It’s one thing to say Joe Biden failed to take advantage of the opportunity to put away Donald Trump in the first debate on June 27 in Atlanta, and quite another to claim the disappointing showing means Biden should quit the race for his re-election.
The headline from the debate should have been that Biden was rattled by Trump’s torrent of lies throughout the 90-minute event. Trump lied at a pace Biden could not hope to correct, after CNN hosts chose not to attempt to moderate the convicted felon and notorious untruth-teller.
When CNN executives announced, before the debate, that the channel would not be checking facts along the way, they allowed Trump to engage in a “Gish gallop,” a rhetorical trick in which an unscrupulous debater overwhelms his opponent with an excessive number of arguments with no regard for accuracy, which are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent.
After the debate, CNN’s fact checkers reported Trump made more than 30 false claims. They included Trump’s assertions that some Democratic-led states allow babies to be executed after birth; that every legal scholar and everybody in general wanted Roe v. Wade overturned; that there were no terror attacks during Trump’s presidency; that Iran didn’t fund terror groups during his presidency; that the US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has; that Biden for years referred to Black people as “super predators;” that Biden is planning to quadruple people’s taxes; that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops for the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; that Americans don’t pay the cost of his tariffs on China and other countries; that Europe accepts no American cars; that he was the president who got the Veterans Choice program through Congress; and that fraud marred the results of the 2020 election.
Trump also added new false claims, such as his assertions that the U.S. currently has its biggest budget deficit and its biggest trade deficit with China. Both records actually occurred under Trump.
Seth Abramson, a lawyer and journalist who has written three books on Trump, noted in a June 30 column on Substack that Trump lied far more than CNN tracked. Abramson counted 602 lies — or a lie every 3.9 seconds in the 40 minutes he was speaking during the debate, including his repetition of lies. (You can find the column at https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/donald-trumps-shocking-box-score)
In his first monologue, responding to Biden’s statement to voters who feel they are worse off under his presidency than they were under President Trump, Trump told 17 lies by Abramson’s count.
Biden tried to specifically rebut false claims made by Trump, but “even if President Biden had been permitted to be the only speaker at [the] debate and been allowed to speak for 90 minutes without interruption or interjection from either the moderators or Mr. Trump; even if he hadn’t had a bad cold; even if he weren’t a lifelong stutterer; even if he hadn’t been experiencing, apparently, the debilitating effects of cold-and-flu meds on 81-year-old men, he wouldn’t have been able to sufficiently rebut every lie Donald Trump deliberately and callously told American voters in Atlanta.”
Biden had a pretty good explanation for his disjointed responses after the debate, telling reporters, “It’s hard to debate a liar.” And he appeared in good shape the next day at a North Carolina rally.
The New York Times led the rush to judgment with an editorial written the night of the debate, demanding that Biden quit the race.
The Times editors noted that Trump has proved himself to be a significant jeopardy to American democracy, but added, “Mr. Biden has said that he is the candidate with the best chance of taking on this threat of tyranny and defeating it. His argument rests largely on the fact that he beat Mr. Trump in 2020. That is no longer a sufficient rationale for why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer had a better read on the debate results with an editorial published June 30:
“President Joe Biden’s debate performance was a disaster. His disjointed responses and dazed look sparked calls for him to drop out of the presidential race,” Inquirer editors noted.
“But lost in the hand wringing was Donald Trump’s usual bombastic litany of lies, hyperbole, bigotry, ignorance, and fear mongering. His performance demonstrated once again that he is a danger to democracy and unfit for office.
“In fact, the debate about the debate is misplaced. The only person who should withdraw from the race is Trump.
“Trump, 78, has been on the political stage for eight years marked by chaos, corruption, and incivility. Why go back to that?”
In a Univision Spanish-language focus group of 14 Latino voters who were undecided before the debate, five later said they would vote for Biden, one chose Trump and eight said they were still undecided. When asked who won the debate, six said Biden, one said Trump won and seven were undecided.
One of the men in the Univision focus group said he had chosen Biden because “Trump sounded like a crazy liar,” and “said the same thing time after time” and was not answering questions or “saying how he would fix things,” according to a Newsweek translation.
Pundits are excited about the prospect of an open fight for the nomination at the Democratic convention at the United Center in Chicago August 19-22, but that would affix on the electorate the image of Democrats in chaos, heading into the election.
In the meantime, polls since the debate have not shown an urgent need for Democrats to replace President Biden.
In a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states released July 6, Trump led Biden by only 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%, in seven critical states needed to win the November election. That’s the smallest gap since the poll began last October. Biden leads Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin. He’s within the poll’s statistical margin of error in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, and is farthest behind in Pennsylvania, a 7-point gap.
Nervous Democrats need to settle their doubts about the leader of the Democratic ticket in November. Joe Biden might speak softly, with a raspy voice, but in the past three and a half years he has led the nation out of the COVID pandemic with historic economic recovery after Trump’s mismanagement, restored manufacturing and Biden overwhelmingly won contested primaries this past spring. The first debate gave the Biden campaign video of 40 minutes of the convicted felon, adjudicated rapist and serial fraudster Trump telling crazy lies. They should make excellent ads.
Here’s the deal: Democrats need to unite behind the honest, soft-spoken incumbent president, who is still in good physical and mental shape, vs. the crazy liar, who remains a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and is credibly accused of encouraging insurrection and abusing state secrets. Congressional candidates can urge Democrats and patriotic independents to get out to vote in November to make sure the House and Senate have Democratic majorities, whatever happens in the presidential race. This is no time to break in a new candidate for president. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2024
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