Debate-Rate: The Night Trump Defeated Biden
"So Joe Biden debated Donald Trump last night and it was… not pretty. In a debate format that spotlighted his shortcomings, Biden was mumbling, sputtering, often unable to complete thoughts or even sentences and, in the absence of such basic communications skills, babbling incoherently, while spending nearly the entire debate looking glassy-eyed, slack-jawed and confused. At 81 years of age, Biden could have passed for 101. Trump, by contrast, sounded sharp, confident and on-point, despite a few obvious stumbles, and landed repeated haymakers simply by making cutting references to Biden’s ongoing gibberish. Even as everything coming out of his mouth was bullshit--and usually outlandish bullshit--Trump faced no real pushback from his addled opponent, who couldn’t lay a glove on him and who, himself, fumbled even the easiest layup questions. It was a dreadful spectacle. If Biden loses this election, as seems even more likely than ever now, future historians will, fairly or not, look back on this evening as where that loss happened.[1]
"That 'fairly' is a caveat because, of course, none of this is new. This is how Biden has been since he launched his presidential campaign in 2019. Regular readers have seen this writer go on about this for years now, and I’m only one of many.[2] This is, in fact, exactly how Biden performed in nearly all of the 2020 Democratic primary debates and, as I wrote more than once at the time, how I expected debates between Trump and Biden to go as well. But the 2020 debate format allowed the candidates to argue with and talk over one another while an audience of partisans cheered, booed and rooted them on--and drowned out a lot of the discordance. Last night, there was no audience, the moderators controlled the participants’ mics and there was just the cold glare of the camera.
"Something that was new, though, was the reaction to Biden by corporate press pundits and Democratic elites. In the 2020 primary debates, they’d gone out of their way to cover for him (I’ll return to that in a moment). Not so last night..."
The rest of the story here:
https://jriddle.medium.com/debate-rate-the-night-trump-defeated-biden-567f4bf75b09