Last night’s CNN debate underscored a grim reality; it wasn’t just President Joe Biden who lost. It was the American public. Both candidates, President Biden and former President Donald Trump, utterly failed to articulate themselves in a manner befitting their aspirations to serve another four years in the highest office of the land.
Last night’s CNN debate underscored a grim reality; it wasn’t just President Joe Biden who lost. It was the American public. Both candidates, President Biden and former President Donald Trump, utterly failed to articulate themselves in a manner befitting their aspirations to serve another four years in the highest office of the land.
While much has been said about Biden’s poor performance – and it certainly was poor – it’s fair to say that President Trump didn’t do much better. Trump reiterated his usual boasts of overseeing the “greatest economy America has ever seen,” that the rest of the world now laughs at America, and all the rest of it. Anybody who has seen Trump speaking about his opponent for at least 60 seconds in any prior interview needn’t have watched last night’s debate. Trump’s words lacked substance. On multiple occasions, President Trump cut his responses short, sometimes by more than a minute, and failed to present a single new, visionary idea for improving America. Instead, Trump spent his time attempting to settle old scores, and utterly failing to do so.
If Trump wanted to prove that Biden was a liar, the inevitable claim that he had once called neo-Nazis at the Charlottesville rally “very fine people” was his opportunity for an easy slam dunk – but he even failed at that. Eager to dismiss Biden’s claim that his opponent’s praise of neo-Nazis was the reason he ran for office to begin with, Trump tripped up over his own words and seemed to imply that the Charlottesville really itself – and not the deceptively edited clip of his response to it – was completely fabricated. It left Biden, and likely much of the audience, befuddled by the former president’s suggestion that the protest never actually took place. Only those with prior knowledge of this story, and the edited clip in question, will have known what he was talking about. The rest of the country presumably thought he was delusional.
That being said, Trump’s lackluster performance does not excuse Biden’s abysmal showing either.
Throughout the debate, President Biden struggled to string his words together, often muttering under his breath instead of delivering clear, concise sentences. I found myself wincing and leaning towards the television as Biden looked as though he was on the verge of falling asleep.
