Will Biden survive his debate implosion?

The Democrats wanted and needed a compelling performance from Joe Biden last night: a rebuttal to the concerns about his age and ability. Instead, his performance was disastrous. His voice was hoarse, he rambled, frequently lost his chain of thought and sometimes couldn’t even get to the end of his sentences. Donald Trump was composed (not usual for him) and was as sharp as Biden was weak. When Trump went into his traditional hyperbole, Biden was unable to answer. It was perhaps the worst performance from any Democratic candidate in the television age and has led to panicked discussion about ditching him.

The (televised) scenes in the spin room afterwards said it all: huge queues for reporters waiting for people able to say that Biden had done well but no one keen to do so. The best Democrats have been able to say is that Biden had a cold; that he started slow but warmed up. True, to an extent, but his warmed-up was still disastrously cold. Trump is not hard to outclass. But Biden ended up ribbing him for his weight and at one point bizarrely challenged him to a golf match. So Trump ended up being the one saying: ‘let’s not act like children’. Their positions had reversed. Biden incinerated every obvious advantage.

For me, one exchange summed up the evening: when Biden was crashing mid-sentence, saying he’d make sure that ‘we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to deal with. The Covid. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with… what if we finally beat. Medicare.’ No one had a clue what he meant. Recognising this gift, Trump replied: ‘He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death. He destroyed Medicare’. The split-screen format means facial expressions matter – and Biden often seemed to freeze, as he has recently done so often, when Trump was his deft, loquacious self. ‘I don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,’ Trump said at one point. ‘I don’t think he knows what he said, either.’

JUST IN: Trump seizes the moment after Biden completely froze on stage.

Biden: "What I've been able to do with the, with, with, with the covid, excuse me. With dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if we finally beat Medicare."

Trump: "You beat Medicare to de*th."… pic.twitter.com/Ks8LWw3LJq

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 28, 2024

Trump chastised Biden for backing Ukraine, repeating his lie that Zelensky leaves with $60 billion every time he comes to the US. Biden could have jumped in then and pointed out how emboldened Putin would be if Trump lets him trample Ukraine – but his answer was weak, unmemorable. Biden (wrongly) said no US troops had died under his watch. But Trump had a decent point about Biden’s failure of deterrence: ‘the whole world is blowing up because of him.’ Biden had nothing to say in response. Biden did try to go on the offensive, accusing Trump of ‘having sex with a porn star while your wife was pregnant’ and having ‘the morals of an alley cat’. But Trump didn’t get rattled, and replied that the public ‘know it’s a scam’. Trump was strong on his pre-Covid economic performance: ‘I gave you the largest tax cut in history… a country where the stock market was higher than pre-Covid’. Biden tried to blame Trump for the inflation, rather than his borrow-and-spend policies. 

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But it wasn’t really what was said but how it was said. Trump, 78, looked as vigorous and as watchable as he was in the 2016 debates. But this time, Trump looked presidential next to the mumbling Biden, 81, who looks a different man to four years ago. Few voters will have really been following his recent deterioration and will have tuned in to the horror for the first time last night.

American television news now is full of quotes from anonymous Democrats in a panic saying that Biden was awful and needs to be pulled as a candidate. Some are going on the record. ‘Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight and he didn’t do it,’ said Claire McCaskill, a former Democrat senator. ‘He had one thing he had to accomplish, and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age. And he failed at that.’ She said her phone was ‘blowing up’ with Democrats saying that Biden needs to stand down.

So the debate after the debate is not about what was said last night. It’s about what the Democrats do now. How their fundraising will be hit by last night’s calamity. And their options: or lack thereof. Kamala Harris, the vice president, is more unpopular than her boss. The best that is being said of Biden is not that he did well last night, but that it might be an aberration. ‘You don’t turn your back because of one performance,’ said Gavin Newsom, the (Democratic) governor of California. ‘What kind of party does that?’

The answer is simple: a party that wants to win. The Democratic convention takes place in Chicago in August. This is their chance to decide whether they pick a new candidate (perhaps Newsom) or send into a battle an octogenarian who has just exposed himself as fatally unfit for the fight. Biden is the one who called for this early-stage debate, knowing he was losing. Debates have the power to set the narrative, he reasoned. Well, the narrative is certainly set now. Trump was heading for the White House before this debate. He may well now be heading for a landslide after it.

From now on, the narrative will be that the Democrats have a puppet in the White House and one who will struggle to get through the next six remaining months of his presidency let alone four years of a second term. The next presidential debate is not due until 10 September, so Biden will not get a second chance to define the race. He is visibly sinking and the only question is whether the Democrats decide to sink with him.

Listen to Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Sarah Elliott from the Legatum Institute discuss the presidential debate: