What Happens Now?

Recapping the atrocity exhibition.

Well, we weren’t imagining things.

I like to think that when it comes to the topic of Joe Biden’s age and viability as a candidate, I have proven myself to be sufficiently critical. More than fourteen months ago—before Biden even officially announced his re-election campaign—I wrote a piece arguing that it would be best for him to step aside. I did this despite a national environment that looked somewhere between good-to-fantastic for Democrats, despite the party’s successes in 2022 under him, despite improvements in his approval rating at the time and despite the fact that he had beaten Trump before. All else equal, I thought it was too much of a risk to nominate someone first elected to national office during the Nixon administration who a solid majority of the public regarded as incompetent. I saw the stakes as such:

If Republicans defeat Biden in 2024, his age will have been the principal reason why. It would be an especially bitter loss because the election wouldn’t have really been a verdict on or endorsement of policies or ideology. It would have been a narrow judgment on the capacity for an octogenarian first elected to public office in the early 1970s to lead a country in the 2020s—a narrow judgment that would lend what is essentially a fascist movement four years in power. And this entire angle, all of it, is only possible if Biden runs. With practically any other candidate, it will not be an issue.

This is a belief that I have held onto all of the time since. I insisted on taking the issue of his age seriously. When I made my ratings of potential Democratic candidates, I put Biden near the bottom. When his polling worsened, I took the concerns voters said they had at face value instead of blaming TikTok. I even went as far as to make an affirmative case for Kamala Harris, which was somehow possible. While I’ve been far from the only person to have made these points, I have been nothing if not consistent in making them.

And I still didn’t see what happened last night coming.

From the very moment the debates were announced, my understanding of them was that Trump had far more to lose than Biden. It was easy for me to imagine that the current president, in light of his surprisingly strong performance at the State of the Union, could outdo his image as a cadaver, changing the narrative about his age and garnering him a boost in the polls. Trump, on the other hand, faced the tough task of maintaining a new reputation as a strong and decisive leader among many voters who were skeptical of him in the past. To me, 90 minutes of Trump on stage acting like himself, coupled with Biden being at least normal, seemed to be a perfect setup for a reality check that would get some swing voters to remember why they’ve always disliked the former president.

Half of this came to pass. While he wouldn’t be quite as monumentally self-destructive as he was during the first debate in 2020, Trump was weak last night. He committed constant gaffes from the very start to the very end, from outright endorsing the end of Roe v. Wade to defending January 6th to obsessively bringing up migrants as the cause of every single problem. Had a competent Democrat been on the stage with him—someone capable of responding to his fuckups on abortion like, say, Gretchen Whitmer did on Twitter—he would have gotten his clock cleaned, just like he has gotten his clock cleaned in every single debate leading up to last night.

But Joe Biden was not a competent Democrat. He was manifestly incompetent in every possible way. He constantly stared off into space. He struggled to speak into his microphone. When he could be heard, he was hardly capable of staying on topic or stringing a sentence together. When he wasn’t doing completely inexplicable things like pivoting from a question about abortion to talk about crimes committed by immigrants on his watch, he was saying things like this:

“Making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with, the, uh, with the Covid, excuse me, with, um, dealing with, everything we had to do with, uh … look … if — we finally beat Medicare.”

(This was supposed to explain his tax plan.)

It was an unmitigated disaster. It played into the worst perceptions people have of him, made Trump look strong and lucid by comparison, and netted the Republican nominee the first-ever general election debate victory of his political career by a two-to-one margin. On the heels of a tough month for Republicans that saw Biden make his first real gains of the cycle, this catastrophic performance sent the race back to square one, allowing a newly convicted felon to somehow get the momentum back. With the integrity of not just Biden’s campaign, but his entire administration, in serious question, where, exactly, does the race go from here?

Is Biden Fucked?