Trump's desperation on full display
After the darkest, meanest debate in the history of presidential elections, let us say three things: Donald Trump is disintegrating, Joe Biden is standing and American democracy is bleeding.
It has been 60 years since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy debated before a televised national audience. It has made debates the highlight of the quadrennial political season ever since and, at their best, an exercise in civic education.
Kennedy defeated Nixon, but that was the last time debates truly mattered. They generate news in the horse race but seldom change minds. If debates were decisive, Hillary Clinton would be president.
And the impact of the debates is even less this year given the paucity of undecided voters and the popularity of mail-in ballots. Millions of Americans will have voted before the third and final debate on Oct. 22 — if, in fact, that happens.
Trump came to Cleveland on Tuesday ready to rumble, fists up and teeth bared. His strategy was to unnerve and confuse Biden. It was to get him to say something silly, to discredit him.
So, to get under his skin, Trump interrupted and insulted. He threw mud and he lost ground. The debate was his Twitter account: a stream of falsehoods, fears, conspiracies and raw anger.
It was his full Mussolini: frowning and chest-thumping and Vesuvian eruptions.
Did he persuade anyone? Did he appeal to the independents, moderates, suburban women or Black Americans he needs? No. He spoke, more than ever, to his loyalists, and demographically there aren't enough of them.
He looks like a man in free-fall who knows he is losing. It is consuming him. He's having a breakdown, seeing power slip away — and knowing the legal jeopardy and financial strain that await him after the presidency. He is desperate. So, he turned in a theatrical performance to shock: refusing to condemn white supremacy, refusing to accept the result of the election, intimating violence, urging his supporters, the Proud Boys, to “stand by.”
The fondest hope of our strutting strongman is to suppress the vote, making Democrats so disillusioned they'll opt out of the process. Like Samson, he wants to pull down the temple and take everyone with him.
Joe Biden, for his part, held his own. He didn't command the stage and he missed opportunities. He mumbled and meandered. His stutter was more pronounced.
Beyond calling Trump “a clown” and telling him to “shut up, man!” though, Biden held it together. He replied, when he could, with some memorable retorts. Whatever his inconstancy, which emerged in New Hampshire, it didn't matter amid the cacophony.
As long as Trump made it about Trump — hogging the stage, making delusional claims, attacking Biden's sons — Biden was the beneficiary. The old rules don't apply in choosing winners and losers, but Biden prevailed because he showed decency and dignity.
The reality is that Biden is winning the election. It is a narrative few commentators will embrace because they were wrong last time. On the day of the debate, the non-partisan Cook Political Report moved Iowa and Ohio — both Republican states last time — to “toss-up.” Everywhere, Trump is on the defensive.
Biden needs a margin of five points in the popular vote to put this away and he is getting it, while maintaining remarkably stable leads in the three battleground states he must reclaim in the upper mid-west and threatening seriously in North Carolina and Arizona, and, surprisingly in Georgia and Texas.
Biden's greatest danger isn't that he won't win the election but that Trump won't lose it, decisively, a real and present danger to this democracy.
The debate may foreshadow the chaos to come. America is eating itself alive: the pandemic, a weak economy and a racial reckoning. All this while its institutions — the courts, the post office, the census, the media — are under attack.
The presidential debates, once the emblem of vigorous democracy between honourable rivals loyal to the republic, now join those other things that Trump has tried to destroy.
The debates are now a farce, and Joe Biden should withdraw from them.