Thursday’s Real Debate Takeaway: Only We the People Can Save US Democracy

So this is how liberty dies—in the void of an Atlanta TV sound stage plastered with more CNN logos than a NASCAR Camaro, where the relentless march on Washington by an American Mussolini, fueled by lies about everything from national greatness to his sleazy sex life, could not be stopped either by the muzzled moderators or the coughing and occasionally confused 81-year-old who was the last thing standing between the United States and dictatorship.

Everything you need to know about the critical, on-a-ventilator condition of American democracy can be explained by this:

The candidate whose most memorable line was, “I did not have sex with a porn star”—an all-but-certain lie on top of roughly 30 fact-checked falsehoods about important things from NATO to abortion law—and who walked onto the Atlanta stage with 34 felony convictions and civil verdicts of an adjudicated rape and massive financial fraud, and who urged on an attempted coup against the U.S. government, is NOT the guy that pundits are begging to drop out of the 2024 presidential race.

Celebrating four decades of utter fecklessness, consistently choosing candidates not with the goal of winning but with fear-driven hopes of not losing, and consistently siding with rich donors over young people who desperately want a party they can believe in, Democrats are ultimately the ones who threw an 81-year-old deer into the TV headlights of a debate stage.

That guy would be President Joe Biden, who finally beat Medicare—whatever that means—but lost his first debate with Donald Trump, in what may have been his last chance to convince America’s legions of casual, TikTok-besotted, less-tuned-in voters that the oldest president in U.S. history has the strength for another four-plus years in the White House.

It turns out that the president who endured weeks of right-wing conspiracy theories that he was going to be high on Adderall or “jacked up on Mountain Dew” didn’t even bother to take throat lozenges when the moment of truth arrived. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, who gets paid the big bucks to find the humor in such a dire situation, riffed that both men should have been on performance-enhancing drugs, before gesturing at their pictures and slamming down his papers: “This cannot be real life! It just can’t!... We’re America... God!”

But it was real life.

Thursday night, just like many of you, my phone started pinging around 9:05 pm Eastern with texts from nervous and horrified family members, seriously worried about their future. It was a night that reminded me of three other moments: June 6, 1968, when I was a nine-year-old kid walking to school and heard from a car radio that Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was the latest leader to succumb to assassination; September 11, 2001, when I saw the second tower collapse and wondered how I’d ever explain this to my two grade-school children; and November 8, 2016, when Trump’s first election inspired the same kind of frantic texts I got Thursday night, wondering if America was the nation we thought it was.

But our country used to have the resilience to overcome assassinations, riots, even a large-scale terrorist attack. June 27, 2024 felt different. Thursday’s debate didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in a moment when many of our institutions, especially the ones that could be a check on an authoritarian president, are failing—miserably.

In the 48 hours before the lights went out in Georgia, a runaway Supreme Court anticipated the next Trump presidency with rulings that all but legalized political bribery, and made it virtually impossible for federal regulators to stop polluters or white-collar criminals. On the cusp of a Christian nationalist America, Oklahoma’s top educator required Bibles in schools, and a Louisiana law mandated the 10 Commandments in classrooms—because they believe that neither our corrupted courts nor a “Red Caesar” president will dare stop them.

Do not obey autocracy in advance. It’s OK and totally normal to feel demoralized today, but then we have 129 days left to prevent the nightmare of Project 2025 from becoming a reality.

And yet perhaps no once-trusted institution is failing America more right now than the news media. CNN’s stellar fact-checker Daniel Dale went before a national audience and in stunning, rapid-fire fashion, exposed nearly 30 lies by Trump, many of them absurd (like grocery prices have quadrupled) or falsely taking credit for things he didn’t do. But this happened at 11:47 pm, more than an hour after the debate and when most folks were asleep.

CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did no fact-checking in real time, allowing Trump to spin his bizarro-world version of the last eight years uninterrupted. In a typical exchange, the ex-president and convicted felon absurdly lied that “this man [Biden] is a criminal. I did nothing wrong.” Tapper responded simply with, “Thank you, President Trump.” One of the few interruptions came from Bash, who stopped Biden in mid-sentence from setting the record straight on insulin prices.

But the biggest clue that something is terribly wrong in America was, in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes, the dog that did not bark. Nothing in this election is more important than the simple fact that Trump wants to rule as a dictator, who would call up troops to put down protests, launch a dead-of-night mass deportation scheme to send thousands of migrants to desert detention camps, sic the Justice Department on his enemies, and free violent insurrectionists. Don’t listen to me; read the 900-page blueprint for autocracy, the 2025 Project.

And yet in a stunning fail, Project 2025 was never even mentioned during the debate. Not once! Not by CNN, in a shocking example of journalistic malpractice, but also not by Biden. That was one more unforced error by a president who’s actually gotten a lot of stuff done, but just can’t live up to his job as Ronald Reagan reinvented it in the 1980s: performer-in-chief.

Because let’s face it: Another institution that has miserably failed the Americans it purports to represent is the Democratic Party. Celebrating four decades of utter fecklessness, consistently choosing candidates not with the goal of winning but with fear-driven hopes of not losing, and consistently siding with rich donors over young people who desperately want a party they can believe in, Democrats are ultimately the ones who threw an 81-year-old deer into the TV headlights of a debate stage.

And it probably won’t shock you when I say that the American public―not all of it, but a lot of it—is wiser than Friday morning’s shock and gloom from the TV pundits and the political establishment, which has been almost solely focused on Biden’s mumbling performance. But in Thursday night focus groups from coast to coast, many everyday voters who’ve ignored Trump for four years were suddenly reminded why 81 million of us voted against him in 2020. The over-the-top lying. The bullying disrespect of our current president. And the blatant racism, like when Trump accused Biden of being “a bad Palestinian,” which did not suggest fondness for Palestinians, or with his bizarre claim that migrants are taking away “Black jobs,” whatever those are.

In several focus groups Thursday night, voters remained divided, with some more put off by Trump’s lying than by Biden’s shaky performance. “We’re in heat-filled Arizona where we are suffering from climate change,” one swing state voter told an NBC News reporter. “To say that there is no problem with our climate is another lie from Trump.”

In a normal world, Trump’s refusal to even address climate change amid a sweltering summer on the cutting edge of a global climate crisis would be a big story. Instead, New York Times columnists and the talking heads on Morning Joe are discussing nothing else but whether Biden should drop out, which would throw the Democrats into sheer chaos. I’m an agnostic about that. Let’s see some polling data first. But frankly, I’m a lot less worried about Biden than I am about stopping dictatorship.

Do not obey autocracy in advance. It’s OK and totally normal to feel demoralized today, but then we have 129 days left to prevent the nightmare of Project 2025 from becoming a reality. I said it last week and I’ll say it again: If you don’t want a far-right Christian government controlling women’s bodies or putting the 10 Commandments in your kids’ classroom, you should follow the examples of Germany and France and take to the streets and protest. And remember that even a weak Biden, if he’s the candidate, is a bridge to a democratic future, while Trump is a road to nowhere.

Eight years after Trump ran on the false premise of making America great again, it was heartbreaking to watch a 90-minute conversation about the nation’s future that pretended that America still doesn’t have the best universities, the best scientists, the best pop music, and millions of idealistic Gen Z and Millennial folks who want to talk about how to make it even better. Donald Trump will destroy that, and Joe Biden is not going to save us. Neither is Chuck Schumer or Sonia Sotomayor or the next editor of The Washington Post. Thursday’s real debate takeaway is that only we can save ourselves. So let’s get to work.