The 2024 Presidential Debate
Where the only suckers and losers are the Americans who were forced to endure it.
I should’ve taken notes.
My wife and I routinely guffawed, grabbing each other’s arms to ensure that the other was watching the car wreck that was taking place over the course of an hour and forty minutes on television.
Before we get to the debate, let me start with the real headline of the evening: the CNN and MSNBC panelists’ unadulterated panic at Joe Biden’s performance.
What before had only been reserved for the darkest corners of Washington DC and Democratic headquarters across the United States was now being pleaded loudly and repetitively on national airwaves. Joe Biden cannot remain as the Democratic candidate for the presidency.
Van Jones was choking back tears as he spoke about how much he loved the current president and the great pain it caused him to suggest his removal from the ticket. One by one, each commentator that CNN had brought to the table, echoed the sentiment of their fellow analysts. David Axelrod with the gall of an out-of-work palm reader tried to find some small victories the current president could claim during the debate, but other than that, they all seemed ready to storm the capital to personally convince Biden to step aside.
Schadenfreude is the German word that describes the feeling of enjoying someone else’s pain. It also describes the emotions every cogent American had this evening while watching members of the media finally admit what they’ve been covering up over the last four years. Joe Biden is incapable of being POTUS.
Other than revealing the glaringly obvious mental decline displayed by the president, the debate was, as all presidential debates before it, was a pointless, condescending episode.
Trump gets points for mentioning Evan Gershkovich, the WSJ journalist detained by Russian authorities (whose trial started this week), but neither candidate mentioned the five American hostages being held by Hamas. In fairness, Trump was too busy answering questions that hadn’t been asked and five is a number two higher than Joe Biden can count.
About six minutes total was spent on the two wars that are threatening to spill over into the rest of the world — thank God all of our questions were answered about those!
On policy, Trump couldn’t answer the abortion question. You could watch his body being torn apart as he tried to find an answer that would appeal to the pro-abortion middle of America and the pro-life right-wingers who elected him in the first place. Trump refused to answer questions about climate change or the affordability of child care. At one point, he started talking about immigrants taking black jobs. For a couple of sentences, it was black jobs this, black jobs that. What, pray tell, is a black job? Think wisely about you’d answer that question.
As a point of clarification, CNN and every other media institution capitalizes the ‘B’ in black. I don’t, it’s stupid.
Luckily for Trump, however, answering questions wasn’t ever how his performance was going to be graded.
Before the debate began, I was texting a good friend of mine about what our expectations for the event were. All Donald Trump had to do — all any generic Republican candidate would have been capable of doing — was to be normal and he would win the debate with flying colors. In her words, all he had to do was not be so ‘Trumpy.’
And he wasn’t. For long stretches of the evening, Trump held himself to unprecedented levels of restraint by not attacking the feeble, incognizant man to his left at every moment possible. He didn’t lose his cool, at many times, he spoke directly to the moderators and did little to make that interaction feel contentious.
Bonus points were awarded for the Gershkovich mention and the consistent way he was able to bring each question back to the policy failures of the Biden administration — immigration, inflation, foreign policy, etc.
For poor old Joe Biden, however, the debate was lost the moment he shuffled on stage. The viscerally apparent, violently obvious disparity between the two candidates’ physical and mental abilities was apparent from minute one. To put it in less politically charged terms, watching the two interact with their surroundings on stage was like watching a sign-language-proficient-orangutan duke it out with the last remaining sloth that still remembers the previous ice age.
Biden’s retorts were the same for each question. No matter what Trump had stated prior, the president would call the previous president a liar. Rarely was he able to muster the proof necessary to justify the insult. It’s not as if Trump didn’t lie or mischaracterize certain aspects of his presidency, it’s that he didn’t do it nearly as much as Biden claimed nor did Biden have the substantive argument to back it up.
Much of the debate centered around the ‘suckers and losers’ comment Trump allegedly made back in 2018. You read that right, 2018. We’ve had a whole pandemic since then — a pandemic that couldn’t have been discussed any less during tonight’s debate. Tom Brady has had two Super Bowl wins, one divorce, and one comedy roast since then. What are we doing?
Biden continually wasted our time bringing up the quote that Trump was purported to have said over a Great Dane’s lifespan ago. He didn’t stop there, of course. We had to listen to the ‘good people on both sides’ nonsense about Charlottesville, too. All of these things have been discussed ad nauseam but were deemed top priority to the commander-in-chief — the man who spent the entirety of the last week preparing for the debate. If this was the version of Joe Biden who spent a week preparing for a two-hour event, what level of performance do you think we’re getting on an average day?
Making her long-awaited Substack debut for the next quote is
, whom I routinely reference but have never named. When asked for her summation of the evening, she responded:“After watching the debate, all I can think about is no wonder our country is feeling so fractured, and our civility is being undermined. No one is running this country. Biden is gone, he’s been gone for a while now - but now we all got to witness it first hand. I was worried Trump would be impolite and abrasive, but even he seemed to realize he shouldn’t do that to Joe, he’s in no state fit to be president. If the Dems don’t switch him out, Trump will definitely win this one in November.”
As I write this, I’m sitting in front of three green tomatoes my wife was forced to pick prematurely from our garden after a squirrel made a meal out of one of their compatriots earlier in the afternoon. I’m quite certain that any one of these firm, green monsters could have performed better than Joe Biden did tonight opposite Donald Trump — the Democrat party is surely ripe with a superior candidate than the incumbent. Right? Bueller?
On a serious note, she’s correct. Our civility and willingness to believe that the governing elite has our best interests in mind has been taken advantage of. Trump did what he needed to do to win the debate — and what a low bar it was — but it revealed the embarrassment that is our political process and our current president.
Robert F. Kennedy, an independent presidential candidate who has polled well into the teens at different moments of his campaign, wasn’t featured in the debate. As of this week, he’s polling at 9.1%. That’s representative of at least 30,000,000 Americans if the percentage were extrapolated to account for the whole population. I know he talks funny and all, but you’re telling me that doesn’t warrant a third podium?
RFK Jr. doesn’t have ballot access in all 50 states and is embroiled in multiple legal battles to obtain access. This alone is a testament to how utterly undemocratic our democratic process is, but the Ross Perot ‘never again’ sentiment of the establishment parties is so strong that they’ll walk through fire (i.e. Joe Biden and Donald Trump) to keep a viable third party option from gaining traction.
Fittingly, despite modest efforts from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, the debate devolved into the two geriatrics arguing about their golf score. The world’s envy, these two. The word handicap was said so many times by both candidates that I sincerely can’t believe that Trump didn’t take the low-hanging fruit.
These campaigns are both jokes, the debate is a farce, and the electoral process is a sham. I say we embrace it. Both Biden and Trump challenged each other to a round of golf to finally settle the score. I think that’s better than anything we’d be doing as an alternative.
I can see it now. Trump beats Biden at Pebble Beach after Biden misplaces his clubs and balls in the ocean. Trump still claims that Biden cheated on his scorecard, Biden’s caddy finishes the round in Biden-drag while the eighty-something-year-old gets himself stuck in a sand trap, and the media report that everything is fine. There’s nothing to see here.
To a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA
Fantastic as always. That Great Dane comment got me! Buckle up, we’ve got a hell of a ride ahead!