The question pundits always ask following a leadership debate – who won?! – cannot reasonably be asked about today’s 2024 Presidential debate.
It would impede coherent understanding of the miasma that wafted across the world from CNN’s Atlanta headquarters. To earnestly ask who triumphed, Joe Biden, 81, or Donald Trump, 78, would be to miss the point entirely. That this debate happened at all, between these two candidates, with this much at stake, and that it unfolded the way it did, is unequivocal proof that everyone is losing.
There are moments in history when kingdoms that have lasted centuries topple because a suitable heir could not be found, the rot having set in, an ailing king’s inbred second cousin’s 6-year-old plopped on the throne to preserve the monarchy. This felt like that.
As the spectacle began I sat down, laptop a-ready, with the noble intention of transcribing the important things said by the two presidential candidates. Before long it became clear this was one of my dumber ideas. Both candidates garbled more than they orated.
Witness, in this staggering but also typical Trump statement, the reality-detached anti-immigrant agenda of a potential second Trump term:
“[Biden’s] the one that kills people with the bad border. Hundreds of thousands are dying, and also killing our citizens. We are living right now in a rat’s nest. They are killing our people in New York, in California, in every state in the Union, because we don’t have borders anymore. Every state is now a border. And because of his ridiculous, insane and very stupid policies, people are coming in and they are killing our citizens at a rate we’ve never seen before. They call it migrant crime. I call it Biden migrant crime. They’re killing our citizens at a level we’ve never seen before… Just take a look at where they’re living. They’re living in luxury hotels in New York City. While our veterans are sleeping in the streets. He doesn’t like our veterans at all.”
Biden, to his credit, in this instance responded succinctly and with real words. “Every single thing he just said is a lie”. But it will not matter. His larger performance today will not reassure anyone. At one point he paused his rambling for an agonisingly long moment and then chimed back in with “we finally beat medicare”, a complete non-sequitur to the few remaining healthy brains watching on.
On abortion, and Roe V. Wade, Trump was allowed to claim that everyone wanted this matter in the hands of the states and that Biden was responsible for post-term abortions [i.e. doctors deciding to kill babies for the lols], to which Biden responded with his heartiest, huckiest “nu uh!” If there was ever a moment to eviscerate Trump, this was it, and it went begging.
We are at the point in the decline of the Western world that the substance of what was said today matters far less than how it was said. Trump speaks his lies with more conviction and less confusion than Biden speaks his facts. At no point today did this feel like the “leader of the free world” swiping away a serious threat to American democracy; it felt like a puppet struggling to remember lines.
When pressed on the January 6 insurrection attempt, Trump spun the assault on democracy into a positive. “On January 6, we had a great border… On January 6, we were respected all over the world. And then he comes in, and now we’re laughed at like a bunch of stupid people.”
“We have a border that is considered the most dangerous place in the world. We have the largest number of terrorists coming here anywhere in the world. They’re coming from Lebanon and the middle east, from everywhere. We had the safest border in history, we now have the worst border in history.”
It’s hard not to feel sorry for hundreds of millions of Americans struggling with bills, with poor health, with gun crime, with climate anxiety, with worn hearts from endless wars and slaughter. They will not find hope from today’s spectacle – just reasons to continue to distrust that which they already distrust.
This was an extremely uncomfortable contest to witness, even before it ended with both men agreeing to continue supporting Israel’s genocide and arguing over their golf handicaps. I wish I were exaggerating. None of these men need to be American President: Trump needs to be as far away from the machinations of political power as possible and Biden needs a warm blanket and some soup.
“You have the morals of an alleycat”, Biden quipped at one point, presumably getting laughs from all the greasers and jocks and hip cats racing around in ‘50s Cadillacs. “Biden is a Manchurian candidate. He takes money from China, or something”, said Trump in retort, the half-assed-ness of this line on display for all to see.
In today’s Presidential debate, the world witnessed a crisis point in the decline of the empire. All of America’s once mighty institutions involved bared their entropy to the world; the only winners today are the nations that heed the red-flags and decide to distance themselves from the United States and detach themselves from its death spiral.
The Republican Party has backed an outwardly racist compulsive liar with mush for brains, an authoritarian demigod, a devious immoral husk of man that has contempt for the machinations of democracy. The Democrats have propped up a detached, hawkish, rambling, dementia patient, Weekend at Bernie’s style, his exhausted expressions of “malarkey” apparently the best America can summon in the face of Trump’s reality altering bullshit. And CNN, the debate host network, tragically decided to allow Biden’s rambling nonsense and Trump’s unmitigated lies to wash over hundreds of millions of voters completely unchallenged or fact-checked by anyone other than the genocidal geriatric freak standing at the opposing podium.
God save the United States.
