The first presidential debate lasted 90 minutes, but President Joe Biden had lost it within 10 minutes. He stumbled immediately, lost his train of thought, and fell silent. It was painful to watch and obvious that no matter how much preparation he had done, he was utterly incapable of stringing sentences together and making a coherent argument.
It allowed former President Donald Trump to deliver a knockout punch within just 15 minutes of the debate beginning. After listening to Biden give a rambling answer on illegal immigration in which the president promised a “total ban” on something, Trump was given an opportunity to respond and simply said, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows either.”
It was honest. It was true. Everyone watching the debate could tell Biden was at sea. And Trump’s coup de grace was cold blooded. That one moment captured the 90 minutes of torture America and its voters were put through Thursday night. We watched an incumbent president who was what special counsel Robert Hur said he was, an elderly man with a poor memory. He was incapable of serious participation on the biggest stage in politics.
Trump was far from perfect. He delivered nonsensical answers on deficits and entitlements and needlessly attacked Biden’s son Hunter. He is a flawed candidate. Voters deserve better choices than these two men. But for all Trump’s faults, he was clearly the more competent man onstage and it wasn’t even close. Not that Biden set a high bar.
Biden was a frail old man coughing and getting almost everything wrong. He claimed he is the “only president of the 20th century” who had no American troops die on his watch. This must have shocked the families of the 13 American service members killed during Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and of the three service members killed in Jordan just this January.
Biden was incoherent on abortion, an issue Democrats feel they can use to beat Trump. The one issue on which he tried, repeatedly, to fact-check Trump was extremely poorly chosen. He repeated the false claim that Trump called white supremacists “very fine people,” which had just been exposed yet again by fact checkers only days before the debate. Biden’s answers on fiscal deficits and entitlements were as evasive as Trump’s. He even botched his closing statement, pausing, mumbling, and stumbling through the last two minutes.
The performance was massively worse than Democrats could have feared, and it exposed as a pack of lies all those statements that Biden is sharp as a tack and on top of the issues. The Democratic Party now faces a moment of truth and an appalling prospect. It has a nominee chosen by popular primary votes all over the country who has been exposed on prime-time television as utterly unfit for the job. They are panicking and scambling to decide what to do. They fear Biden will drag them to a huge defeat all down the ballot.
They will have to decide whether to press Biden insistently to step aside. It is very late in the election to do that. While they are deciding how to proceed, they should reflect on all of the untruths they have told about their figurehead for the past year or more. They have misled their country, and pulled their party into a trap.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Many Democrats are calling for Biden to step aside. Andrew Yang, who shared a debate stage with Biden in 2020, is one of them, New York Times and cable pundits are following suit.
If Biden is convinced to bow out, the country will be better for it. It would mean a painful convention this August in Chicago, but removing Biden from the ballot and choosing a younger, more competent candidate would at least give voters a real choice this November.