Thursday’s debate couldn’t have gone worse for Joe Biden. But it wasn’t just his own doing.
Over the course of the 90-minute debate, the president was repeatedly upstaged by Donald Trump, who took control from the outset by unleashing an onslaught of invectives that Biden could not match.
After his abysmal performance sparked Democratic panic, Biden acknowledged how the debate had gotten out of hand for him at a North Carolina rally on Friday, saying he does not “debate as well as he used to” but asserting that he knows “how to do this job.”
His Friday rally had a decidedly different dynamic from the Thursday debate. One key difference? There was no Donald Trump.
A close examination of the debate shows Trump’s strategy emerged early on: attack, attack, then attack Biden again — often ignoring moderators’ specific policy questions to lay into the incumbent president. That was amplified by Biden’s own struggles to keep up, playing into longstanding concerns about his age and ability.
All debate long, Trump asserted his dominance by taking shot after shot at Biden in quick succession, and keyed off of Biden’s phrases in a way that prevented the incumbent president from building verbal momentum. He was nimble in both launching his lines and responding to Biden’s, setting up a sharp contrast with the current president.
Trump’s attacks often weren’t grounded in truth or policy, but that wasn’t the point: They set the tone and put Biden constantly on the defensive. And while Biden tried to respond, he delivered his attack lines more slowly — sometimes stumbling over them.
Even as Trump leaned into predictable falsehoods about the outcome of the 2020 election and abortion policies passed by states, Biden appeared unequipped to call out his predecessor or reclaim control of a debate he arranged and set the rules for.
The difference was stark: One man, defying his normal demonstrative bravado, calmly skewered his opponent, while the other put up very little to shield himself from the barrage. Biden at times attempted to steer the discussion back to policy, which did little to neutralize Trump’s repeated one-liners.
Consider the responses to a question about the opioid crisis and overdoses, which have risen under both Biden’s and Trump’s presidencies. Rather than address overdoses at all, the former president returned to a previous exchange on trade and delivered a series of verbal punches against Biden in less than a minute:
- “Under this guy, we have the largest deficit with China.”
- “He’s a Manchurian candidate. He gets money from China.”
- “I think he’s afraid to deal with it or something.”
- “He never took out my tariffs because we bring in so much money.”
- “He’s got the worst situation with China. China is going to own us. If you keep allowing them to do what they are doing to us as a country, they are killing us as a country, Joe, and you can’t let that happen. You’re destroying our country.”
He finished with 67 seconds still left on the clock. Moderator Jake Tapper reminded him of the original question, prompting Trump to briefly address overdoses — before pivoting back to the border to keep going after Biden until his time was up.
Biden’s response to that litany of attacks? Talk about policy. He defended his administration’s efforts to better screen for fentanyl at the border, and hit back at the former president for opposing a bipartisan deal earlier this year that would have increased border funding.
“When we had that deal done, he called his Republican colleagues and said, ‘Don’t do it. It’s gonna hurt me politically,’” Biden said.
It was a clear criticism of Trump, and sought to make a larger point about Trump putting politics over policy. But Trump — having barely addressed the question of overdoses — came out of the exchange having spent far more time on the attack. And Biden, having gone into the policy weeds, hadn’t addressed most of Trump’s criticisms, however vague and unrelated to the question they were.
In another instance, a tongue-tied Biden stumbled through his response to a question about the national debt before letting out a raspy: “We finally beat Medicare.”
This gave Trump an opportunity to pounce and deliver one of the night’s biggest soundbites: “He’s right, he did beat Medicaid. He beat it to death.”
Trump also put Biden on defense by repeatedly returning to immigration, which polls have generally shown voters trust him on over the incumbent Democrat.
Early on in the debate, Biden lambasted Trump’s policies of family separation at the border and migrant child detainment. But he trailed off at the end of his response — weakening his delivery.
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump replied. “I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
It’s not that Biden wasn’t trying to fend off Trump and go on the offense himself. But at times he tripped up over his words, became bogged down by policy or got stuck in almost childish name-calling that failed to give him the clear upper hand.
Biden focused many of his attacks on the subject of the economy, going after Trump for everything from unemployment and inflation to the national deficit, efforts to cut Social Security and the Affordable Care Act, tax cuts for the wealthy and his proposed tariffs plan.
After the first commercial break, he hit Trump for leaving the economy “flat on its back” and “decimated,” blaming him for inflation caused by “his tremendous malfeasance in the way he handled the pandemic.” He pushed against claims that police don’t approve of him by saying Trump “wants to cut cops” and warned “this guy wants to eliminate” ACA.
Biden tried to go after Trump on a personal level, too.
In one particularly fiery exchange, Biden called Trump a “convicted felon” who slept with a porn star while his wife was pregnant, and has “the morals of an alley cat.”
But most of his attacks were far less powerful — and some were borderline juvenile.
Twice, Biden described Trump as a “whiner.” Referencing remarks Trump has made toward veterans, he said: “You’re the sucker, you’re the loser.”
In an exchange between the two candidates in which Trump took a swing at Biden’s mental and physical fitness vis-a-vis his golf skills, Biden made a jab at Trump’s height and weight — a subtle reference to his booking record at the Fulton County jail in Atlanta. He also suggested a show-down to determine which man is the better golfer.
As moderators tried to reel them both back in, Trump swiped back with a final phrase: “Let’s not act like children.”
Read the full article here
