“Joe you did such a great job!” an enthusiastic US First Lady Jill Biden told her husband as they spoke to a watch party of their supporters in Atlanta after the first presidential debate on Thursday night ahead of the November 5 American elections.
“You answered all the questions. You knew all the facts,” she said, holding a microphone and looking at her husband. Then she turned to the crowd and attacked his rival, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“Let me ask the crowd: What did Trump do? Lied!” she exclaimed.
“In the days ahead, they are going to be out there fact-checking all of the things he said. I can’t think of one thing he said that was true. I am not being facetious.”
Pundits and the media didn’t wait for days. Major news outlets released information showing that when it came to factual information, President Joe Biden far outstripped Trump.
Biden did incorrectly state that no American soldiers had died overseas on his watch, but his errors tended to fall more into the realm of exaggeration rather than outright falsehoods.
Trump's tall tales
CNN listed at least 30 falsehoods Trump uttered during the debate, including those involving his own record when he served as president from 2017-2020, and his repetition of the 2020 election fraud allegations.
Some of those falsehoods involved the Middle East as Trump argued that during his presidency, there were no terror attacks and that he had prevented Iran from funding its proxy groups in those years.
It could be argued that truth should be a critical standard for politicians seeking the White House, given that it could be considered one of the elementary pillars of faith that the public places in its leadership.
Within that paradigm, Biden should have been a hands-down winner of the debate. Who cares how Biden says it – what he says should be what matters.
Yet a flash poll done by CNN after the debate showed exactly the opposite, with 67% stating that Trump outdid Biden, as media pundits immediately declared him the winner.
Trump has historically been attacked for issuing falsehoods in his public speeches, which often rely on a populist simplistic oratory style that highlights his own achievement and the failure of others.
It’s a style that has played well with his supporters and which he utilized to his advantage during the debate.
Is Biden too old for the presidency?
Biden’s supporters, however, entered the debate more concerned about the president’s competence than his policies, and his performance only heightened rather than lessened those fears.
The Daily Show host Jon Stewart joked that Trump’s expectations were that he “not end democracy” and “not look like a bully,” while Biden couldn’t “have a senior moment” or “have verbal stumble.”
Then he proceeded to show the moments where Biden did indeed stumble, sounding incoherent and confused, such as when he spoke about tax cuts and the health care system.
“Making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the... with the COVID, excuse me, with um, dealing with everything we have to with, uh …Look. If we finally beat Medicare.”
Trump at one point noted, “I don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, but I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
At 78, Trump is only three years younger than Biden, but he managed to project vitality and quickness, while the president seemed at times to project confusion and slowness. There were moments in which Biden issued strong statements, including against January 6 and the far-Right Charlottesville rally.
He recalled that Trump had been accused of saying that Hitler had done some good things and stressed that 40 out of 44 of Trump’s “top cabinet officers refused to endorse him.”
But periodic strong showings were not enough to overcome his moments of weakness, giving a tailwind to Trump’s statement that Biden is “not equipped to be president – you know it and I know it.”
The New York Post went so far as to say that, “We’ve witnessed the end of Biden’s presidency.”
Democratic analyst and author Anthony Kapel Von Jones, who worked with both Biden and former president Barack Obama, told CNN: “that was painful. I love Joe Biden. I worked for Joe Biden. He did not do well at all.”
He put forward an analysis of the “old man versus the con man” explaining that Biden “had a test to meet tonight to restore the confidence of the country and the base, and he failed to do that.”
“There are a lot of people who will want him to consider taking a different course,” he said.
Columnist Tom Friedman, who described himself as a friend of Biden, immediately penned an opinion piece in The New York Times calling on him to step down amid reports that the president’s advisers were panicking and the party was seeking other candidates.
If the debate set off domestic alarm bells in the Democratic Party, then it also did so among the international community, as the fate of global crises often hinges on who sits in the White House. That is particularly true for the Russian-Ukrainian and the Israeli-Hamas conflicts.
For Trump supporters, the debate was a victory that persuades them that the Republican candidate will win the election.
For Democrats, it unveiled the depth of the rocky uphill battle they will have to fight to retain the White House.
For skeptics in the middle, it left them pondering the question of how, in such a critical moment in world events, the US was left with a choice between a populist challenger with an uncertain commitment to democracy versus a sitting president who seemed too old for the job.
Historically, a presidential debate has often boiled down to small details that help seal the fate of the presidency and, in a more abstract way, the world. The person who sits in the White House impacts the domestic and global agendas.
This unusual race, which is less about policy and more about competence on both sides of the aisle, comes at a time when the world appears to be careening toward another global war.
The stakes of the moment were highlighted by the candidates themselves. Trump reminded the audience that “We’re closer to World War III than anyone can imagine,” with Biden retorting “You want World War III? Then let him [Trump] win.”
Two main conflicts sit center stage: the Russian-Ukrainian war and Israel’s war with Hamas and Hezbollah. The latter is a proxy conflict for Israel’s war with Iran, which saw its first direct skirmish two months ago with a mass, but largely thwarted, Iranian missile attack on Israel.
It’s expected that Trump’s policies for both those conflicts would upend those of the Biden administration and send them hurtling on a different course. In Ukraine’s case, it could expect less support; in Israel’s case, it is hoped that Trump would back a more vigorous anti-Hamas approach.
But irrespective of whether that shift is greeted with panic or applause, there is still a long six months until either Trump or Biden is sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2025.
A first-term president, running for a second term, always has to struggle to fulfill his agenda in that last half-year loop, particularly as the option of an administration shift seems palpably real, as it does in this case, post-debate.
Raising the issue of Biden’s competence is clearly good for Republicans. It’s also good for Democrats, who might feel impelled to replace the incumbent’s candidacy, an unusual move, but something that is doable at this stage.
It has, however, the unfortunate consequence of projecting US weakness globally at a time when the White House is a leading policy voice in both the Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.
If Biden is not fit to debate Trump or to remain in the White House, then how can he set policy for two wars? Unless competency is reestablished fairly soon, it places a question mark next to every decision he makes from here on in.
That is bad news for Europe and bad news for the Middle East.