Trump lost that debate by widening the empathy gap
WASHINGTON — The central issue of the 2020 presidential campaign was settled within the first 11 minutes of the final debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday. And it did not work out well for Trump. “More and more people are getting better. We have a problem that’s a worldwide problem,” Trump declared. “We’re rounding the turn. We’re rounding the corner. It’s going away.”
Problem One for Trump: Saying that it’s a “worldwide problem” doesn’t get him off the hook. Problem Two: We’re not rounding the turn. Problem Three: We’re not rounding the corner. Problem Four: It’s not going away anytime soon.
So Biden pounced: “220,000 Americans dead. You hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who is responsible for not taking control ... anyone (who) is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.”
Trump tried again, suggesting that a country that is sick and tired of living with the pandemic has, in fact, become accustomed to it, the way people get used to bad weather. And the president could not stop himself from talking about his favorite room in the world.
“I say we’re learning to live with it,” Trump insisted. “We have no choice. We can’t lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe does. He has the ability to lock himself up. ... we can’t close up our nation, or you’re not going to have a nation.”
Biden ignored the basement and surged right through the opening Trump afforded him. “He says that we’re learning to live with it. People are learning to die with it. You folks home will have an empty chair at the kitchen table this morning. That man or wife going to bed tonight and reaching over to try to touch ... out of habit, where their wife or husband was, is gone. Learning to live with it? Come on. We’re dying with it.”
Trump’s presidency seems to be dying, too, which is why it was not surprising that the postdebate snap polls awarded Biden the victory — by 19 percentage points in a YouGov survey, by 14 in a CNN poll and by 11 in a Data for Progress measure.
Trump lost the night because he misunderstood what he needed to do to turn the presidential contest around.
He thought if he looked reasonable, in contrast to his crazed performance in the first debate, journalists would fall all over themselves to declare that a new, sober Trump had arrived, just in time to save his presidency. That sort of thing happened early in his presidency. It’s way too late for that now.
He thought he could knock Biden out with Fox News and right-wing media reports about Hunter Biden’s business dealings. But it’s no longer 2016, when any negative story concerning Hillary Clinton was treated credulously. And Trump’s overconsumption of sympathetic media has hurt him. He explained nothing, tossing out disjointed pieces of a story that only the crazy uncles out there understood.
But most importantly, Trump failed in his most important task: to show that he cared about his fellow citizens, and not just himself. The president needed to close the gigantic empathy gap with Biden at least a little bit. Instead, he turned it into a canyon.
Biden used Trump’s attacks on Hunter to drive this home. “It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family, and your family’s hurting badly. ... You’re sitting at the kitchen table this morning deciding, ‘Well, we can’t get new tires. They’re bald, because we have to wait another month or so.’ We should be talking about your families, but that’s the last thing he wants to talk about.”
Trump brusquely pushed this aside as “a typical political statement. ... ‘The family, around the table, everything.’ Just a typical politician when I see that.”
I won’t try to improve on my Washington Post colleague Alyssa Rosenberg’s observation that Trump’s derision of the family and the kitchen table demonstrated the president’s “utter disdain for the simple ideas of human connection and emotions.”
The Trump campaign will leap on this or that Biden statement in its frantic search for an opening. The president and his minions were quick to turn Biden’s pledge to “transition from the oil industry” — since oil “has to be replaced by renewable energy over time” — into an assault on the entire states of Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. Never mind that our country is already transitioning from oil.
But this is just grasping at oil wells. Biden is ahead because most Americans have decided that narcissism is not an effective governing style and that self-involvement is not a demonstration of strength. Thursday night confirmed that the only way to start “rounding the corner” is to be done with the man who thinks our current circumstances are something we can “live with.”