of Biden and Harris, and every clear-thinking Democrat up and down the ballot. I accept the bombed debate outcome of this one debate and will move forward, as I sincerely hope all of you will as well.
NOTE: In the next debate, if it happens, I think that the inclusion of notes, on cards or paper, and a three-minute response time would be helpful. While muting the mic was a well-intended addition, it did not mute a debater from making himself be heard on the stage. This was unfortunate, particularly when someone was spewing lies, although it did make the audience’s listening atmosphere calmer.
Relax. In a few days this apocalypse will be over. Meanwhile, the media are joyous over having a "hot story" to boost ratings and sell clicks and newspapers, but at the end of the day, the debate won't sway anyone. I would vote for a senile old man over Donald Trump no matter what.
“This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has” Heather Cox Richardson
Dr. Richardson's analysis of the debate is the best and most reasonable thing I've read today.
I cannot believe the lack of support for Joe Biden and the lack of appreciation of his knowledge and statesmanship. Are we such a superficial society that all we can hear is a raspy, uneven voice and not the meaning of the words. I'm truly disgusted with the shallow analysis of the debate.
If democracy itself wasn’t on the ballot, you’d be right. I’m so sick of entitled old white men, I could puke.
It's the nature of the media to focus on how people look, but Biden certainly didn't sound too good, either. Even so, the yapping will die down in a couple days.
Monique Pressley, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.”
Not the mainstream standard. What's important to our exceptional media is that an elderly man acted like an elderly man his record notwithstanding and that the Dems are in panic mode.
The Professional Bedwetters need to be stuffed in their Volvos and driven off the cliff.
Works for me.
The sane response to Biden's performance is panic. It went far beyond his hoarse voice.
And Trump's lies were perfectly fine, I guess. Appearances are all that matter.
I've preemptively disagreed. See elsewhere here.
So excuse me for being a retarded idiot but after panic what do y'all do?
Idea! Since replacing Biden ensures a Trump victory, maybe we can get SCOTGOP to declare Trump the winner and maybe get a pointless majorirty in the Senate. (The DCCC is hard at work doing their best to ensure the Republicans keep the House.)
Jesus.
I love the Talking Points Memo emails, but if this is the standard for comments here, I won't bother to state my thoughts any more.
It isn't the norm but as always one has to be ready to catch flack for saying something too silly.
And you've yet to answer my perfectly reasonable Q.
And because pissed as I am by your approval of panic but nothing actually positive and helpful, a gift:
https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-extremely-simple-reason-maga
I reject your premise that replacing Biden means a Trump victory. I know it's inexact, but 'generic Democrat' outperformed Biden against Trump in all the earlier polls. I think sticking with Biden guarantees a Trump victory, and the only hope is a different candidate.
And what I said is hardly silly. Many people are saying the same thing. Probably many major donors as well.
This is a very helpful (to me) separation of the multiple ingredients of last night, particularly our reactions to it. Thank you for still being able to think and analyze. I myself fell onto the Do Something panic wagon, but my main concern is about the true dangers of DJT and the gush of sewage he spilled.
I found Van Jones' comments to be very moving. https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/politics/video/van-jones-reaction-biden-trump-cnn-debate-digvid
Thank you for reminding us of the bigger parts of this circus wagon.
Thank you.
Here in a nutshell is everything that irks me more and more about libs: to reduce a huge group to an overly simplified diagnosis it's the manic-depressive attitude.
Roe results in mania that allows libs to consider the war won even as the resistance begins, even after the Hyde amendment, even after generations of Republicans run on reversing it and getting elected on that position. Memo to libs: a single battle won usually isn't the war being won.
And then there's the flip side: crushing, paralyzing depression because an elderly man with a pretty fucking good record as POTUS acted like an elderly man. Jesus fucking Christ, how dare a POTUS be human.
He acted like what he was while having about as good a record as any POTUS given realities political and otherwise could have. Stop the fucking crying and circle around him, support your candidate.
Too: electing a decrepit dotard (again: with a pretty good track record) wouldn't be an existential crisis for the nation. Restoring Trump would be even if we got with that strong (as in: as DINO-free as possible) Dem majorities in both houses of Congress.
And if you made it this far, I've no interest in exceptions to any rule or whatever. What I've noted above are real world trends or well documented acts.
Should maybe add that a nation that chooses to elect Republicans after refusing to learn better maybe deserves what the system allows: Republican domination, now featuring enough electoral fuckery that the nation maybe is a de facto one party state. Just like the Founding Fathers wanted.
I should add overshooting the target and going from optimism to full out panic without stopping at concern is distressing for one thing. Maybe shameful.
If we can't fight as needed there's no reason we don't deserve to get our asses whipped in November.
Yeah, I'm fucking pissed at our shameful response.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I get pissed of and spew so y'all can save the effort.
And thank you!
And just for that, the less pissy version:
https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-extremely-simple-reason-maga
I was pretty freaked out over the debate but you brought me back to earth. as did Seth Abramson. Thanks again!
I try to serve.
Thanks.
Why is this all about Biden? Why is the bar set so high for him and no bar at all for Trump who lazily spewed lies and unfounded attacks and refused to answer questions? I don’t understand how Trump keeps slithering and ramming past all notions of decency and intelligence. I feel like we’re stuck on a train in an alternate reality.
This is the question I keep asking and that no one seems to hear. Why are we not talking about the giant looming threat in the room? Why, why, why? We’re basically saying there’s nothing wrong over there! The only disaster is the one on our own side. It’s insanity.
Dems are so afraid that by focusing on Biden's relatively minor faults, they're digging their own graves.
I think it's more that the HUGE TARGET we could be shooting at has been so disgustingly normalized over the last nine years that we forget we could take aim at it at all. What an astonishing victory for the authoritarian right--and what a horrifying loss for us if we let them get away with it.
That’s well said Nancy.
Thank you for this perspective and for laying out the process. I've gone the entire range of emotions since watching Biden walk out on stage last night to reading your post this morning. I was expecting the physical frailty but not the mental feebleness - it was just a huge lost opportunity for Biden. There were SO many chances for him to make a point (for example, when Trump said he was "running because Biden was horrible", that was Biden's chance to say Trump was running to stay out of prison...easy layup!). Biden seemed so befuddled like he had facts and figures swirling around waiting to be spewed out but unfortunately wasn't coherent enough to deliver effectively (I'm still in the angry stage this morning).
I feel betrayed by the campaign. If Biden is truly that frail mentally, they need to come clean with us. I even wondered if the campaign was risking a high stakes live 'intervention' to get Joe and Jill to come to a decision about his campaign; his campaign people couldn't possibly be that inept to go on with this debate if his head cold was a potential factor. In the days of preparation, there had to be some sign to them that this disastrous outcome was possible. I've had head colds and I know how that affects me - I'd have no business attempting a debate.
If Biden stays in the campaign, I'll still support him wholeheartedly, but I'm afraid our chances of getting undecided voters to vote for him has decreased substantially. I don't see how he recovers from this, let alone uses it positively in any way to help.
Thank you David, for this excellent writeup.
Old guy with a bad cold had a shitty debate with a pathological liar and it was televised nationally.
If it alters the course of the election, then we will deserve the authoritarian assholes that we will get.
I think that last sentence is key. He/they/whoever let a lot of people down. There is really no excuse for this. I think Biden has done a great job, I am working my tail off for him, and now I have real doubts as to his competence, which I did not have before. Also, I don’t think I have read this today yet, but now at the least voters will think there is a good chance he won’t be able to serve four more years. I happen to think VP Harris is coming into her own, but I’m not sure enough voters do, and Trump’s team will ratchet up this argument.
I just can’t get over it…He. Just. Blew. It.
Monique Pressley, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.”
I think what a lot of people missed last night is that he was clearly overprepped, stuffed full of stats and data that most people don’t care about, and told to focus on that rather than to do what he does best, which is to come out swinging against a raving menace. The moments where the real Joe came out were his strongest. If they’d just told him to go with that—to be the Joe we saw at the SOTU—we’d be having a very different conversation today. Though an even better question is who thought having a debate with an attention-seeking liar was a wise idea in the first place.
This is what I wrote last night at That's Another Fine Mess:
Once again, the Cretin News Network and the overage yuppies still stupid enough to continue to work there lived down to my expectations: no mic control, no holding El Jefe Del Mar A Lardo to the rules, and Alex Wagner proved how desperate she is not to get dropped at MSNBC like happened back in 2008 (I just canceled recording her show). I’ll laugh if he wins and they and the rest of the DC Press Corpse find themselves looking out from the wrong side of the barbed wire fence at the tent city in West Texas they’re confined to. They all fucking well deserve it, but we don’t.
Once again, I will say that if the DC Press Corpse and the rest of the cable news yuppies and the “Democratic Consultants” had been in the Navy between December 7, 1941 and June 4, 1942, someone would have thrown their useless asses overboard.
Oh, it’s terible! The enemy is winning! Whatever can we do??? Well, as Dick Best told me, “We did our jobs and didn’t think about losing because it was unthinkable.” And then on June 4, 1942, they cut out the heart of the Japanese in six deadly minutes.
Too many Americans act like professional-level nitwits. They’re the reason we didn’t get The GI Bill For Everybody in the Second New Deal that didn’t happen because they were (sniff, sniff, boo hoo) “disappointed” by the way the war had been going, so they didn’t show up to vote on the first Tuesday in November 1942…
Four days before the US Army landed in North Africa. Step One on the hard-fought road to Normandy.
And let me tell you from ten years’ experience as a “professional Democrat” that the term “Democratic Consultant” is a two word quickie for “over-educated otherwise-unemployable moron who’s a legend in his own mind”.
I agree completely with what Josh Marshall wrote to a TPM subscriber:
“It sucked. It was brutal. But this is where we are. And a million people in history have been in suck and brutal situations and they pushed forward. Maybe they were in a battle and then they all died. Or maybe that was the moment when they made the critical decision to pull together and they won. This is living in history where we don’t know which story we’re in. That’s life. It provides an immense psychic relief to break the existential glass and say he should withdraw. Okay, then what? This is where we are and we have to keep fighting because that’s the only realistic choice we have.”
We. Have. To. Keep. Fighting. Because. That’s. The. Only. Realistic. Choice. We. Have.
Just like the guys on the carriers at Midway who tore the heart out of the enemy after six months of retreat and defeat.
One thing I can testify to with some certainty is that the mass media campaign is not where low information voters get their information/leanings. They have worked/been forced by life to screen out all that noise. Having worked in many cycles of real door-to-door campaigning targeting low propensity voters, they are only reached by personal contact, sharing feelings with an empathetic person in what can be a longish conversation that is not ostensibly about the merits of candidates. Obviously this is almost insuperably difficult for a campaign to facilitate at scale, though I would argue that the continued dominance of Dems in Nevada is the happy result of hotel workers organized by the Culinary union, UniteHERE, knocking on those doors. Where a small margin can yield a win, this can be doable. Look at Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto as the best example. But the same hotel workers have also had influence in the same way in PA and GA. Scale is very hard.
That's a great point. I had a line in the draft post that I took out to try to shorten it up a bit that said for the purposes of this argument I was defining low-information voters as basically anyone who didn't fit in a partisan camp. So not just low-propensity voters, but broader than that. Low-propensity voters are hard to reach and super expensive on a per vote basis.
Didn't watch the shitshow for exactly the reasons listed above: tRump lies...well, duh. That's his MO, and he's sticking with it, got absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by "flooding the zone" with lies and bullshit.
WHAT A SURPRISE!
CNN made it easy - no fact-checking...two lightweight "moderators" getting chumped by the master...this is EXACTLY the outcome CNN brass hoped for: tRump lying his fecking arse off non-stop, and "Sleepy Joe" fighting to correct the record, but buried in orange dreck.
NYT/Peter Baker coverage was MSM-typical: essentially tRump lied and bull-shitted with great vigor, hence he "won".
The post-mortems by "key Dem sources" are given without any hint of ownership why Joe Biden is their guy...until last night, that is.
OY-Fecking-VEY!
The Decoding Fox News substack did an excellent deep-dive on Trump's lies during the debate.
"Donald J. Trump lied, exaggerated or said something misleading for every single answer he gave during the debate."
Click the links for their articles, "Presidential Debate - Trump Fact Check - Parts One and Two."
https://decodingfoxnews.substack.com/p/presidential-debate-trump-fact-check
https://decodingfoxnews.substack.com/p/presidential-debate-trump-fact-check-520
Before the debate, I was 100% in the Biden camp. That is no longer the case. He has lost my confidence. I don't care if he was recovering from a cold, and his past experience is not the issue. He looked unable to function adequately to do his job. I felt like if someone had run up to him and whispered that Iran had nuked Los Angeles, he might have ordered attacking Mars in response. He just seemed lost. There are no circumstances under which I would vote for Trump, but I am convinced that Biden cannot do the job any longer. He should not only withdraw his candidacy, but he should also resign. Kamala Harris should publicly withdraw her name from consideration, and the convention should choose a Democratic governor or senator as the candidate.
Post Bombed Debate
This is directed to those who may feel dismay and those who still have hope following the debate. For those who say, “we’ve lost” or “Biden cannot stay in the race,” I hope that you will hold on a little longer. I am sorry your hope was so easily dashed. To those who are hanging on I say, it is not our hope that will keep D. J. Trump out of the presidency, it is our strength. Nobody says that this monumental campaign is going to run smoothly with no bumps in the road. President Biden, after multiple trips around the world, with a cold and a week of being subjected to his campaign staffers’ angst and push on debate issues, came and underperformed. This is one debate. Other presidents have bombed in a debate and went on to win their races. Take a breath and relax.
We all grow older; it is the human condition. It does not make us less effective in our decision making, it just takes a little more time. Biden’s decision-making strength comes from his weighing the numbers, the effects on people and our economy, and a multitude of other things. When asked a question he processes a lot, and processing and verbalizing in a two-minute window is a challenge for anyone, especially for an older individual.
Spewing lies is a much easier task. Which was done, as expected, but with no pushback from the moderators, other than a three time repeat of original, unanswered questions, by Diana Bash. I refuse to go into the fact checking Trump in this comment, I’ll leave that to the professionals.
Remember what a dark hole we are viewing in Trump’s Project 2025 plan. I plan to work for the elections of Biden and Harris, and every clear-thinking Democrat up and down the ballot. I accept the bombed debate outcome of this one debate and will move forward, as I sincerely hope all of you will as well.
NOTE: In the next debate, if it happens, I think that the inclusion of notes, on cards or paper, and a three-minute response time would be helpful. While muting the mic was a well-intended addition, it did not mute a debater from making himself be heard on the stage. This was unfortunate, particularly when someone was spewing lies, although it did make the audience’s listening atmosphere calmer.
Relax. In a few days this apocalypse will be over. Meanwhile, the media are joyous over having a "hot story" to boost ratings and sell clicks and newspapers, but at the end of the day, the debate won't sway anyone. I would vote for a senile old man over Donald Trump no matter what.