After That Fiasco, Biden Should Refuse to Debate Trump
Again
The
president was petulant and puerile, so what is the point?
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 30, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
I wasn’t in the crowd of people who
believed Joe Biden shouldn’t deign to debate President Trump, but put me in the
crowd that believes he shouldn’t debate him again. Not after Tuesday night’s
horror show: a disgrace to the format, an insult to the country, a nearly
pointless 90 minutes.
And, I should add, a degradation of the
presidency itself, which Trump had degraded so thoroughly already. He put on a
performance so contemptuous, so puerile, so dishonest and so across-the-board
repellent that the moderator, Chris Wallace, morphed into some amalgam of
elementary-school principal, child psychologist, traffic cop and roadkill.
No matter how Wallace pleaded with
Trump or admonished him, he couldn’t make him behave. But then why should
Wallace have an experience any different from that of Trump’s chiefs of staff,
of all the other former administration officials who have fled for the hills,
of the Republican lawmakers who just threw up their hands and threw away any
scruples they had? Trump runs roughshod over everyone and everything, and on
Tuesday night in Cleveland he ran roughshod over the idea that two presidential
candidates presenting rival visions for America should do so with at least a
small measure of dignity and an iota of decorum.
Almost from the
start, he talked over Biden, taunting him, demeaning him, trying to provoke
him. He interrupted him and interrupted him and then interrupted him some more,
all the while complaining that he, Trump, ever the martyr, was being
persecuted once again.
“Mr. President, I’m the moderator of
this debate, and I would like you to let me ask my question,” Wallace said
early on, trying in vain to contain one of Trump’s tantrums and wrestle him
into submission. I’d seen debate moderators get perturbed. Wallace bordered on
plangent.
“I guess I’m debating you, not him, but
that’s OK,” Trump shot back. “I’m not surprised.” Of course not. To be Trump is
to be accustomed to an unjust world unimpressed with your majesty.
He plumbed uncharted
presidential-debate depths of nastiness. When Biden, objecting to Trump’s
reported dismissal of people who serve in the military as “losers,” brought up
his son Beau’s tour of duty in Iraq, Trump brought up the past cocaine use of
Biden’s other son, Hunter. And looked impressed and delighted with himself for
doing so.
When Trump was
challenged on holding huge rallies where supporters pressed tight together, the
coronavirus be damned, he said that Biden would do likewise if he could just
get anyone to show up.
When Biden said that Trump needed to
get “smarter” about the pandemic, Trump erupted, a Vesuvius of petulance and
pettiness. “Did you use the word smart?” he asked. “Don’t ever use the word
smart with me. Don’t ever use that word. Because you know what? There’s nothing
smart about you, Joe.” His voice was so thick with unwarranted condescension
that it made my skin crawl.
When Biden noted that under Trump’s
watch, our country became the world leader in recorded deaths related to
Covid-19, with more than 200,000 Americans gone, Trump’s retort was a claim so
hyperbolic that I didn’t know whether to laugh at its inanity or cry over its
insanity. He said that if Biden had been president, two million people would
have died.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that Trump
was breathtaking, and I may even be paying him something of a compliment,
because it takes a peerless combination of audacity and mendacity to pull off
some of what he pulled off.
On taxes, for example: He turned the
revelation that he had paid only $750 in federal income taxes for each of two
recent years into an indictment of Biden, as a former senator and vice
president, for creating so many tax loopholes.
On federal judges: His boast of
appointing scores and scores of them segued into a rebuke of President Barack
Obama and Biden for leaving behind so many vacancies, as if they’d simply
forgotten about them. Not exactly. Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s Republican
majority leader, blocked the Obama administration from filling many of them,
and then, after Trump was inaugurated, abetted him.
On the integrity of the upcoming vote
count: He pivoted from Wallace’s question about whether he would refrain from
declaring victory “until the election has been independently certified” into a
fresh exhortation that his supporters serve as poll watchers, looking out for
sketchy activity. He’s going to get people hurt. I mean, on top of all the
people he has hurt already.
Responding to this
pile of bile, Biden was hardly a choir boy. “You’re the worst president America
has ever had,” he said at one point. He repeatedly called Trump a liar and
several times called him “this clown.”
“Will you shut up, man?” Biden said to
him. “This is so unpresidential."
But Biden was right: Trump wouldn’t
shut up, and wasn’t remotely presidential, and to the extent that Biden
occasionally flung mud of his own, well, when you’re dragged into the pigsty,
you have no other choice.
Mostly, though, Biden shook his head as
Trump ranted and raged. He smiled dismissively. He looked at Wallace or at the
camera or anywhere but at Trump, his lack of eye contact a suggestion that some
nonsense — and some nonsense purveyors — are best ignored. His obvious strategy
was to treat Trump as part spectacle, part joke, all embarrassment. Which is
precisely how Trump deserved to be treated.
Who won and who lost? I know I’m
supposed to make something of a determination along those lines, but that’s not
how this debate went down. Trump talked more and faster and louder, which was
clearly his strategy: Be so
damned vivid that Biden would look even paler than usual.
In this Trump was successful. He had
more fire — but dangerously, even dementedly, so. He never wore Biden down, but
at moments he wore Biden out: Listening to Biden’s sentences peter out could be
like hearing the air seep from a tire.
But here’s the deal, as Biden would
say: Only one man on that stage persuasively communicated that he has the interests
of the American people at heart. Only one man on that stage seemed at all
interested in maintaining a tether to the truth. Only one man demonstrated any
respect for Wallace or for the process. Only one man would be bearable for the
next four years.
I needn’t spell out who that man is.
But I have a message
for him, and I’m serious: Don’t do this again. You showed your willingness. You
showed up. But another of these fiascos is beneath you. I’d add that it’s
beneath America, if there’s even such a thing anymore.
