Given that President Joe Biden’s debate performance on Thursday was so disastrous that the public reaction was to ask if the party could bail on their nominee, it would have been reasonable to assume that Donald Trump would revel in the moment in a cruel way. This is a guy who mocks his opponents with name-calling, someone who is prone to slamming foes as low-energy, sloppy, ditzy, sanctimonious, wacky, shifty, and little. And yet, at his Friday afternoon rally in Virginia, Trump didn’t really mention Biden’s bad performance at all.
That’s not to say he avoided talking about debate. He started the event by praising the “big victory,” to huge cheers. But he immediately began to ding Biden on … his policies. Even when it seemed he was about to tear into his opponent’s stylistic weakness, Trump swerved back into arguments about how Biden represented an “evil” party that was seeking to destroy the country.
“He got the debate rules he wanted,” Trump said of Biden. “He got the network he wanted. He got the moderators he wanted. No amount of rest could help him defend his atrocious record.”
He even outright rejected criticisms based on Biden’s age.
“Joe Biden’s problem is not his age; it’s not his anything,” Trump said. “He’s got no problem other than his competence. I know people that are much older than him doing unbelievable things, making a fortune.”
Maybe Trump doesn’t want to attack Biden on age because he is only three years younger. But it was still notable that Trump took what could have been a remarkable moment for bullying and instead focused on, for example, what he sees as his opponent’s weakness on NATO. Trump talked about Biden weaponizing the Justice Department, implementing a “Green New Scam,” allowing trans women into women’s sports, and putting “a windmill on every corner”—otherwise, his standard talking points. He accused Biden of loving wars, of allowing rampant inflation. And a huge chunk of Trump’s Friday speech was dedicated to the crimes of undocumented immigrants and their taking jobs away from Hispanic and Black people. He promised to build a “great iron dome” over the country (by this he meant a thorough missile defense system) “because we deserve it.” He accused Biden of destroying Social Security. He warned of the threat of nuclear war.
“The question should not be if Joe Biden can survive a 90-minute debate performance but if America can survive four more years of Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump said.
In North Carolina earlier in the day, Biden had defended his debate performance. “I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to,” he said. “But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job; I know how to get things done. I know, like millions of Americans know: When you get knocked down, you get back up.”
But Trump didn’t talk about the Democrat response that prompted even Biden to address his performance. Though he acknowledged the calls for Biden to leave the race, Trump quickly dismissed the idea. “I don’t believe that, because he does better in polls than any other Democrats,” he said.
He added that he would be pleased to find out that he was facing someone such as Kamala Harris. “I’d be happy. But they don’t poll as well as this guy.”
It’s possible someone told Trump he should try to look as if he is above petty fighting (and that he actually listened). No one could make him avoid mentioning his bizarre hobbyhorses: He still ranted about windmills killing whales and people wanting electric boats with “batteries so heavy it sinks the boat.” Nor did he avoid lying, as when he insisted that Democrats want to kill babies after they are born.
Perhaps Trump felt that Biden’s performance was so disastrous that he didn’t even need to mention it—that Fox News and the internet would do the work for him by pushing clips of Biden’s garbled answers, that it would be so widely discussed that he simply didn’t need to expend any energy on it.
He did, after all, toss out a reference to the performance as a sort of given baseline talking point: “The biggest problem for our country is not Joe Biden’s personal decline but that Joe Biden’s policies are causing America’s decline at a rate we’ve never seen before.”
Still, it was a strange turn. After arguably the worst performance of a presidential candidate in modern history, both candidates went along to their respective campaign events, stuck with their old talking points, acting as if nothing particularly unusual had happened—as if the entire tone of election season had not shifted seismically overnight.
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