Who was the real loser in the Biden-Trump debate?

The stage was set for incumbent US President Joe Biden to assure his nation that he was good to go for another four years in the White House. More than POTUS, the two anchors of the first-ever ‘Presidential Debate’ conducted before the two candidates have even received the formal approval of their respective parties, were determined to cut him plenty of slack as he faced off with his mercurial challenger, former President Donald Trump. But it backfired. Spectacularly.

So now the US media has turned on a dime and wants Biden to step aside! With very little time to change candidates at this stage, there will be talk of a conspiracy by political cabals to bypass the system of primaries to choose the worthiest one. Why did the Democratic Party not tell a clearly ageing politician to call it a day long before this crisis point? Why did mainstream media collaborate with that party to persist in propping up Biden despite warnings about his abilities?

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Indians are used to the term ‘godi media’ these days, indicating the willingness of the fourth estate to soft pedal those in power. But mainstream media in the US has been far more lap-doggish with Biden than they are given credit for. During this first debate the anchors repeatedly did not let Trump rebut Biden—the few times when the latter was coherent. They pretended not to see Trump about to reply and moved quickly to the next topic. The media willed Biden to win.

That could not save Biden’s bloopers, of course. In fact, if anything, he looked rather like an aging racehorse pumped up with steroids that produced short bursts of energy but then lapsed into a canter and then a total standstill. Maybe Biden does not have Parkinson’s as many in the opposing camp have been alleging, but he certainly is not all there either. Many 80-year-olds are still alert, sharp, cogent and physically fit these days. Sadly, Biden is evidently not one of them.

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The televised face-off was part of the Prop Up Biden campaign. Instead, it offered too close a look at the President. Even when he was supposedly attacking Trump—on the migrants’ issue, on veterans—he looked woefully stiff, his eyes and mouth frozen in one mode, sometimes looking like an irritable Grandpa woken up from his mid-morning snooze. If anyone could make Trump look better than he was, it was Biden with his breathy, raspy voice and fuzzy logic.

Trump is nearly four years younger than Biden, but during his term as President, the mainstream US media gleefully highlighted each time he stumbled, bumbled or fumbled, conveying he was unfit to be in that job. It worked in 2020. Ironically, the same media tried valiantly to gloss over Biden’s far more frequent stumbles, bumbles and fumbles while in office, especially during this re-election campaign, to convey that he is still fit for the job! But that just did not work in 2024.

There have been protests against ‘ageism’ and attempts to silence criticism of Biden’s clearly failing mental and physical faculties. But the US public’s opinion after this TV debate was clear: age is very much an issue. And they were not swayed by the US media’s attempts to sidestep that contentious issue with Bernie Sanders-type feints like, “Yes, age is an issue but there are also other issues that candidates must be judged on—abortion, climate change, minimum wage…”

It seems Biden had practiced hard about what he would say during the debate—he even took a week off for it, some had reported. He rattled off a bunch of sentences at top speed in the initial minutes of the debate, but then he lost the plot. Often. He started with one subject and ended with another, all in a single sentence. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump commented archly at one point, “and I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

At one point, a rambling Biden even claimed “the Border Patrol men endorsed me” which Trump later countered by saying they had actually endorsed him. That made Biden round on Trump like an incensed Mr Wilson would at Dennis the Menace, but he could not find the words for a comeback. The last word on the matter, however, was from the Border Patrol, whose union put up a succinct retort on X: “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.” QED.

Testily calling Trump a liar and harking back to his deceased son’s military record to gather sympathy sounded pathetic to anyone other than a diehard Democrat voter. That is probably why every opinion poll conducted after this debate was unanimous that Trump had won this match, although there were wide variations on the victory margin. Still, most of the media obligingly gave plenty of post-debate airtime to Biden’s defenders, including Vice President Kamala Harris.

She told sympathetic TV anchors that he had “slow start but a strong finish”, and that he spoke about all the “issues that concern the American people”. A few other Democratic party sympathisers offered similar arguments. But when that did not work, the mainstream media did an about-face. They are now calling for Biden to step aside. To save their face or Biden’s? Only the consistently anti-Biden New York Post stood vindicated, and its editorial may turn out to be prophetic.

It wrote: “We just witnessed the end of Joe Biden’s Presidency… his performance during the debate was embarrassing. Whenever CNN put him up on the split screen, he had a thousand-yard stare. He didn’t look old. He looked ancient. He looked empty…It is political malpractice to let him continue to run for re-election. It is national malpractice to let him continue…The Democratic elite are pulling a con job on the American people, and it was exposed last night.”

With elections just a little over four months away, the US media is complicit in the unedifying situation that the US public finds itself in. On the one hand it has played up the fact that one candidate is a ‘convicted felon’ (thanks to some adroit legal politicking). On the other, it was talking up a doddering old veteran of Washington DC’s discredited political labyrinth along with some motivated sections. Until now. And NOTA is an option only in Nevada in the US.

The author is a freelance writer. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.