There is no question to anyone that watched that the Biden / Trump debate on June 27 was a DISASTER for Biden. More importantly, it was a disaster for anyone that cares about America's direction. Biden's failure to connect has placed the country closer to a point where apathy will drive the country past a point of no return.
Biden's performance in the debate was abysmal not because of some absolute objective scoring of his answers, truthfulness and clarity. He's a highly erratic "performer" from a speaking standpoint. HIs performance was ABYSMAL because Biden GOT THE DEBATE on his terms but he not only failed to CAPITALIZE on those terms, he failed to "train" for the potential PITFALLS of those terms regarding his own performance.
MUTED MICS -- Biden asked for the opponent's microphone to be muted during answers. GREAT. That eliminates the problem from prior debates where Trump simply overtalked his opponent when they WERE making points. However, that comes with a downside. If no one can hear the opponent while you are talking, then ALL THAT VIEWERS HEAR is you. If you cannot fill that time with a clear, coherent statement, the viewer can only attribute that problem to YOU. Biden was incredibly ineffective at using his uninterrupted time with his answers. In large part, that was due to the next problem.
FLOODING THE ZONE WITH @*#) -- With muted mics, it was also impossible to interrupt Trump for two minutes as he unloaded a continuous stream of vitriol and lies about weak generals in Afghanistan, immigrants bankrupting Social Security, the latest "through the looking glass" debate about Trump's "very fine people" in Charlottesville, etc. Biden and his team clearly prepped Biden to appear in a debate. You know, a public performance involving an intellectual battle between opposing parties involving actual facts and truthful statistics. When Trump arrived with his FLOOD THE ZONE gameplan, Biden wasn't prepared and seemed preoccupied during Trump's talk time trying to remember all of the BS he was going to refute in his turn. When Biden finally did respond in each round, what came out was a list of half-bullets Biden collected over the prior two minutes of Trump's comment, strung together with additional confusing conjunctions that took up time and resulting in NO complete thought being expressed. With zero sound coming from Trump, with nothing to distract a viewer from attributing the lack of coherent response entirely to Biden.
How should have Biden and his team prepped for this event?
First, they should not have prepped for it like a debate. The opponent has no compunction against lying about ANYTHING. Any event or fact is fair game to be distorted. As a result, you CANNOT plan to spend your talk time refuting every BS point brought up by the opponent. Instead, Biden's campaign staff should have pre-built a shortcut on his campaign website, something like:
https://joebiden.com/floodthezone
and have his campaign staff fact check Trump in real time and post actual facts linked to timestamps in the debate where Trump lied. Voters have been DYING for someone to do this anyway. This would absolutely connect with younger voters and memorialize every lie and make it shareable in social media.
The rules of the debate say you can't bring any notes to the podium and you can't communicate with campaign staff during the debate. The rules HAVE NEVER stated your campaign staff cannot update a web site in real time identifying BS stated by the opponent. Instead of reciting his fractured bullet lists, Biden could have simply started his turn by shaking his head, saying "I don't have time here to refute 2 minutes of BS in one minute but my campaign does. Check biden2024.com slash flood the zone to compare what you just heard to reality." At that point, Biden could pick ONE thing out of Trump's rant to refute as part of themes Biden should be communicating.
Some examples:
TRUMP: No general was fired after the disaster of Afghanistan.
BIDEN: The timetable to leave Afghanistan was dictated by terms the Trump Administration negotiated with the Taliban. You expressed no concern with the timetable when you agreed to it. My administration knew the American people had withdrawn their support for continuing our presence and, in that light, we stuck to the agreement.
TRUMP: He left billions of dollars worth of equipment in Afghanistan.
BIDEN: When you are evacuating a war zone that is reverting to control of the enemy you are fighting, it isn't worth the risk to the TROOPS being evacuated to spend time trying to ship back equipment that has already been in use in a war for 6 to 10 to 20 years. You destroy it in place and get your soldiers out as safely as you can. If Trump knew anything about military operations, he would know that.
TRUMP: Biden is bankrupting Social Security by encouraging millions of illegals to enter the country and sign up for benefits.
BIDEN: If they are illegal immigrants, by definition, they have no Social Security number assigned which means no Social Security benefits, either or disability or retirement, can be paid to them. But they still likely have Social Security TAXES withheld from paychecks which means they're contributing to a benefit they will never collect. You know as much about Social Security finances as you do about who pays for the tarrifs you are proposing.
TRUMP: What they’ve done to some people that are so innocent, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, what you have done, how you’ve destroyed the lives of so many people. When they ripped down Portland, when they ripped down many other cities, you go to Minnesota, Minneapolis, what they’ve done there with the fires all over the city, if I didn’t bring in the National Guard, that city would have been destroyed.
BIDEN: And your point? Those events occurred during YOUR administration. I've only had to deploy the National Guard to help after flooding, hurricanes and fires.
========================But Friday morning quarterbacking is pointless.
The post-debate landscape is one in which America has a choice between two geriatric candidates with profound communication issues. One candidate cannot speak for two minutes without lying and projecting his own failures upon everyone around him, calling into question his grasp of reality. The other candidate lacks the "mental tempo" required to dodge and parry a flood of BS that has become the unified modus operandi of the opposing party and is unable to consistently organize his own thoughts and priorities and express them to combat the threat posed by the opposition.
In Biden's case, he and his advisors clearly lost sight of the difference between the skills needed to WIN or RETAIN the Presidency and the skills needed to OPERATE within the Presidency successfully. Biden's legislative accomplishments clearly indicate he has the skills required to BE President (even after a horrible debate performance) but legislative and administrative actions aren't the sole criteria for overall success. If you LOSE the White House and the opponent comes in and reverses all of your accomplishments, you have netted very little.
For America, a 2024 election that returns Trump to the White House and returns control of the Senate to Republicans will trigger long lasting changes that would unleash political conflict not seen in American history, including the Civil War. The Civil war involved profound moral conflict but 1860s America was not also being manipulated by parties and shadow organizations leveraging billions of dollars contributed by ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations seeking to extend their already-obscene shares of wealth and power.
Republicans are making no secret of their goals should they regain the White House. They are PROMISING to gut Civil Service regulations to purge independent professionals from government who are unwilling to toe an extremist party line. They are PROMISING to abuse prosecutorial powers to punish anyone they deem their enemy. The fact that such public promises have gone UNQUESTIONED by even a single sitting Republican Representative or Senator at the federal or state level means the inertia gained by such a result will be impossible to halt. Every single corrective measure enshrined in the Constitution will have been eliminated in actual form or function.
So that's the landscape in America as of June 28, 2024. Even after Biden's horrific debate performance, Trump still only likely has 40 to 42 percent support across all CITIZENS. But that measure is meaningless. Trump doesn't have to win support from 51 percent of all CITIZENS. He doesn't even have to win support from a majority of VOTERS. He only has to win a majority of electoral college votes. That means the fate of the country is still in the hands of VOTERS who do not support Trump. But what will they actually DO? Will they vote based on energy level in a contrived debate environment or results in office? Will they vote against a candidate who fumbled legitimate points about policy and vote for a candidate who aggressively lied about nearly everything but did so confidently? Will they yawn and throw up their hands with fake sophistication and stay home, allowing all branches of government to fall under the control of a party that is profoundly anti-democratic?
I won't attempt to predict the result but the odds for avoiding a bad outcome have never been lower. Profound failures have already been exposed in our checks and balances that have led to this current predicament. Those checks and balances were not designed with the assumption their use would be required on a daily, monthly or yearly basis. They were designed as circuit breakers to block what should be outlier, once-in-a-generation situations. More importantly, they were designed to be operated by people who understood and agreed with their purpose.
In 2024, America is faced with a choice between a candidate and party promising to destroy every remaining check and balance in our system and a candidate who cannot consistently, convincingly articulate why that would be such a profoundly bad outcome for individual citizens and the survival of the country to engage voters to avoid that outcome.
A republic, if you can keep it, indeed...
WTH
