“I don’t really know what he said at the end of that sentence — and I don’t think he does either.”
This phrase from former President Donald Trump on Thursday night (27) sums up well the first — and who knows, perhaps the only — debate of 2024 between Trump and President Joe Biden.
I wrote recently that corporate media manipulation of Biden’s vigor would not work because the American people can clearly see that Biden is in sharp mental and physical decline.
That was on full display for all to see during the 90-minute debate broadcast on CNN on Thursday night, as Biden, often barely audible, coughed, appeared confused, failed to finish sentences, mumbled incoherently and frequently lost his train of thought in what was almost certainly the worst presidential debate performance in television history.
You don’t have to be a public policy expert or a constitutional scholar to see that the president is not doing well, and no amount of sophistry will change what the public can now clearly see.
Well, okay, the Biden campaign and its allies in the media tried to play one last trick during the early stages of the debate.
The excuse was that Biden was suffering from a “cold.”
It’s such a pathetic explanation for what we saw that I don’t think even the most sycophantic, Pravda-like figures in the media will adopt it in their future messages.
Even notorious narrative creator Ben Rhodes [ex-conselheiro adjunto de segurança nacional dos Estados Unidos no governo Obama] surrendered to reality. He tweeted: “Telling people they didn’t see what they saw is not the way to respond to this [às críticas a Biden].”
A cold may give you a hoarse voice, but it doesn’t make you sound or look that way. Biden has had a week of no public appearances to prepare for this debate, and this is apparently the best he’s been able to do.
This part wasn’t shown on live TV, but here’s what Biden looked like as he left the CNN set.
Any suggestion that the president’s obvious signs of decline are based on “misinformation” or what White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre calls “cheap falsifications” has been completely and unquestionably debunked.
CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash were not terrible, although clearly biased. They frequently interrupted Biden when he started rambling to keep him focused and on message, and they often asked Trump questions to keep him from responding.
This didn’t really matter much. Sure, there were plenty of important issues discussed—from the open-border catastrophe to inflation to the erosion of global stability to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
That’s not what people will remember from this debate. It often felt more like a CNN interview with Trump rather than a confrontation between the two men supposedly in the arena.
Biden’s performance was so catastrophic that, while the debate was still going on, the newspaper The New York Times and website Political were publishing articles about the Democrats’ panic.
If you kept watching CNN’s commentary after the debate ended — which was mostly a bunch of typical CNN babble about Trump being an evil orange man — pretty much the entire panel called for Biden to be removed from the Democratic presidential ticket. (On MSNBC, it was more or less the same.)
Could this happen? Who knows? It would be unprecedented to have a presidential candidate kicked off the ticket at such short notice, but we live in strange times.
What I do know is that it’s almost impossible to imagine Biden lasting another four years in office, let alone four months until November.
And so, given Biden’s performance, there are a lot of questions for the American people to ponder.
There is no doubt now that the American people at least deserve to hear the audio of Biden’s interviews with special counsel Robert Hur, which Attorney General Merrick Garland insists on withholding, even under threat of congressional censure.
If Biden is looking so bad in public, who exactly is running the show in the White House? In other words: who is the puppet master of the puppet?
There have been accusations that former President Barack Obama is running a kind of shadow presidency from his home in Washington. That certainly seems plausible.
Are there people in the White House who want to keep Biden there because he is easily manipulated and unable to make important decisions now? Is Biden really still making all the decisions?
If so, then may God help us.
There are even questions about what to do with a president who is no longer capable of performing the duties of his office.
And it’s not just Americans who saw Biden’s condition during the debate. Enemies and rivals around the world saw it too.
In a dangerous world — of instant communication and fast-moving events — Americans cannot afford to have a president who seems completely out of it when he has a “cold.”
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said at X that we should start thinking about the 25th Amendment, a constitutional mechanism for replacing an incapacitated president.
Either way, after tonight, maybe we should be thinking less about Biden and more about who will replace him.
©2024 The Daily Signal. Published with permission. Original in English: Biden Has a Debate Disaster for the Ages
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