In the first presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace tried as best he could, but there was no stopping Donald Trump and his bullying, rude behavior, non-stop spewing of lies and misinformation, and nauseating self-congratulatory superlatives. The debate went out-of-control almost from the start; Joe Biden attempted to stay on message, and a few times managed to look into the camera and explain what he was going to do as president. But it is tough to talk when some loudmouth jerk is talking over you and frustrating you with ridiculous accusations that are patently false. At one point Biden actually told Trump to “shut-up,” which may be “unpresidential,” but then again, it was easy to forgive Biden that one “slip-up”given Trump’s playground antics.
It was horrible. Trump, like many on the right who are arrogant in the "logic" of "gut feelings," thinks that just because he says something loudly and “decisively,” that what he says is “plausible.” One has to admit that Trump tell his falsehoods and blows-up the truth “real good.” It is frustrating to deal with such people because their simplistic claims require rational discussion to refute, and there simply isn’t the time in a debate that lasts a little over an hour, and even if Biden took the time to refute Trump’s irrational claims about things he doesn’t know anything about--like, say, climate change and forest management, and things he pretends to know something about, like the COVID-19 and the economy--that Trump would just keep interrupting and shouting over him. “Keep yapping, man” Biden told Trump at another point.
I have to say that I didn’t think that Biden’s performance was particularly strong, but it would have been difficult for anyone up against a rude braggart like Trump. Wallace had to repeatedly intervene on Biden’s behalf when Trump kept cutting in before he could even begin to answer a question. I thought Biden made a miscue when he said he didn’t support the Green New Deal; what he should have said was that many of its ideas were good, and were helpful in formulating his own “Biden Plan” for green energy. On the other hand, Trump had been accusing Biden of being beholden to the “radical left” so often, that every time Biden would assert a policy position that wasn’t “socialist,” Trump would proclaim “he lost the left.”
But Biden did impressively undercut Trump’s claim that he did more for blacks than he did, by simply allowing Trump to run on without interruption, looking on with astonishment as Trump rambled about why he ended racial sensitivity training in the Justice Department. He claimed that people were being asked to do things that were “insane” without explaining what those insane things were. Trump complained about “radical revolution” in schools (he probably isn’t aware of the power of the right-wing Texas State Board of Education to insert their vision of the nation’s history in school books), and he implied reverse-racism. It was all “very bad,” “very sick ideas.” Teaching people to hate our country. It was an astonishing, stupid admission by Trump, as stupid was his refusal to denounce white supremacist domestic terrorism.
Trump certainly thought his claim that he had universal support from law enforcement was a winner, and it no doubt was for his base support. But because he claimed that there was no systemic racism in this country or in law enforcement, it was obvious that he could not be a “healer” of racial division, because he could only see the white grievance side of the equation. Biden “surprised” Trump by stating what he has said many times before--that he did not support defunding police, but did support insuring that police had the “tools’ to police themselves. Biden sent Trump into a head-shaking frenzy when he asserted that Trump was cutting assistance to state and local law enforcement by $400 million in his 2021 budget proposal; in fact the number is actually over $500 million, about one-quarter the amount of previous budgets.
Biden was able to make Trump look foolish when he talked about his late son Beau, who served in Iraq, and contrasted that with Trump’s comments on “losers” and “suckers.” Trump tried to interject claims about Hunter Biden, which fell flat as a pancake, or a cow patty.
On the topic of health care, Trump can only call the Affordable Care Act “terrible” and a “failure” so many times before you expect him to tell you why. The only thing he can come up with was the individual mandate--which frankly few who were supposed to pay it did--and it “cost a lot.” As I talked about before, Trump’s more affordable health care “plan” is probably a lot like the one he signed an executive order to allow people to sign-up for a full year instead of three months--basically a cut-rate “mini-medical” plan that offered pathetic benefits and no preexisting coverage, which the ACA was intended to “fix.” When Biden claimed that 100 million people had preexisting conditions, Trump rolled his eyes, apparently unaware that factcheckers mostly backed Biden’s number.
Trump bragged about an economy that saw a record string of weekly new unemployment claims of over one million, falsely claimed that the economic recovery from the Great Recession was the slowest in U.S. history, and made numerous wild claims about mail-in balloting, He preposterously asserted that if Biden had been president, 2 million Americans would have died from the COVID-19. He kept making such claims, before Biden in exasperation told Wallace that he was not there to call out every lie that Trump said; everyone knows he is a liar and doesn’t know what he is talking about.
When it was over, a CBS instant poll showed Biden “won” the debate, but less than 50 percent thought so. 83 percent thought the debate was “negative” in tone, and 69 percent were annoyed by it. It was indeed a frustrating spectacle, mainly because of the uncouth behavior of Trump. A CNN poll did seem to suggest that Biden had a considerable edge in "truthfulness," and the "fairness" of his attacks. Still, one wonders if there should be another debate between Biden and Trump, unless Trump is put into a sound proof box with a microphone that can be shut on or off.
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