ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY MY ONLY POST ABOUT THE TRUMP-BIDEN DEBATE REMATCH THING (PART 1)

As you probably know, Joe Biden and Donald Trump held their first debate of 2024. And everyone is freaking out about it, so I thought I’d better post something, mainly to organize my own thoughts in my head. So:

 

1. No I didn’t watch it. I rarely watch live debates anymore – partly because I’m in the wrong time zone, but mainly because (1) it’s rare that any candidate says anything of substance that I haven’t heard them say before, and (2) in this case, I already know who is getting my vote – and it’s not the pathological liar who has been convicted of one felony (so far) and literally whipped a mob into trying to overturn the 2020 election results by force. So the highlights reel is usually enough for me.

 

2. Based on that, I’ll be the first to admit Biden had a bad night, whether it was the cold medication or whatever. That said, I don’t think it justifies either the crowing on the right or the freakout on the left. I certainly don’t agree with the hot takes that Biden lost the debate because he wasn’t as loud and energetic as Trump – which is a silly way to declare the winner of a debate. I’ve actually seen some Demos say “Yes, Trump lied his ass off and made little sense, but he did it with confidence and energy.” Well, okay, but if you think that’s what makes him seem more presidential, then I don’t really know what to tell you.

 

3. Perhaps understandably, part of the freakout is that it plays into the GOP’s whole “Biden’s too old” meme (despite Trump being just a few years younger and obviously in far worse health, but okay), so now we’re back to the “replace Biden” meme, backed by (1) Demos who are afraid he can’t beat Trump in what’s looking like another close election and (2) hardcore liberals who viscerally hate Biden for his Israel/Gaza policy and have threatened to vote for Trump just to hold Biden accountable unless he drops out.

 

4. Anyone who knows about how party politics and US elections work will tell you that’s not likely to happen. Biden has won all the primaries and most of the delegates that go with them, and a brokered convention will be too messy and risky. Also, no one seems to agree on the answer to the most important question: replace Biden with who, exactly? Apart from Kamala Harris, there are a few other names being thrown about (none of which are RFK Jr, thankfully). But the fact of the matter is that of the bunch, Biden is the only one with a proven track record of beating Trump in a general election. Throwing that away for someone else over one bad debate performance would be a major gamble. So unless Biden dies or willingly steps down – and there’s currently no reason to believe that he’ll do either – we’re probably stuck with him.

 

5. This where a lot of people will complain about the party system and DNC mechanisms and the electoral college and whatnot, and that’s fine, but that’s a whole separate set of problems that has no bearing on who gets to be the Demo nominee for 2024, because it’s way too late for that. That’s a discussion for 2028 and beyond, and it’s worth having now, but, well, see above.

 

6. The bigger question of course is what all this means for November. As the saying goes, five months is a long time in politics, so even if the debate moves the needle in Trump’s favor, Biden has the time and opportunity to turn that around. Meanwhile, we’ve already seen a couple of post-debate talks where Biden was already back on form, and one of the first post-debate polls suggests that Biden’s debate performance didn’t hurt him. So Demos can probably stop panicking now.  

 

7. However, we’re still looking at a close race that Biden can still lose. And honestly, while I’m not officially calling the election for Trump yet, I have to say, my gut feeling is that he is going to pull this off. Again. And this time with the full backing of the GOP, which is now his party. Trump won in 2016 despite all conventional political wisdom saying it was impossible AND losing the pop vote. There’s no reason to assume he can’t do it again – especially if the far left really can’t bring themselves to vote for Biden and go with Trump, RFK Jr or a blank protest vote.

 

8. The nihilist in me can’t help thinking that if a slim majority of people is willing to vote for Trump despite being a blithering pathological liar and a wannabe dictator who has been convicted of one felony (so far) and literally whipped a mob etc etc etc – even if the reason is that Biden is too old or whatever – maybe democracy should die?

 

9. Okay, not really. But for me, there’s no mystery here. We know what a Trump presidency looks like, and that was when the GOP wasn’t fully onboard and things like Project 2025 were just a gleam in Kevin Roberts’ eye. We also know what a Biden presidency looks like, and at least on paper, it’s been reasonably good more often than not and relatively sane compared to the previous admin. Which is why it’s inexplicable to me that people outside of the MAGA party would want to put Trump back in charge.

 

10. But as I’ve said elsewhere, people vote for all kinds of personal, idiosyncratic reasons, and in the current reality schism, I don’t know what can be done to change that, especially since a complex problem usually requires an even more complex solution. All I can say for now is that if Trump does win, and if we somehow survive his second term, we might want to think long and hard about how we got here and what we should do about it.

 

I’m not going to debate you Jerry,

This is dF

ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY MY ONLY OTHER POST ABOUT THE TRUMP-BIDEN DEBATE REMATCH THING

Not to bang on about the Great Biden-Trump Debate Freakout, but one thing I noticed in my Twitter feed during the debate was that a lot of people complained that even Trump’s more blatant lies went unchallenged by both Biden and the moderators.

 

Fair point, though I’ll add that I think this is probably due to a couple of things:

 

(1) I suspect part of that is because we’ve normalized the idea that politicians lie or exaggerate about most stuff anyway, so moderators figire there’s no point in fact-checking them live – let ‘em talk and do the fact checks later.

 

(2) As someone who has moderated panel discussions (albeit not political ones), I would note that from a pure moderation standpoint, it’s actually hard to fact-check people to their face in real time during a live debate, not least because of the dangers of falling down enough rabbit holes that it ends up throwing the entire event off track. This is especially a problem with people like Trump who seem incapable of saying anything remotely true, potentially creating infinite rabbit holes.

 

(Apparently there’s an actual rhetorical strategy called the “Gish gallop” that is essentially a form of gaslighting by overwhelming your debate opponent with a firehose of nonsense so that they are unable to respond – though it’s also likely that this isn’t a deliberate strategy on Trump’s part so much as him just doing what comes naturally, but the result is similar.)

 

Anyway, given Trump’s general tendency to spout whatever pops into his head and the general deluge of disinformation swamping social media, it’s probably time for broadcast media and moderators to figure out a way to plausibly fact-check politicians in real time.

 

People like Daniel Dale do a pretty good job of this on Twitter, but that’s a separate medium that viewers have to actively check. Post-game fact-checks are fine, but also arguably too little too late for a lot of people. For viewers who are only seeing the debate coverage on TV, it would be good to figure out how to integrate that capability onscreen – like a fact-check ticker or something.

 

That said, the other challenge is the trustworthiness of the fact-checkers – I imagine the “facts” offered by, say, Newsmax and Fox would be quite different from those offered by CNN, etc. And then you’ll get into the whole thing where everyone says that “this media network is biased because they fact-checked my candidate more than the other one”.

 

So it’s not so simple, is what I’m saying.

 

Who checks the fact-checkers,

 

This is dF