U.S. President Joe Biden, right, and Republican presidential candidate former president Donald Trump, left, during a presidential debate hosted by CNN, in Atlanta on June 27.Gerald Herbert/The Associated Press
There’s a 2008 episode of South Park called “Britney’s New Look” that was made right when the height of Britney Spears’s popularity intersected with the depths of her very public mental health struggles.
In the show, the pop star is exploited and humiliated by a series of people who see her as a human slot machine. Despondent, she points a shotgun at her head and pulls the trigger.
Because it’s South Park, she survives, with most of her head missing. The rest of the episode features people either pretending the ghoulishly disfigured singer is perfectly fine as they haul their meal ticket into a recording studio or onto a stage, or feasting greedily on her dysfunction.
Even for South Park, the episode is incredibly dark and razor-sharp. The butt of the joke isn’t the diminished celebrity wheeled out to deliver a performance they’re in no way capable of executing. No, this indictment is for the society that wants them to do it, the handlers who enable or insist on it, the money-printing machine that grinds and chugs and squeezes along until finally extruding something that is less a person or even a product than it is an inevitability.
After the first presidential debate of the 2024 American political season, it’s time for a another conversation about all of this.
It’s a constant danger and temptation when analyzing a political debate to fixate on theatre at the expense of substance. But in this rematch between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump, style was always going to be the point.
The world knows these two men plenty well, and the American voters who will choose between them are deeply, understandably surly about the options. This debate was no debutante’s coming-out party; it was, quite explicitly, a live-fire test of decrepitude and decency. Everyone failed.
Mr. Biden is 81 and Mr. Trump 78, and most Americans think both of them are too old to be president, though age is a bigger problem in perceptions of Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump’s liabilities include being a convicted felon, a carnival barker whose only attraction is himself, a wannabe insurrectionist and a political leader whose crassness, instability and dullness of mind are all probably underestimated. But his sins also fall firmly into the category of what can anyone tell you that you don’t already know and find appalling or dismiss as a colossal lie.
Mr. Biden is no troubled pop star being led naively to the slaughter here, but his debate performance was so shockingly weak that it felt unseemly to look at. His voice was hoarse and reedy, like a caricatured old man in a particularly mean and artless sitcom. While Mr. Trump spoke, Mr. Biden gazed vacantly down or straight ahead, his mouth gaping open. And when he spoke, Mr. Biden’s words were muttered and smudged, but so were his thoughts and arguments, and that was much, much worse.
As an artifact of humanity, it was wincingly painful. As an exercise in democracy, a hedge against the grift, dollar-store autocracy, social corrosion and seething, sucking, self-absorbed chaos that was the only other option on the table, it was a horror.
Mr. Biden spent the past week holed up at Camp David with a coterie of advisers deep in debate practice. Mr. Trump spent this time workshopping applause lines at huge rallies while suggesting that Mr. Biden was either taking a long old-man nap or doing lines of cocaine to prepare for their match-up in Atlanta.
Either way, Mr. Trump’s point was obvious: His Democratic opponent is feeble and needed every crutch he could grab, while Mr. Trump would roll into the exam after an all-night party and ace the thing. As it turned out, he was right, at least in the funhouse mirror of this particular debate.
Mr. Trump lives, perpetually, in a world of childlike hyperbole, zooming around in a cape made out of one of his mother’s bath towels, bellowing about how everything was the greatest when he was president – so amazing, the best you’ve ever seen – and now it’s all a disaster under the Biden administration.
Vladimir Putin would never have tried his tricks if Mr. Trump was at the helm – and “Every time Zelensky comes in this country he walks away with $60-billion, he’s the greatest salesman ever” – but Mr. Trump will have that mess sorted out before he even begins his second term. He fixed COVID, he personally wet-nursed the greatest economy America has ever known and everyone everywhere wanted the fall of Roe v. Wade, which he engineered.
Mr. Trump lied so freely, shamelessly and formlessly that fact-checking him would be more stupid than futile, like slapping a parking ticket on a hurricane. CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash didn’t even try; the closest they came to pushing him to answer the questions he ignored was to note primly how many seconds he had left in his allotted time and ask if he wanted to try again.
So there are your choices, America, you shining bastion of democracy. A man who sees you as such easy marks he’s not even trying with his lies anymore, and another who appears so dwindled and incapacitated that you wonder who’s showing him any of the decency or empathy behind the scenes that have always been the hallmark of who he is as a public figure.
You can tell yourself as many times as you want that it’s just a flesh wound, no one can even notice it, comb your hair a certain way and it’s fine.
On Thursday, there was no ignoring the manifestly unfit meal tickets who had been hoisted onto that debate stage, or the great, oily machine that decided to make them inevitable.
It was brutal to watch, but no one should look away.