I don’t know what was wrong with Joe Biden. It’s hard to imagine that they ever would have asked for a debate if this was the way he is normally. We’ve seen him recently holding press conferences and giving speeches and he seemed to be fine. They said he had a cold so maybe he really was on drugs — Nyquil or Mucinex or something that made him seem so shaky and frail. Whatever it was, it was a terrible debate for him and if he does stay in the race (which is almost certain in my opinion) the campaign is going to have a lot of work to do to dig out of the hole that was dug last night. The media smells blood and they are circling like a bunch of starved piranhas.
. . . For some odd reason, moderator Jake Tapper told Trump in the beginning that he didn’t need to answer the questions and that he could use the time however he wanted. Trump ran with that, essentially giving a rally speech whenever he had the floor and was unresponsive to the vast majority of the questions. He made faces and insulted Biden to his face, at one point calling him a criminal and a Manchurian candidate. If anyone had said 10 years ago that this would happen at a presidential debate they would have been laughed out of the room.
After the debate when most of the country had turned off cable news or gone to bed, CNN aired its fact check. And it’s a doozy:
It sure would have been good if even some of that epic litany of lies could have been checked while people were still watching. The decision to have the moderators sit like a couple of potted plants woodenly asking questions about child care while Trump responded with irrelevant lies was inexplicable. Why did they even bother to ask questions at all? They could have just run the timer and let the candidates talk for two minutes each about anything they wanted. It probably would have been more enlightening.
We know Trump is a liar.
Biden had to prove he wasn’t feeble… and he failed at that.
Voting for Biden and his administration is still 100% the correct decision, but that debate isn’t going to convince any swing voters. If you want to use the incumbency advantage you need to convince folks you can stay the course for the next 4 years.
WE know, and that’s why the debate wasn’t for us. And it was a bad idea from the start - Trump does not deserve to be in a debate. Not that there’s any debating going on.
It was always going to support the ticket that thrives on chaos and idiocy. Always.
I would like to see Trump in a debate with someone young who knows the issues and has a specialty in antifascist takedowns. Not a respectable Democrat character, I mean someone who can get up there and call him a rapist, a criminal, and an unpatriotic traitor and back it up with intelligent citing of the facts. You know, a Greta Thunberg type character. I want to see the Greta Vs Donald CNN debate.
There are entire divisions of the RNC and Trump Org staffed and hard at work to ensure that that never happens.
I am voting for Biden. But that debate convinced multiple swing voters I personally know to vote for Trump. All I hear from both democrats and republicans is that Biden is senile. That bunch of nonsense followed by “we beat medicare” line lost tens of millions of votes for Biden.