6 takeaways from the first Trump-Biden debate
Tuesday’s presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden was, in a word, chaotic. It was not a healthy exchange of ideas that enlightened the public, but instead an all-out melee that stressed out voters and left even Trump supporters overwhelmed by his appetite for conflict. But that doesn’t mean that we didn’t learn anything new about the candidates and their campaigns. Here are six takeaways from the extraordinary spectacle.
1. The debate was a bleak and vacuous affair,
mostly defined by Trump channeling the trolling energies he’s built up after nearly four years of spending his presidency primarily on Twitter. He violated the terms of the debate with an unending stream of interruptions that resembled a disgruntled child interfering with his or her calmer sibling’s account of a fight to a parent. He spit venom at Biden even as he spoke of his deceased son. He lied, he lied, he lied.
Trump really did fluster Biden, but he also failed to drive home any messages that might revive the interest of Republicans who have soured on him, in part because of his personal conduct and an inability to even feign empathy. While Biden was overwhelmed, he stuck to substantive messages such as explaining the stakes of Trump’s Supreme Court nomination and bragging about his climate policy proposals.
2. Early focus group feedback
and initial rapid polling suggest that Biden came across more favorably to viewers by a significant margin. (Even pundits on “Fox & Friends” said that Biden ultimately defied Trump’s strategy.) Historically, presidential debates have small and often ephemeral effects on elections, but in a close race they can matter. Most polls so far indicate this isn’t a close race by historical standards.
3. Neither Trump nor Biden could string
more than a few sentences together before losing their train of thought — a stark reminder that we live in a fullfledged gerontocracy. It is impossible to shake off the anger over how unequipped both of them — and most of our political class — are to deal with the enormous problems we face on the pandemic, the economy, civil society and a warming planet. We need energy and creativity, and if Biden wins the presidency, a young left will be desperately needed to make it capable of meeting the challenges ahead.
4. Biden went all in on
the pitch he crystallized at the Democratic National Convention: that Trump’s temperament and personal character are even more of an affront to the republic than his politics. Biden said of Trump’s pandemic response, “It is what it is because you are who you are,” which was a riff off of Trump’s famously cold dismissal of the number of COVID-19 deaths under his watch.
While largely devoid of meaningful political content, Biden’s focus on Trump’s personal character should have resonated with anyone watching Trump manically interrupt him and issue one ad hominem attack after another. Biden also repeatedly tried to draw attention to the experience of voters in personal terms, sometimes referring to them in the second person, and speaking evocatively about empty chairs at dinner tables in homes hit by COVID-19. Meditating on grief is probably Biden’s most powerful rhetorical asset, and made for an effective contrast to Trump’s obsession with ratings.
5. Biden had one major vulnerability
going into this debate — Trump’s campaign to portray him as soft on crime and rioting. This is an absurd argument, both because Trump is the only one of the two in office, and because Biden is an architect of the 1994 crime bill. But polling data has suggested concern about the Democrats’ position on law enforcement is real.
Trump failed to advance any sophisticated arguments on this issue. When he taunted Biden and repeatedly dared him to say he supports law and order, Biden replied, “Law and order with justice, where people get treated fairly.” It was among the smartest retorts of the night, neither pandering to Trump’s framing nor exposing himself to false claims about his position on law enforcement, and sticking to his commitment to reform.
6. The most important takeaway
of this debate is that
Trump said, on prime-time television and unchallenged in a serious way by either the moderator or his opponent, that he would not agree to a peaceful and orderly election and transition of power.
If you combine that with his calls for his supporters to “go in to the polls and watch very carefully” — a thinly veiled call for voter intimidation, something with an ugly history in this nation — and for the white supremacist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” (a comment he tried to walk back Wednesday), this is an alarming situation indeed.
Trump is an agent of chaos and is broadcasting what sound like authoritarian intentions. That doesn’t mean he’ll succeed, but it does mean he’ll likely try to do what he can to cling to power if the results are unfavorable for him. As we saw throughout every moment of the debate, he is incapable of adhering to rules and operating in good faith.