By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
June 30, 2023
Here’s what I hoped would happen when President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump met for an unusually early presidential debate on Thursday night.
I hoped that Biden would utter clear, disciplined and hard-hitting statements. I hoped that Trump would issue numerous rambling, incoherent, hateful and obviously false screeds about immigration, the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, renewable energy and sharks, among other topics. I hoped that millions of voters, especially independent and undecided voters, would watch the debate and realize that only one of the two American major political parties is running a sane, mentally stable candidate.
I view Biden as a good person and a good president, for all that I disagree with some of his decisions Covid-19 and the Israel-Gaza war. I view Trump as a narcissistic monster who seems to have limited ability to empathize with anyone who isn’t a relative, close friend or person able to help Trump. (To be sure, Trump’s empathy for relatives does not extend to all family members.) Moreover, I think Trump is obsessed with accumulating and wielding power in order to line his own and his allies’ pockets and to punish his enemies, regardless of the damage this would do to the nation. Trump is frightening because he is a base man beloved by millions; many of his allies are frightening because, unlike the former president, they have the intellect and discipline to put numerous cruel conservative policies into effect.
So much for hopes and dreams. As the debate opened, Biden seemed tentative and tired. Early on, Biden had trouble wrapping up one of his answers before his microphone was cut off. Instead of landing any kind of point forcefully, he said, “We finally beat Medicare.” Trump capitalized, claiming without evidence that immigrants are being put on federal welfare programs. “He will wipe out Social Security,” the Republican candidate warned. “He will wipe out Medicare. So he was right in the way he finished that sentence, and it’s a shame.”
Like many things Trump said on Thursday night, these statements were misleading at best. But they were clearly articulated, and to voters who don’t follow politics or policy closely, that may be what matters most.
At another point, when speaking about abortion rights, a topic that favors Democrats, Biden detoured into a talking point on immigration that seemed to lend ammunition to Trump’s repeated scaremongering assertions about immigrants and crime:
Look, there’s so many young women who have been — including a young woman who just was murdered and he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by — by — by an immigrant coming in and (inaudible) talk about that.
But here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their – by their in-laws, by their – by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by — just — it’s just — it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it. And they try to arrest them when they cross state lines.
Given that Biden spent days at Camp David preparing for this debate, his digression on a crime victim and his inability to hammer home the cruelty imposed on pregnant women by Republican-governed states is appalling.
Later on, Biden had trouble articulating his vision for improving border security, which he was close to doing until Trump persuaded Republican members of Congress to back away from a bipartisan legislative deal that addressed a number of conservative concerns. According to CNN’s transcript, Biden said, “I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the — the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.”
However, those words weren’t clear in the moment to me or to many other viewers. Trump pounced on the mumbling, saying, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Biden seemed to get a little sharper as the debate continued. He reduced his fumbles and got in a solid attack on his 2020 opponent, who repeatedly denies wrongdoing despite various civil and criminal court convictions. Said Biden:
[T]he crimes that you are still charged with — and think of all the civil penalties you have. How many billions of dollars do you owe in civil penalties for molesting a woman in public, for doing a whole range of things, of having sex with a porn star on the night — and — while your wife was pregnant? I mean, what are you talking about? You have the morals of an alley cat.
That prompted Trump to say, “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.” That begs the question of why he paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels to quash her story in 2016 and paid his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, even more money to conceal the nature of those payments from state and federal authorities. Those payments formed the basis of Trump’s conviction in May in New York State court on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Even so, reaction to the debate, at least among the pundit class, was nearly unanimous: Biden had performed poorly and had been hurt by the debate, even though Trump spewed numerous lies. (Biden was not entirely accurate either, to be fair.)
What was somewhat infuriating to Democratic supporters is that we know Biden can do so much better than we saw on Thursday night. His State of the Union address was notably energetic. The president even seemed more peppy at post-debate remarks he gave at an Atlanta watch party shortly after the debate with Trump and on Friday in Raleigh, N.C.
I’m still somewhat skeptical that Biden should withdraw his candidacy, as The New York Times editorial board called for him to do on Friday. But his debate performance was shaky at best, and it certainly left room for doubt.
MEMwrites 
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