| Okay. So. Do you want the bad news or the bad news? Bad news it is. You know by now that the debate was not pretty, not for Biden and not for democracy. Thirty-five minutes into Thursday night’s debacle, Catherine Rampell said in our columnists’ live chat, “This is excruciating to watch.” Forty minutes in, she said, “I am now yelling at the TV.” The Editorial Board, in its recap of the debate, characterized the whole thing as “Ninety minutes of pain.” I want to be very clear: This has just as much — more — to do with Donald Trump’s voluminous falsehoods than Biden’s stumbling, mumbling attempts to bat them down. As I edited late into the East Coast night Alexandra Petri’s satirical summary of the debate, the two of us texted, wrestling with how to balance talking about a thing that’s ultimately a performance even though the stakes are who ends up running the country. Where we ended up was moderator Dana Bash turning to the camera at the end of the recap and asking, “Are you waking up in a cold sweat and wondering: How did we get here? How did we decide that live television performance was the best way to determine who should run the country? And how was this that performance?” Well, how did we get here? Alexi McCammond thinks CNN fell down on the job by not fact-checking Trump, a topic she discusses in her latest Prompt 2024 newsletter. Erik Wemple, however, points out to her the huge roadblocks to real-time verification, writing that “for media people, I believe we are no closer to cracking the code on whether you can ever allow Trump onto live television, under any circumstance whatsoever.” But the greater blame might fall on the Democrats who allowed this to happen. As Dana Milbank writes in a column engulfed by Trump’s lies, “the truth needed a standard-bearer on that stage.” It is woeful that the country discovered all at once that “Biden plainly was not up to the job.” Didn’t the people around him know this already? Karen Tumulty writes that now comes the “Great Democratic Freakout,” not just for the inner circle but for everyone in the party. “The anxieties that Democrats have had all along about Biden’s decision to run for a second term will come to the fore,” she predicted at 11:52 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, to be proved right on Twitter and cable news approximately seven nanoseconds later. Karen thinks the “far-fetched” scenario of replacing Biden on the ticket would cause catastrophic turmoil that would hurt the Democrats more than help them. This is not the consensus view at Post Opinions. As George Will writes in his column (on how perhaps this was just the debate we deserved), “persisting with Biden’s candidacy, which is as sad as it is scary, rather than nominating a plausible four-year president, would rank as the most reckless — and cruel — act ever by a U.S. party.” Ramesh Ponnuru reminds Democrats that the pity they feel for Biden “should not wholly take the place of anger” because “his inadequacy is more damning the more you believe what he had to say.” To wit: Trump is dangerous and disgraceful. This is the greatest argument for his opponent’s reelection, and it is selfish and unfair of Biden to be making that less and less likely. Back in the columnists’ live chat, Jim Geraghty thought the debate might have gone too well for Trump: The incumbent is the easiest person for him to beat, and now, Jim muses, “maybe we won’t get that Trump-Biden rematch after all.” Chaser: Ann Telnaes’s cartoon of the matchup captures the tragedy of substance failing to overcome bluster. |
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