POTUS Debate TV Review: Biden Shows His Age While Trump Tosses Out One Whopper After Another With No Fact-Checking From CNN Moderators
If there was any winner in Thursday night’s first presidential debate, it was CNN. If there was a loser, it was absolutely Joe Biden.
Throwing the already tight race into a tailspin for the faltering incumbent almost from the very beginning, the most memorable line maybe Biden’s inability to finish some of his own sentences. Otherwise, Donald Trump’s declaration that “I didn’t have sex with a porn star,” and his rival’s badly delivered line that “you have the morals of an alley cat,” could be what history remembers.
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What anyone who saw or heard the Jake Tapper and Dana Bash moderated clash between the 45th and the 46th POTUS’ can’t deny is that the 78-year-old Trump was energized and relatively succinct. On the other hand, as Trump ramped it up, the 81-year-old Biden was rambling and halting over the course of the night even with his command of issues foreign and domestic.
Biden finally came alive in the last minutes and calling Trump a “whiner,” but it was way too little, too late for the seasoned politician.
Long story short: It was not a good night for the president of the United States. In fact, it was such a bad night, the unthinkable may now be being discussed – should Joe Biden drop out of the race?
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“It was 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,” said CNN’s John King right after the event ended. Former White House Communications Director and Biden loyalist Kate Bedingfield called her ex-boss’ performance “disappointing.”
On Fox News, a somewhat surprisingly circumspect Sean Hannity said “Joe Biden is not fit to be president, Donald Trump clearly is.”
Jumping into the fray fast and furious, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN that Biden had a “slow start” but a “strong finish,” and she got a bit of a boost when anchor Anderson Cooper told her that, when it came to framing the election, “neither person on that stage tonight made the argument as coherently as you just did.”
Other future presidential prospects also were out in force defending Biden. California Gov. Gavin Newsom told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that Democrats should “worry less and do more.”
Newsom was selling hard on Biden’s record, but no one was buying, as the punditry focused almost exclusively on Biden’s performance, his age, and the freak-out among Democrats.
What made a bad situation even worse was that shortly after the debate, when Biden visited a post-debate watch party in Atlanta, he showed some of the swagger that he had at the State of the Union in March.
In the Biden fallout, there was a lot of history on the map Thursday.
Held in Atlanta and hosted exclusively by CNN, the debate was the earliest ever in a modern presidential campaign. It’s the first showdown of a current president and a former president. It is also the first time presidential contenders have had a debate without an audience in attendance since John F. Kennedy and then Vice President Richard Nixon went head-to-head in the first televised debates in 1960.
Sixty-four years ago, it was two of the youngest men ever to seek the White House. This year, no matter who wins will be the oldest person elected.
To that, Thursday’s war of words certainly wasn’t pretty, especially for Democrats.
Simultaneously disputing and confirming Cormac McCarthy’s assertion that America is no country for old men, tonight’s unprecedented entirely made-for-TV event had the potential to be the ugliest debate of our lifetimes.
Instead, it was a very sad affair.
Another aspect of the debate format also was unique: Muted microphones.
Making up and rewriting history in real time, Trump may have benefited. The guardrails prevented him from the temper tantrums that characterized the debates of the 2020, forcing him to moderate his outbursts.
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As to whether the ABC-hosted debate in September even happens is a hard call for either side. As Barack Obama’s terrible performance in his first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012 showed, everyone has a bad night. The problem for Joe Biden is that the debate was a chance to show that he was up for another term, and instead he may have merely instilled more doubts.
That can’t be said of Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.
Attacked by Republicans in recent days, the two moderators were very much in a neutral stance.
Tapper and Bash didn’t fact-check for most of the primetime event, perhaps heeding the advice of past moderators who cautioned that the debate is about the candidates, not them. There was not a word when Trump even brazenly called Biden a “Manchurian candidate” and said his opponent was driving the globe towards “World War III.” Having said that, Biden didn’t make much of an effort to hold Trump’s feet to the fire of facts – which is distinctly his job, and the only way to keep his job.
Overall, Trump flipped the script to turn accusations of his incompetence, corruption and anti-democratic tendencies onto Biden, who often seemed to be staring off into space. In response, over topics of the economy, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, immigration, the military and veterans, Biden meekly shot back with terms like “malarkey” and “worst president ever.”
Throughout the debate, political operatives from both the GOP and Democrats texted, calling Biden’s stint on the debate stage a “disaster” and “painful,” even with a slight surge by the incumbent in the last 30 minutes of the event.
With a weak voice from the get-go and an often even weaker performance, Biden was on the ropes for most of the debate. Showing his age and the weight of his office, the 81-year-old POTUS will find himself in an ever more difficult position getting his reelection off the ground – no matter what his vice president says.
Tapper and Bash were at their best when they held both men to the rules of the interaction, or when they asked their questions again when Trump evaded answers on issues like his conduct on January 6th and whether he would accept the results of the next election.
In addition to its own broadcast across all its platforms, CNN’s coverage was simulcast across rival broadcast, cable and streaming networks. That undoubtedly will give the network a big ratings boost, and a branding pickup across the total aggregate audience.
With a poll declaring that around 60% of Americans planned on watch the Biden and Trump face-off in some form of fashion, tonight’s debate also comes as a significant number of Americans are disinterested in either candidate.
Biden often missed opportunities to remind voters why they ousted Trump in the first place.
When Tapper asked Trump about the bloody January 6, 2021 siege on Congress by a MAGA mob half an hour into the debate, the 45th POTUS deflected the horrors of that day. When the 46th POTUS called out Trump for his support of the insurgents and tried to shame him, the former Celebrity Apprentice host simply ignored him. Unleashing a multi-pronged attack on Trump’s legal cases, convictions, and moral character, Biden saw his rhetorical lunge miss the mark.
Literally offered an opportunity on Trump’s boost towards the end of the debate that he would free the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich from Putin’s prisons if elected, Biden acted as if his foe never even implied he was holding an American’s life in his hands for political gain.
Trump even appeared to be gaining some ground on abortion, which has been a potent issue for Democrats in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Biden, though, noted that Trump likely would sign a national abortion ban if it were to reach his desk.
In the closing minutes of tonight’s perhaps overly hyped debate, the mask on the schoolyard status of this race fell off. As the two old men engaged with each other over golf and who has the better handicap, Trump said, “Let’s not act like children.” “You are a child,” replied the president.
Just sad.
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