What does the worst debate in American history look like? It looks like the debate that took place on Tuesday night between President Donald Trump and the former Vice-President Joe Biden. It was a joke, a mess, a disaster. A “shit show,” a “dumpster fire,” a national humiliation. No matter how bad you thought the debate would be, it was worse. Way worse. Trump shouted, he bullied, he hectored, he lied, and he interrupted, over and over again.
Remarkably enough, it was seemingly on purpose. Losing in the polls, and with the country stricken by a pandemic that has claimed two hundred thousand American lives, the President offered incoherent bluster, inflammatory racism, and personal attacks on his opponent’s son. But mostly what came through was Trump’s refusal to shut up. He talked and talked and talked. He talked over Biden. He talked over the moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace. He talked over Biden some more. How bad was it? The line that history is likely to record as among the most memorable was Biden’s lament, at the end of the debate’s very first segment: “Will you just shut up, man? This is so unpresidential.”
To the extent that there was a substantive headline, it was Trump’s refusal to disavow white supremacy—after, it should be noted, claiming that he has been great for African-Americans—and his continued campaign to undermine public confidence in the upcoming election by baselessly asserting that ballots will be interfered with. “This is not going to end well,” he said, of the election, showing once again that his plan is to attack the very idea of voting itself. He then repeated it, as if for emphasis. “This is not going to end well.” It sure sounded like a threat.
Biden, for his part, made a strong argument for the over-all disastrousness of Trump’s tenure, speaking in especially caustic terms about Trump’s botched response to COVID-19. “You’re the worst President America has ever had,” Biden said at one point. Later, he added, “Under this President, we’ve become weaker, sicker, poorer, more divided, and more violent.” It was a tough line and potentially even memorable, but Trump’s crosstalk kept it from being memorably delivered, which was true of many of the specifics that Biden sought, and often failed, to get across. He hardly mentioned, for example, the Times’ revelation, this week, that Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire who has refused to release his tax returns—unlike all previous Presidents for the past four decades—had paid only seven hundred and fifty dollars in federal income tax for each of the first two years of his Administration.
Instead, Biden and Wallace were left sputtering by Trump for much of the evening, which is not a good look for either an aspiring President or a journalist who is generally admired for his tough questions. At times, Trump succeeded, if that is the right word for it, in getting them to descend to his level. Biden slung a few insults of his own, calling Trump, at various points, “racist,” a “clown,” and even “Putin’s puppy.” Wallace, visibly frustrated and not sure what to do about it, was left to lecture Trump about not following the rules that Trump’s own campaign had agreed to—but Wallace was powerless to stop the rampaging President. Trump even interrupted Biden as he attempted to finish his very last sentence at the end of the debate. The whole thing was hard to follow, and nearly unwatchable, as if you’d stumbled into a family’s dinner-table fight over politics, and Trump was the drunk, belligerent uncle who would just not stop talking but could not make a coherent point. With such tumult, of course, neither candidate was able to communicate much about his plans for the country, which seemed to be Trump’s point.
About midway through the debate, the evening’s low point came, just as predicted, when Trump attacked Biden’s son Hunter, talking about his history of drug use—“Was it cocaine?” Trump asked—and falsely claimed that he had been “dishonorably discharged” from the U.S. military and had received “millions” from the wife of the former mayor of Moscow. This was no surprise. In the hours before the debate, Axios published an item about Trump’s plan to do just that. In the end, the only shock was that Trump chose to launch the attack as Biden spoke about his other son, Beau, who had died of cancer after serving in Iraq and going on to a career in public service like his father.
Biden, perhaps because the Trump campaign had put him on notice, maintained his composure, though there were more than a few times when he flashed his famous Biden grin in disbelief at what he was hearing. As the ninety minutes wore on, Biden was at his best as the personification of the exhausted America he hopes to lead, shaking his head and commenting on the Trumpian tantrum as it played out onstage across from him. “He just pours gasoline in the fire constantly,” Biden said at one point. Later, the Democratic nominee observed, when Wallace tried to shame Trump into abiding by the agreed-upon rules, “He never keeps his word.” When Trump bragged about his response to the coronavirus pandemic, insisting that “we are doing phenomenally” and then claiming he had not been against wearing masks (while making fun of Biden for wearing masks), the former Vice-President again assumed the role of weary narrator for the public. “He’s been totally irresponsible,” Biden said. “He’s a fool on this.”
With the election now less than five weeks away, the question of Trump’s foolishness, and whether it will do him in politically, will soon be answered. Trump’s debate performance will not help him in that respect: the race was Biden’s to lose before the debate, and it almost certainly will remain that way after the debate. As of Tuesday, the RealClearPolitics national polling average had Biden up by six points nationally, and FiveThirtyEight had Biden up by seven points—a wider margin than any candidate has had at this point in a U.S. general election since Bill Clinton trounced Bob Dole, in 1996. And those polls were before the Times’ revelations about Trump’s taxes. Even the setting of Tuesday’s debate, at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio, underscored Trump’s political weakness. Four years ago, he won Ohio, a bastion of his white working-class supporters, by eight points. Hours before the debate, a new Fox News poll showed Biden leading Trump in Ohio by five points, and the Cook Political Report changed its rating for the state from “leans Republican” to “toss up.”
With Trump in a corner, everyone expected him to lash out at Biden with particular viciousness. He does not do defensive crouches. He does nasty. He counterpunches. This is, after all, Trump’s mantra, his lifelong habit. “When someone attacks me,” Trump wrote on Twitter, back in 2012, “I always attack back…except 100x more.”
But, even for Trump, there was something particularly over the top about his debate performance on Tuesday night. It was more of a primal scream than a political appearance, a rant by a man who not only cannot control himself but for some reason thinks he does not have to try. Who could this possibly have been designed to persuade? For the last few months, as polls have shown the decisive suburbs slipping away from him, Trump has talked about his appeal to the “suburban housewives” of America. If there is a single additional suburban housewife, or any woman, who is voting for Trump after that debate, I would like to meet her. The bottom line is that Trump’s chances for a second term are dwindling fast. He knows it. Which is why he will not shut up, on the debate stage or anywhere else, for the next thirty-four days. At this point, there is only one way to get Donald Trump to shut up. “Elections have consequences,” he said, in his very first answer of the evening. To which America will soon have its chance to reply: yes, they do.
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