Trump and Biden delivered an incoherent debate. America deserved better

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Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.

Many commentators saw this first, early debate between incumbent President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump as a pivotal moment in an election rematch between two avatars of polarized forces in American political life. Both sides seek to solidify a narrative about what the past two presidential elections have meant to the longer arc of American history, and what this one means for its future.

Was Mr. Trump’s win in 2016 the aberration of the steady, though sometimes capricious and wayward, march toward a more progressive United States? Or was Mr. Biden’s win four years later the aberration for a country that, rather like Mr. Trump, is driven by far more by status, suspicion, nostalgia and narcissism, than life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness?

The lead up to the 2024 American presidential election was always going to be messy. After all, the U.S. is still reeling from a pandemic, a literal insurrection of the Capitol, alleged attempts to overturn the results from the last presidential election, multiple criminal cases against the former president, et cetera seemingly ad infinitum. No one expected to be reassured by this first debate. The return to precedented times is still a long way off. But I, for one, was at the very least hoping that the candidates (fine, one of the candidates) would make coherent and cogent arguments.

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That didn’t happen. The debate was incoherent. But the debaters were not equally so.

It’s true that both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump rambled at times. They devolved into personal attacks. There were deflections and misleading statements abound. Neither seemed to answer questions when asked directly about climate change, abortion or the Israel-Hamas war.

Mr. Trump made vague references to “the numbers” – numbers of illegal immigrants and terrorists coming across the southern border, the “best” environmental numbers, his poll numbers, which went “way up” following his criminal conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records last month. Mr. Biden frequently paused, sometimes fumbled and lost his train of thought, and got caught up overcorrecting Mr. Trump’s frequent falsehoods. Halfway through the debate, MSNBC reported that Mr. Biden had a cold; likely true, but also clearly an attempt at damage control in the middle of the train wreck.

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At one point, the candidates fought over which of them was the “worst president in United States history.” And then, bizarrely, Mr. Biden’s golf handicap. On the weak economy and persistent inflation, both seemed to make an argument that went something like, “It wasn’t me, it was him.” Neither gave the kind of reasoned, thoughtful or even pointed responses that could have laid questions about Mr. Biden’s age and Mr. Trump’s temperament not necessarily to rest, but perhaps to snooze for bit.

Let me be clear here: Mr. Trump was, by any measure, much less coherent than Mr. Biden. He deals in distraction, distortion and deflection, nearly every statement leaving fact-checkers (though not CNN moderators Dana Bash or Jake Tapper, who chose to let the candidates’ remarks fly unimpeded) scrambling. There’s a lesson here about arguing with fools, who, as Mark Twain apparently said, will only drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

But on a debate stage with identical podiums, strict time limits and decisions such as which candidate got to stand at the podium on the right of the screen and which got the last word in their closing remarks decided by a coin-flip game of chance, the playing field still wasn’t quite level. Mr. Trump didn’t have to be coherent; Mr. Biden did.

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The Republican Party has framed this election, not unlike the one in 2016, in terms of grievance and status threat. Anxiety about the future is a more prominent theme this time around than the campaign’s emphasis in 2016 of a nostalgic past when American was great, or in 2020 when Mr. Trump was on the defensive during a global pandemic and devastated economy. However, Mr. Trump’s overtures to the American people are, once again, intended to stoke anger (preferably) and angst (less effective, but will get the job done).

Emotional appeals like these don’t need to be coherent. They just need to work. And here, Mr. Trump is a confident, if not convincing, liar.

Mr. Biden, on the other hand, tried to appeal to a politically aware American public that values rational responses to pressing problems. His task was to connect the dots of today’s challenges – the economy, immigration, abortion, whether Mr. Trump will accept the results of the next election – to four disastrous years of an unhinged president. But 2016 is a distant memory for many Americans who are more focused on inflation and affordability in the here and now, and the motivating factors that helped Mr. Biden’s victory in 2020 do not have the same urgency as they once did.

As things stand now in the battle to win over each candidate’s base, the independents, the indifferent, the aggrieved, the apathetic and the agnostic, Mr. Trump’s incoherency is an asset. Mr. Biden’s is a liability. And once again, American democracy hangs in the balance.