At last night’s second and final presidential debate, Joe Biden and Donald Trump both played it safe in their separate ways. As the front runner, Biden seemed uninterested in doing anything to shake up the race, and maintained a sober tone that stuck to his major campaign themes, without any particularly savage attacks against the president’s horrific record. The president was restrained in comparison to his first performance, refraining from the constant interruptions that turned the first debate into a showcase for his narcissism and aggression.
But Trump’s calmer delivery made his torrents of lies and slander last night all the more horrifying. His calculation and amorality took literal center stage. Most striking were his attempts to paint not simply Biden but his entire family as a crime syndicate, a predictable move, but so clearly an act of pure malice and projection. All the untruths he leveled at Biden’s exploitation of government for personal gain are descriptions of Trump and his own family’s betrayal of the public trust by exploiting their White House power for personal gain. What I was struck by again and again was how Trump not only lies constantly but seems to feel not an ounce of compunction or doubt about doing so — the shamelessness that so many people have long described was almost tangible.
I don’t think the lies, existing without clear referents or evidence in the real world for most people, helped Trump’s cause, and his continued unwillingness to articulate responsibility or a plan for the coronavirus were obvious to anyone paying attention. It’s a bit crazy that some people are referring to how substantial the debate was compared to last time. Joe Biden may have brought substance, but Trump brought lies in such vast quantity that his performance was an enactment of propaganda against the American electorate.
But unlike the first time, where Trump’s bull in a china shop behavior made him seem stylistically and substantively unpresidential, this second showdown was a good demonstration of how Trump can be legitimized and propped up by a presidential debate, even one in which he’s asked critical questions by a highly competent moderator. Whatever Trump’s plans or lack thereof for handling the coronavirus pandemic, fixing the economy, or providing Americans with health care, he is also a president who has incited violence against political opponents, refused to say if he will step down if he loses the election, and called for the incarceration of his opponent literally the day before the debate. When his direct attacks on democracy itself are removed from such a fundamental public conversation, the president is given a pass on the very issues for which the public most requires an accounting. In this respect, part of the blame lies with Joe Biden, who passed up opportunities to press home that Trump is not just a failed president but an authoritarian who has already vowed to retain power no matter what the voters say.