presidential debate
A Debate Fiasco for Both Candidates—And This Nation
This is what we should expect from a debate "moderated" by a corporate news outlet.
It was, of course, not a presidential debate. Not a surprise. Trump came in ready to repeat what he tells audiences at his rallies – raging, lying by the microminute, promising perfection and spewing hate at Biden. Biden – flustered, bumbling at times, stumbling over facts, at least tried to answer specific questions from the moderators – Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. At least eight times, Trump brushed aside their questions and repeated his previous flailing tirades against Biden. It is a wonder Trump didn’t slurp saliva along with his sneering arrogance.
Democratic operatives were aghast during and after the merciful end of this 90-minute look/see by an estimated 51 million viewers. Biden prepared for over a week with his debate advisors and probably was so overprepared as to be tightly wound. Also, he had a cold which he should have noted at the outset to explain his weak tone of voice.
The moderators were forewarned about Trump trying to take over the show. They cut the mics of each candidate while the other was talking. Trump adjusted. He leapfrogged their questions and bellowed without ever being told: “Mr. Trump, you are not answering the questions just addressed to you.”
CNN correctly said beforehand that the moderators were not going to interrupt with any fact-checking, no matter how wild and crazy. As a result, the unfurled, unstable, disjointed man from Mar-a-Largo kept doing himself in, mitigating Biden’s staggering failure to deliver the most obvious rebuttals, especially on the issues of “democracy” and “climate.”
All the questions asked by the moderators were predictable by the candidates and their staff. That is how deep is the ditto nature of the mass media. Earlier the Washington Post asked sixteen of its opinion columnists to offer one policy question for the presidential debate. The moderators pretty much covered the questions asked. None of the sixteen columnists mentioned the corporate crime wave, the plight of worker exploitation (e.g., frozen minimum wage, workplace health/safety casualties, and anti-labor laws), massive corporate welfare giveaways, corporate tax reform, the global arms race or widespread abuses of consumers in many marketplace sectors.
Most prominently, the super-dominant power of giant corporations over our government, politics, economy, culture, and our children’s future never occurred to these savvy observers of what’s really going on in America.
Back to Biden’s collapse. Long-time Democratic Party loyalist, exhorter and critic, Robert Kuttner repeated his demand that Biden step aside. He elaborated: “With Biden heading the ticket, Democrats will likely lose the House, Senate, state legislatures and governorships, and down-ballot races all the way to school board, as well as the presidency.” I’ve known Kuttner for years. He rarely panics to this extent. He added that, “In coming days, the media echo chamber, which for once has it right, will keep reinforcing the depth of Biden’s defeat and the story of utter panic among Democratic officials, strategists, and donors. That will be self-enforcing.”
The vast majority of actual voters have already made up their minds. The rest will be treated with billions of dollars of advertising featuring selections from both Biden and Trump’s deliveries. What may save Biden, whose team asked for this early Debate, were the ravings and pathological lying of dangerous, dictatorial Donald. (See the Association Press Debate Fact Check).
There was little daylight between Biden and Trump on militarism, Empire, genocide and a devouring, bloated military budget. But domestically, Biden could have exposed Trump as an abject tool of the worst of Big Business and Wall Street over Main Street, contrasting his record in the process. Here is one salvo that Biden could have delivered crisply and deliberately:
Let’s look at your record, Mr. Trump.
CHILDREN – You blocked extending the child tax credit in January 2022, which was delivering $300 a month to over 60 million children;
WOMEN – You’re opposed to their reproductive rights and want to punish them for their choice, not to mention your long history of abusing women;
WORKERS – You and your Republicans in Congress have long opposed raising the paltry federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 an hour. As President, you displayed your hatred of Unions and weakened job safety protections;
IMMIGRATION – You single-handedly demanded your Party in Congress abandon a bipartisan immigration reform bill that the Congress was ready to send for my signature earlier this year;
CONSUMERS – You weakened enforcement of life-saving health and safety laws and shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that worked to make Wall Street accountable;
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH – You think climate disruption is a hoax and tell the main fossil fuel polluters to “Drill, baby, drill” instead of backing planet-saving solar energy and wind power;
PATIENTS – You want to end Obamacare and oppose the expansion of Medicaid in Southern Republican states, taking away healthcare for tens of millions of Americans;
PUBLIC LANDS – Belong to all Americans and their descendants. You want to turn over big chunks of this land to corporations;
TAXPAYERS – In 2017, you gave under-taxed super-profitable corporations and the very rich another giant tax cut which greatly increased the federal deficit; and
Your hatred for the well-being of America shows how phony is your MAGA slogan. That’s just some of what you’ve done to the American people.
Thursday’s Real Debate Takeaway: Only We the People Can Save US Democracy
The debate happened in a moment when many of our institutions, especially the ones that could be a check on an authoritarian president, are failing—miserably.
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.
'The Stakes Could Not Be Higher': Debate Disaster Ignites Calls for Biden to Step Aside
"You're deluded if you believe Joe Biden, at this stage of his life, is the best person Democrats have to offer against Donald Trump, against a fascist," said journalist Mehdi Hasan.
President Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance Thursday evening against presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump—an unhinged, would-be authoritarian whose lies were glaring and constant—sent much of the Democratic Party establishment into a spiral of panic and ignited calls for the incumbent to step aside to allow another Democratic candidate to take on the former president in November.
The alarm began to set in just minutes into the
CNN-moderated event in Atlanta, with Democratic operatives and lawmakers exchanging despairing texts with reporters and each other after the president declared—after appearing to lose his train of thought—that "we finally beat Medicare," an absurd line that followed his stumbling attempt to explain that the nation's ultra-rich pay far too little in taxes.
"For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America—I mean billionaires, in America," said Biden, his voice raspy from what his campaign says was a cold. "And what's happening? They're in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2% in taxes. If they just paid 24% or 25%, either one of those numbers, they'd raised $500 million—billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period."
The beltway access outlet Politicoreported that the text message inboxes of its journalists quickly blew up with expressions of dismay from Democratic lawmakers and the names of potential options to replace the 81-year-old incumbent, who cruised through the primary process without a serious challenge.
"I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue," an unnamed member of the House Democratic caucus wrote to Politico. An anonymous Democratic insider told the outlet that they believe "there are short lists being made" for Biden's potential replacement, lists that reportedly include Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
An unnamed Democratic lawmaker toldThe Financial Times that "many House Democrats tonight, representing a wide cross-section of the Democratic caucus, were privately texting one another that Biden needs to announce he's decided not to run for reelection"—a belated conclusion that drew disdain from commentators who have been warning for months that a Biden reelection bid could be calamitous.
"Hilarious to watch elite consensus shift and see all the media folk who knowingly created the Biden 2024 catastrophe now desperately try to maintain credibility by depicting themselves as the courageous voices demanding a course correction when it may already be too late," The Lever's David Sirota wrote Friday morning.
The frenzied discussions of a last-ditch replacement effort spilled over into the
editorial pages of major newspapers, panel discussions with former White House officials and ex-lawmakers, and the segments of prominent corporate television shows, including MSNBC's "Morning Joe"—which Biden reportedly watches obsessively.
Morning Joe, Biden’s favorite show, is wavering.
“If he were CEO and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America, any Fortune 500 corporation in America keep him on as CEO?”
pic.twitter.com/bSZisE3FDU
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) June 28, 2024
In a panel discussion following Thursday night's 90-minute debate, CNN national political correspondent John King said that "there is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party" that began shortly after the debate kicked off and "continues right now."
"It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, and it involves fundraisers. They are having conversations about the president's performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket," said King. "And they're having conversations about what they should do about it. Some of those conversations include should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside. Other conversations are about should prominent Democrats go public with that call."
Dire concerns about Biden's performance and broader readiness to compete in the November election were amplified by Trump's showing during Thursday night's debate, which further showed that the presumptive Republican candidate poses a grave threat to democracy, the climate, workers, and fundamental rights.
"Tonight put on full display how broken our political system is. Our generation deserves better," Stevie O'Hanlon, communications director for the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said in a statement. "The debate also made it undeniable that a Trump presidency would be a climate catastrophe. When Trump was asked if he would address the climate crisis, he ignored the question completely—because he can't answer it. He has promised oil and gas CEOs that he will expedite drilling permits, hasten fracked gas pipeline approvals, and release 'vast stores' of oil and gas on public lands. In return, they're bankrolling his campaign."
"Biden touted achievements that young people fought hard and long to win: the Civilian Climate Corps and the Inflation Reduction Act. Like in 2020, we will fight like hell to defeat Donald Trump so we have the political conditions to end the fossil fuel era and win a Green New Deal," O'Hanlon added. "But President Biden and the Democratic establishment's choices have made an election against a convicted felon dangerously tight. Young people have offered Democrats the vision, energy, and policy on which to beat Donald Trump. They have turned away from it. If there is to be any chance of beating Trump this November, they must listen to young voters."
"Biden is manifestly not up to the task of combating Trump's lies, vitriol, and neofascism—nor is he capable of articulating a coherent progressive vision capable of galvanizing voters this fall."
It's far from clear that mounting calls for Biden to end his reelection campaign and clear the way for a viable replacement will move Democratic leaders or the White House, which has been adamant that the president will be on the ballot in November even as Democratic voters indicate they would prefer someone else as their nominee.
A Gallup survey released ahead of Thursday's debate showed that just 42% of Democratic voters are pleased with Biden as the nominee and a majority want a different candidate.
But Robert Costa of CBS News reported in the debate's aftermath that unnamed sources close to Biden said there is "zero chance" the president "steps away from running."
Newsom, one of the Democrats most commonly floated as a potential alternative to Biden, came to the president's defense Thursday night, urging the party to rally behind the incumbent.
"You don't turn your back because of one performance," Newsom said. "What kind of party does that?"
Alex Wagner presses Gov. Gavin Newsom on questions about whether Biden should step down.
Newsom: “You don’t turn your back because of one performance. What kind of party does that?”
“This president has delivered. We need to deliver for him at this moment.” pic.twitter.com/J5G9XGNYWn
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) June 28, 2024
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) also stood by the president, telling reporters on Friday that he should not drop out of the race even as one unnamed House Democrat—described as an "outspoken defender" of Biden—toldPolitico's Jonathan Martin that Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) should seriously consider a "combined effort" to convince the incumbent to step aside.
"The movement to convince Biden to not run is real," the lawmaker said.
However, Martin noted, "many top party officials" feel that "Biden can't be persuaded let alone pressured."
"One Democratic governor called the debate 'beyond bad,' but said it was 'too late' to nominate a new standard bearer," Martin reported.
But analysts argued Thursday's debacle solidified the case that a Biden candidacy is untenable—and could gift Trump and his far-right allies another four years in power, which they're planning to use to unleash a massive assault on reproductive rights, public education, immigrants, environmental regulations, and more.
"I'm not saying that Joe Biden is going to lose the presidential election because of tonight's debate. The race is still ridiculously too close to call at this point," saidZeteo's Mehdi Hasan, a former MSNBC host. "But it's not looking good. And what I am saying is that you're deluded if you believe Joe Biden, at this stage of his life, is the best person Democrats have to offer against Donald Trump, against a fascist."
"Small-d American democracy, if it is to survive, needs Democrats—big-d Democrats—to put their big boy pants on and get their act together," Hasan added.
I have spent months, both on MSNBC and at Zeteo, refusing to obsess over Biden’s age and fitness for office. But no longer. Not after tonight’s car crash of a ‘debate’.
It’s time for Biden to step aside. The Democrats need to find a new nominee. https://t.co/20UUcW06TK pic.twitter.com/oMtRbED3Bx
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) June 28, 2024
After acknowledging that "a comatose Joe Biden would make a better president than Donald Trump," Vox's Eric Levitz wrote Thursday that even though "there is no way for the Democratic Party to deny Biden the nomination at this point," party leaders could "personally lobby the president to step aside and endorse his preferred successor, preempting the hazards of a contested Democratic convention in late August."
"Waiting months to anoint a presumptive nominee would be highly risky. Rallying around Biden's handpicked heir now would be much less so," Levitz added. "The president's policy positions and governing record matter more than his current skills as a rhetorician. But precisely because of how much is substantively at stake in this election, Democrats cannot afford to wager it on American voters changing their minds and deciding that Biden isn't too old for his job after watching him struggle to remember the topics of his own sentences."
RootsAction, a progressive group that urged Biden in late 2022 not to run for reelection and has been calling on the president to step aside for more than a year, said in a statement that Thursday night underscored the incumbent's "severe liabilities as a candidate."
"Biden is manifestly not up to the task of combating Trump's lies, vitriol, and neofascism—nor is he capable of articulating a coherent progressive vision capable of galvanizing voters this fall," the group said. "There is still time before the party convention to decide on a different nominee for the party. Democratic leaders must finally heed the clear preference of Democratic voters and reconsider their backing of Biden's candidacy."
"We need a swift intervention to make Biden voluntarily a one-term president so a Democratic nominee can be up to the job of defeating Trump," RootsAction added. "The stakes could not be higher for the future of the United States, and the world."