Last Thursday night, millions of us experienced a traumatic and collective near-death experience — not of our own lives, but of American democracy. Within the first 10 minutes of the Biden-Trump debate on an Atlanta stage, we witnessed the man who tried to overthrow American government four years ago steamroll over our current president with lies, menace, and an aura of invincibility, while the latter struggled to form a single coherent sentence and appeared to reinforce even the most outlandish accusations that he is too old to be president. And though Biden’s performance improved from his checked-out start, it was deeply disorienting to watch the contrast between Trump’s firehose of lies and fascistic rhetoric, on the one hand, and Biden’s inability to defend American democracy and basic freedoms, much less himself, on the other.
So many of us remain stunned in the aftermath not simply by Biden’s inability to perform at the rhetorical and intellectual level we should expect from a president, but because we perceive that he is all that stands between us and the volcano of hate, retribution, and destruction with whom he shared the stage. Even as Biden seemed to show that he isn’t up to the job — either in terms of convincing people of his overall fitness for office or of advancing the Democrats’ goals for America against Republicans’ demented vision — we also got a reminder of what a profound threat Trump poses to the country. Trump lied remorselessly about his accomplishments and Biden’s. He was in full sociopathic con man mode, telling America that up is down and black is white: that January 6 was the Democrats’ fault; that Trump actually opposes political violence; that America is being invaded by tens of millions of criminals and mental patients who intend to kill and rape us before taking our jobs; that the overturning of Roe v. Wade is not his fault but is also simply the return of common sense with which everyone but Biden agrees, and that also, Democrats abort babies after they are born.
So when we encounter the mass disorientation of Democrats and other supporters of democracy, it is not because we ever believed Biden to be perfect, but because the threat posed by his opponent is so very great, and because Biden showed — both symbolically but also substantively — that he may well be unable to counter this threat. Time and time again, Biden failed to forcefully or cogently defend basic aspects of American life and freedom from Trump’s lies and slanders. A few particular moments stand out to me:
First, Biden’s utter fumble of his defense of abortion rights, instead slipping into a near-non sequitur about women murdered by migrants, and soon after talking incomprehensibly about trimesters. There was also an unpleasant digression into incest which failed to make explicit that victims of incest could be denied abortions in some states.
Second, his inability to counter Trump’s misdirection about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a straightforward explanation of why the U.S. is backing that besieged country; this was particularly egregious considering the clear opening it held for reminding Americans of Trump’s sycophantic deference to Vladimir Putin, not to mention the fact that Trump was impeached the first time for tying Ukraine’s defense against Russia to its willingness to help Trump kneecap Biden’s first presidential run.
Third, it was appalling that Biden appeared to accept Trump’s lie that the country is being overrun by criminal and/or insane immigrants, and spoke so limply of border security, fumbling the potentially potent point that it was Trump who ultimately directed Republicans not to vote for a bipartisan border bill in order to provide Trump with an issue to run on. It is beyond comprehensible to me that Biden would not have an argument ready to refute such a predictable and slanderous point that is so closely tied to Trump and the GOP’s centering of racial hatred in the party’s appeal to voters. Those who have argued that Democrats have made a grave error in accepting GOP premises around immigration were vindicated, as Biden found no way to upturn the insane premises (brown people are coming to kill us all) and resulting insane solutions (expel 20 million immigrants from the U.S.) proposed by Trump.
Biden is ultimately responsible for his own performance, but you have to wonder about the advisors who were responsible for helping him prep for this debate, and who urged him to participate in it in the first place. Either they did not properly prepare him (including by having someone realistically role-play a vicious and implacable Trump), in which case the team is incompetent, or they did prepare him as much as possible, in which case Biden owns his poor performance all on his own. After all, Trump’s words and actions at the debate were wholly predictable, in line with his prior campaign appearances, and yet Biden seemed to have no plan to deal with his torrent of lies, to undermine Trump’s absurd claims to competence, or to make a case for himself in the face of Trump’s assaults. I hate to repeat a trope that the former president uttered last night, but in this case, it will indeed be a travesty if Biden doesn’t fire anyone for giving him bad advice that contributed to last night’s debacle.
In the last few days, plenty of Democrats have been hitting the panic button, which for many turns out to be an eject button, wondering how they can jettison Joe Biden from the presidential nomination and get someone more electable in his place. I’ve been skeptical of the dump-Biden arguments up to now, believing that his objectively strong record and commitment to democracy earned him a run at a second term. There was also the not-insignificant fact that no credible alternatives chose to challenge him for the nomination during the primaries, with Biden emerging as the legitimate party choice. And he seemed to do fine and quell a lot of doubts with his strong State of the Union performance back in March.
But if his debate participation was meant to further reassure voters as to his mental and physical abilities while exposing Trump as the degenerate that he is, he failed in the first mission and badly fumbled the second. Instead of the subsequent public discussion being dominated by Trump’s repeated refusal to say that he’d accept the November election results (he hedged his answer in ways that make it clear that only a Trump victory will be acceptable), or by Trump’s lies about abortion rights, or by Trump’s total lack of engagement with questions around climate change, far too much oxygen is being taken up by what is ultimately a self-inflicted (and avoidable) wound on Biden’s part.
So that is where we are, whether we like it or not. But where we go from here is not just up to Joe Biden, but also to the millions of Americans who want to defend our democracy, defeat the fascistic movement behind Donald Trump, and move this country forward. For his part, Joe Biden needs to confront the damage he’s done to our confidence in him, and rapidly implement a credible strategy to regain public trust in his capacity to fight implacably for America’s future. He cannot simply ask the American people to ignore what they saw last week, because what they saw was terrifying and demoralizing, and seemed to validate the widespread concerns about his age held by voters from across the political spectrum. Not only does he need to signal that such a failure will not happen a second time, he will have to deliver on that promise. Even the rosiest possible take on Biden’s health and acuity — that debate night was a one-off, an uncanny convergence of cramming for the debate, a head cold, and the existential burdens of the presidency — must still conclude that his catastrophic performance and choice to participate ended up boosting the prospects of his deranged opponent. And if Joe Biden cannot reassure his prospective voters in the coming weeks, then those voters should feel free to make loud and clear their desire for Biden to step aside, and for the Democrats to choose a successor candidate, however messy and potentially dangerous such an unprecedented maneuver might be.
The country needs a candidate who can clearly illustrate the stakes of this election; it needs to be seen as a choice between democracy and authoritarianism, not as a gamble between a declining senior and an energetic psycho. What happened on debate night was totally unacceptable — again, Biden walked into a trap of his own making. No one forced him to debate Donald Trump, and indeed, many have persuasively made the case that you can’t actually have a debate where one candidate has no commitment to either the truth or basic democratic beliefs like adhering to election results.
At the same time, all the millions of Democrats feeling at sea and disempowered need to face the fact that in-fighting, recriminations, and self-doubt will only make defeat in November more likely. For every conversation about Biden disappointing them, and for every call to their elected representatives urging that Biden step aside, I would ask folks to also remind themselves and others of how hideously Trump behaved on that debate stage. To me, the lack of remorse or accountability over his past catastrophes was by itself disqualifying. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that he is running for president primarily to escape accountability for the many crimes he committed before and during office. In this sense, his quest is utterly self-serving, even as his ascendance to the presidency would empower a reactionary cohort of Christian nationalists, white supremacists, anti-labor zealots, and open misogynists. This race is not simply, or even primarily, about Trump versus Biden, but about whether we continue to have a democratic, free society that defends equality and shared purpose, or an authoritarian one where insurrectionists run free, a deranged president jails political adversaries and guns down protestors, women and minorities are treated as second class citizens, and the world is left to burn as oil executives are allowed to write environmental policy. Whether or not Biden remains on the ballot, we must insist that these be the true terms of the debate.