Everyone lost.
That’s what a fair headline would say about what was the worst presidential debate in history.
President Joe Biden couldn’t string together coherent sentences. Donald Trump said absolutely nothing of substance, refused to answer questions, and I’m still not sure if there was a single truthful statement amid his blizzard of lies. And moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash not only didn’t try to fact check Trump — which some think they absolutely should’ve done and others equally vehemently think they should not have done — but didn’t even try to force the candidates to answer their questions.
The media also lost because it decided 20 minutes in that the story of the debate was about Biden’s performance, and they ignored any good substantive answers he gave subsequently and paid precious little attention to Trump’s deeply troubling antics and lack of substance.
All of this meant that anyone who watched the debate also lost bigly, to use a Trumpism.
Where does the campaign go from here? The next few weeks will now be dominated with calls for Biden to step aside. Almost every president loses the first debate of his reelection campaign. They’re used to being in a bubble where few people question them and where they just don’t have to make sharp points and counterpoints in the way that a debate demands.
But given that voters already had concerns about Biden’s fitness, his halting answers, occasional pauses, and lack of sharpness will confirm for many of them that he’s just not up for the job. I think the most cogent answer of what happened — as explained by Biden’s former communications director Jen Psaki on MSNBC after the debate — is that his debate prep filled his head with facts and figures. As he tried to recall and marshal them, it distracted his train of thought and led to him fumbling for words.
The same thing happened during Ronald Reagan’s disastrous first debate performance in 1984 — leaving Nancy Reagan fuming and demanding that heads roll. In essence, Biden was over prepared. That also explains why he sounded so much better in several post debate appearances.
Even so, anyone who watched Vice President Harris or other Biden surrogates filet Trump on the cable networks after the debate knows how poor his performance was. Their arguments and dissection of lies were what the president needed to do on stage and didn’t.
For the first time, he and his family have to ask themselves whether stepping aside makes sense. Biden has been a very good president. Nonetheless, a younger Democrat with no age concerns almost certainly could turn the campaign into one about Trump’s incoherence, lack of fitness, and age issues — which were on ample display Thursday night. After all, the man’s answer to a question about his mental acuity was that he won golf club championships.
Make no mistake, it doesn’t matter what anyone outside of the Biden family thinks. The only person who could make the decision to step aside is Biden himself. But given the avalanche of calls for him to do so that will surely come in the next week, plus angst from Democratic officials, fundraisers, and more, it seems like there is at least a chance that he might decide to ride off as an American hero who put country over party and self. And that’s not something I thought was possible before the debate.
I still think it’s an unlikely outcome. And if Biden decides to stick it out, his campaign has to aggressively get both him and Harris out there in the next couple of weeks (Harris to silently say to voters worried about Biden’s fitness, look at this competent person who can take over if need be). He needs to do live interviews, which prove that he just had a bad debate night as happened to his predecessors in their first reelection debates. He has to change the narrative and quickly. Heck, I’d offer him to every network for an interview after Trump’s acceptance speech.
The reality is that anyone who says Trump is going to win in a landslide or Biden can’t still win is delusional or lying. Trump was awful on Thursday night — it’s like a quarterback who throws three interceptions and whose team still wins because the other team turned it over five times.
Biden has plenty of time to come back and lots of opportunities. He may yet win. But the truth is that another Democrat almost certainly would demolish Trump given his weakness. And that should give Team Biden pause.