Politico | Trump mayhem takes over first US election debate
- The president interrupted and bullied. Joe Biden called the president a ‘clown’. Chris Wallace, the moderator, despaired.
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by David Siders on politico.com on September 30, 2020.
The mayhem Donald Trump subjected Americans to on Tuesday might have helped him if Joe Biden had disintegrated. Biden didn’t.
Trump – and viewers everywhere – just left the night worse off for having sat through the whole, weird thing.
The president interrupted and bullied. Biden called the president a “clown”. Chris Wallace, the moderator, despaired.
“The country would be better served,” the veteran journalist said to Trump, “if we allow both people to speak with fewer interruptions”.
The result was a circus that will be viewed as one of the strangest confrontations in modern presidential history.
At one point, when Wallace asked Trump, as he did repeatedly, to let Biden finish one of his answers, Biden responded: “He doesn’t know how to do that”.
The debate was unwatchable, in some ways a fitting conclusion to a day that began with Republicans peddling conspiracy theories about Biden wearing an earpiece.
He wasn’t, Biden’s campaign says. Nor was there any evidence, despite Trump’s suggestions, that Biden was on drugs.
What is clear – just as much after the debate as before it – is that Biden is ahead in this race and Trump will leave the debate still desperate for something to pull him down.
He is running out of time, with early voting already under way in some states and few voters still undecided.
Trump’s nonstop interruptions might have worked had the bulldozing made Biden look small.
It didn’t. Instead, it served to align Biden with Wallace – and through the moderator, viewers at home. Trump laboured to talk over them both.
The effect of the chaos was that Biden could do little affirmatively to make his case for president. But as the front runner, the onus was not on him to.
Instead, he stood in for the onslaught, at times laughing Trump off, at others belittling him.
“You’re the worst president America has ever had,” Biden said. “Come on.”
Trump had to know that Biden would be more difficult to flatten than he’d once anticipated. For months, Trump had portrayed Biden as confused and mentally “out of it”, and everyone could see right through the course correction when it came.
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Biden wasn’t eloquent on Tuesday. But he didn’t need to be. Americans have already grimaced through reels of Joe Biden gaffes – and they don’t seem to care. He didn’t need a stand-out performance, only a stable one. And because of Trump’s wildly undisciplined exercise in expectation setting – and bizarre commitment to interruption – Biden only needed to come off as sane.
Perhaps the most revealing discussion on Tuesday did not pertain to the vote – but to what happens after.
If Tuesday was any indication, it is going to be war.
For more than four years, Trump has made repeated, baseless claims about widespread voter fraud, and he has refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses. Last week, he said he expects the contest to “end up in the Supreme Court”, as if that were normal (it isn’t; Bush vs Gore was an aberration).
But if anyone was still watching on Tuesday, Trump aired his grievances for a national audience once more.
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Trump vs Biden: The 2020 US presidential election
He said he is “counting on” the Supreme Court to “look at the ballots”, with a mail-in voting system he said is a “disaster”.
“This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen,” Trump said.
Biden said Trump was “trying to scare people” and was “just afraid” of counting the vote.
The effect of Trump’s rhetoric may reverberate far beyond the election. Americans have already lost a significant amount of faith in the electoral system. According to a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll, just 22 per cent of Americans expect the presidential election to be “free and fair”. This has immediate practical implications for November, with some evidence that lower trust in an electoral system results in decreased turnout.
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But it also suggests that the electorate is primed for a post-election scramble over the results. Tuesday’s debate was a preview of not just of what the closing days of the campaign will offer, but also its immediate aftermath.
Trump didn’t win the presidency because people liked him. He won because voters in enough swing states loathed Hillary Clinton more.
The difficulty for Trump, as it has been since the start of the campaign, is that Biden is far less polarising than Clinton. Before the debate, nothing that Trump has thrown at Biden has stuck – not China, not Biden’s mental acuity, not Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukraine.
Tuesday night may have represented Trump’s last best chance to drag Biden through the mud – anything to pull his favourability down.
How low could Trump go? As expected, he went to Hunter Biden – not only on Ukraine, but for his drug use. The man, Trump said, was “dishonourably discharged for cocaine use” and didn’t have a job until Biden was vice-president.
Biden shot back: “None of that is true”, before saying he was “proud” of his son for overcoming his drug problem.
Like so much else in the nation’s discourse, Trump has set the rhetorical bar for debates at subterranean levels. But Trump’s most effective smear may have been the one closest to the truth – that Biden is a creature of Washington.
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It’s inconvenient for Trump’s reprisal of the outsider argument he made four years ago that he is now the incumbent president. But it is not an impossible case to make. The line he repeated Tuesday was about Biden’s “47 years”, contrasting his own, relatively brief tenure in government with Biden’s.
He said Biden could have cut drug prices during his “47 year period in government”, for example.
At another point, Trump said: “47 years, you’ve done nothing”.
Biden might have learned in all those years, however, that it’s best not to be a shrinking violet. And on Tuesday, he wasn’t.
“Will you shut up, man?” Biden said once when Trump was interrupting him. “This is so unpresidential.”
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‘Will you shut up, man?’, Biden tells Trump in heated first US presidential debate
The election began as a referendum on Trump. And despite all of the disruption this year, including a global pandemic and widespread civil unrest, every sign on Tuesday pointed to it remaining so.
For Trump, that is not an appealing prospect. Earlier this month, deaths from the coronavirus topped 200,000. Schools and businesses are still closed. The economy is in tatters.
It took Biden about one minute to pivot from a question about the Supreme Court to health care. And the coronavirus wasn’t far behind.
More people will die, he said, unless Trump gets “a lot smarter, a lot quicker” about Covid-19.
Trump dug in on Biden on race relations, criticising him for calling criminals “super predators” in the 1990s, and he faulted Biden for the Obama administration’s handling of the military and veterans affairs.
But more often, Trump tried to look forward, an effort to persuade Americans that life could, in fact, be worse than it is. If Biden is elected, Trump said: “Our suburbs would be gone, and you would see problems like you’ve never seen”.
Trump’s law-and-order campaign has largely fallen flat, in part because his dire warnings about “Biden’s America” all reference unrest occurring in a country where Trump, not Biden, is president. But fear and anger are reliable motivators in elections, and Trump will now need to lean into both in the next two debates if he’s going to turn his campaign around.
