I’m not interested in laboriously dissecting the presidential debate Thursday in any meaningful way. Talking heads and columnists from across the political spectrum have already been doing that, and presumably, if you’re reading this, you’re well aware of all the major points. President Joe Biden looked like he was going to cough a bit too hard and keel over at any moment. Former President Donald Trump reveled in his opponent’s ineptitude and grew increasingly unhinged as the night wore on. In between those two observations existed a blabber of indecipherable policy stances that hardly bear repeating.
But buried underneath arguments about their golfing ability (“That’s the biggest lie of all,” Trump said, “that he’s a six handicap. I’ve seen your swing; I know your swing.”) and whether or not the former president had sex with a pornstar while his wife was bearing his fifth child, one thing was blisteringly certain, if it wasn’t already: There is absolutely no reason why either of these candidates should be in serious discussion to head the most influential government in the world. I know that’s not a new or hot take, but oh my God — what are we doing here?
More than anything else, however, one thing will be sure to stick in voters’ minds: Our current president clearly demonstrated he is physically and cognitively unwell, and, therefore, completely and utterly incapable of running the country for another four years. It is necessary that he drops out of the race and allows the Democratic National Convention to nominate somebody else.
For all intents and purposes, Biden and his team handed the debate victory to Trump on a silver platter. He won. Biden lost. If I were a much less informed person, with no context to base my decision on other than this debate, Trump would have my vote in November. Obviously, that doesn’t describe my case, and I won’t be voting for his second term. But I’m not convinced in any way I should vote to give Biden another one either. The mass media and the Democratic Party finally realized Thursday night, only four months before the election, that the emperor has no clothes and has been naked for quite a while. They’ve begun discussing Biden as though he’s an old dog that, after one too many surgeries, might need to finally be euthanized. Van Jones, an analyst for CNN, was chief among them:
“I’m just gonna speak from the heart: I love the guy, he’s a good man. He loves his country, he’s doing the best he can, but he had a test to meet tonight, to restore confidence in the country and in the base, and he failed to do that.”
This is nothing new for those who have been paying attention. We’ve known for years that Biden has been on a steady mental decline. It should not have taken humiliation on national television for it to have been said aloud. Jones, bless his heart, was too kind to say it, but if Biden is on the ballot in November, Trump will almost certainly be elected president. That is a very realistic scenario we need to start contending with. But as I write this, Biden has predictably vowed to remain in the running and, presumably, to take part in the next debate in September. An old man is not going to willingly give up his license and his ability to drive. The Democratic Party must pressure him to leave.
Any debate with Donald Trump should be easy. It should’ve been easy in 2016 when the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton and she went on to lose the electoral college. It should’ve been easier in 2020 when they first nominated Biden, who only won because we’d seen directly the damage the former president did in his four years of office. And it should’ve been easier even still to conquer this week’s debate: Trump has been his party’s frontrunner three times at this point. We know his M.O., we know exactly how he acts, we should know the best way of dealing with him. But, somehow, every four years, like clockwork, the Democratic Party utterly fails.
Their candidate, the man they’ve been hyping up since Barack Obama was in office, stared off into space, mouth agape and struggled to articulate any sentence longer than five words. It was entirely expected he would say stupid things like, “We have a thousand trillionaires in this country” and “I spent half of my career being criticized for being the youngest person in politics.” This is no more than his standard, run-of-the-mill behavior, but, on Thursday, it was made ever more embarrassing precisely because of the importance placed upon his being able to maintain a physical and mental fortitude against Trump. Like Jones said, he was given a test and, even if we graded him on a curve, he wouldn't have even come close to passing.
Across the country, people were gathering in their local bars and pubs to watch the debate. News outlets like the New York Post and USA Today were publishing drinking games online to “help you get through” it. I cannot think of another, more apt symbol for the feeling of creeping malaise we’re experiencing from watching an empire decline and there being so little we can do about it. Looking back, I don’t think I would’ve needed any alcohol on Thursday to feel drunk. I believe, when I woke up Friday morning and read the news, I would’ve felt dreadful regardless. But maybe there’s something about the existential absurdity of the moment that calls for a drink — the way we run our country is irrational and meaningless, utterly ridiculous in the way it allows two elderly, cognitively unavailable men to seek its highest political office.
How else does one cope with unwillingly living in a farce? How many times must we experience this reality before we stop accepting it as normal? And where do we go from here? I obviously have no definitive answers to any of these questions. And, unfortunately, it seems almost certain we’ll be asking them again after the next debate in three months. It’s hard to imagine this moment leaving voters with anything but a sense of dejection, and it’s exactly that feeling that’s going to morph into apathy come Election Day. And that is what’s going to hurt the Democrats. The direness of the situation has finally dawned on the party, and now it’s entirely their choice whether to do anything about it.
Joey Sills (he/him) is a senior studying English and political science.
