From secondhand reports (see below), the surprises in the debate last night were that Biden fought back and Chris Wallace totally lost control.
P.S.: They need to give the moderator a kill switch.
I know there were people last night watching the debate and then live-tweeting their responses — like people in the Ninth Circle of Hell who don’t think their circumstances are bad enough and try to dig a Tenth Circle with their bleeding raw fingers.
Alan Jacobs. If you’re only interested in highly literarate analysis, you can stop now. None of the other comments topped Ayjay’s in the category.
Considering what he was up against, Biden did fine. No one could have come away from Trump’s machine-gun barrage of bile anything other than diminished. How can one respond to a man who barks one lie after another while refusing to keep his pestilential maw shut for a mere two minutes so his opponent can speak? Try to respond to one lie and he lets loose another four and drowns you out with them before you’re done.
But the Trump campaign came into the debate pushing the line that Biden is a senile old man. He more than demonstrated that isn’t true, though much of the time Biden did give off the air of someone understandably overwhelmed by an onslaught of verbal violence. Most of all, Biden came off like an ordinary politician, citing policies and data and hitting the president over his record while occasionally trying to raise his own rhetoric to the lofty heights traditionally favored by men and women in public life, seeking the honor of winning its highest office.
Trump was something else entirely — some kind of post-truth, street-fighting, full-spectrum bulls**t artist. Say anything. Dominate constantly. Display no warmth. No compassion. No empathy. Just fight, fight, fight. Kick everyone’s ass, including that of the moderator, Chris Wallace, who repeatedly tried and usually failed to impose order on the chaos.
… Down the path Trump has opened up in our politics lies moral darkness and national decline. We will either begin to right ourselves and reverse course five weeks from now by repudiating him and everything he stands for — or the darkness and decline will deepen.
Damon Linker, Trump pummels Biden — and America
On Tuesday night the American people, or at least those unlucky millions who were not watching the Yankees-Indians game on ESPN instead, were subjected to an hour and a half of mindless shouting from two hapless sad-looking old men who looked as if they would rather be anywhere else but that auditorium in Ohio. President Trump also spoke.
… no actual transcription could possibly do justice to these 96 minutes of shouts, insults, interruptions, stray thoughts, and loose babble. It was like witnessing an argument about an arcane procedural rule during a senior bingo night at a nursing home in purgatory. It was vicious, tasteless, witless, and (surprisingly, alas) painfully unfunny.
Matthew Walther, The worst presidential debate of all time
Many people will criticize how the moderator, Chris Wallace, managed the debate, and surely he could have done better. But really, nothing short of a shock collar around Trump’s neck would have disciplined the man who is, after all, the president of the United States. A president who does not respect the tax laws, does not respect the FBI, is surely not going to be constrained by a debate moderator. It was pandemonium. But it was revealing pandemonium. Who and what Trump is could not have been more vividly displayed in all the psychological reality. Debate one was not Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, or red versus blue. It was zookeepers versus poop-throwing primates.
Biden may be faded from what he was: perhaps less crisp, less sharp, less fast. But when Biden spoke, he spoke to and about America. Trump spoke only about his wounded ego. Biden communicated: I care about you. Trump communicated: I hate everybody. Biden succeeded in putting his most important messages on record: your health care, your job, your right to equal respect, regardless of race or creed—all against Trump’s disregard and disrespect. Trump might have imagined that he projected himself as strong. The whole world witnessed instead the destructive rage of a bully confronting impending defeat. Trump disgraced the presidency on that stage. He might just have delivered the self-incapacitating wound that pushes the country toward self-salvation.
David From, Trump’s Theory of the Debate Was All Wrong – The Atlantic
“Watching that debate,” one Democratic strategist told us after, “was like watching the Angel of Death unfurl its glorious infinitely black wings before me, my eyes being taken ever deeper into the absolute void where no color can exist, and seeing in that moment nothing but death and the end of all things shouted at me through the guttural Queens accent of a madman.”
The Morning Dispatch: One Bad Debate – The Morning Dispatch
I think Hunter Biden’s capitalizing on his father’s power for personal gain is fair game, but for pity’s sake, don’t trash a man’s son for his brokenness with substance abuse. If they weren’t politicians, but two ordinary guys in a bar, I would have loved to have seen Joe Biden walk over and cold-cock Trump for trashing his boy.
I can’t believe I wrote that line about a presidential debate. This is what Trump, the chaos agent, brings to our politics.
Rod Dreher, The Debate Disaster | The American Conservative
How old am I? I’m old enough to remember Al Gore’s boorish debate stunt, and Dubya’s effortless response.
Those were the good old days of mannerliness.
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Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
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You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.
W.H. Auden
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