“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence—and I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
That line from former President Donald Trump on Thursday night pretty much sums up the first—and who knows, maybe the only—2024 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden.
I wrote not long ago that corporate media gaslighting about Biden’s vigor wouldn’t work because the American people can plainly see that Biden is in steep mental and physical health decline.
That was on full display for all to see during the 90-minute, CNN-hosted debate Thursday night as an often barely audible Biden coughed, looked dazed, couldn’t finish sentences, muttered incoherently, and frequently lost his train of thought in what was almost certainly the worst presidential debate performance in the history of television.
You don’t have to be a policy wonk or a constitutional scholar to see that the president isn’t well, and no amount of sophistry is going to change what the public can now see on full display.
Well, OK, the Biden campaign and media allies did try to throw up one Hail Mary during the early stages of the debate.
The excuse was that Biden was suffering from a “cold.”
It’s such a pathetic explanation for what we saw I don’t think even the most sycophantic, Pravda-esque media figures are going to make that part of their future messaging.
Even notorious narrative fabricator Ben Rhodes gave in to reality.
A cold might give you a scratchy voice, but it doesn’t make you sound or look like that. Biden had a week without public appearances to prepare for this debate, and this is apparently the best he could do.
This part wasn’t shown on live TV, but here’s what Biden looked like walking off the CNN set.
Any suggestion that the president’s obvious signs of decline are based on “misinformation” or what White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre calls “cheap fakes” has been thoroughly and unarguably debunked.
So, what of the debate itself? You can read The Daily Signal’s fact check here.
CNN’s moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, weren’t terrible, even if clearly biased. They frequently cut off Biden when he began to ramble to keep him focused and on message, and often followed up with questions for Trump to keep him from responding.
That really didn’t matter very much here. Sure, there were plenty of important issues that were discussed—from the open-border catastrophe to inflation to the erosion of global stability, even to the shambolic exit from Afghanistan.
That’s not what people will remember from this debate. It often felt like just a CNN interview of Trump, rather than a confrontation between the two men supposedly in the arena.
Biden’s performance was so catastrophic that while the debate was still going on, The New York Times and Politico were publishing pieces about Democrats panicking.
If you stayed tuned for the CNN commentary after the debate ended—which was mostly just a bunch of typical CNN blather about Trump being a bad, orange man—pretty much the entire panel called for Biden to be replaced at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket. (On MSNBC, it was much the same.)
Is that likely to happen? Who knows? It would be unprecedented to have a presidential nominee booted from the ticket so late in the game, but we live in strange times.
What I do know is that it’s almost impossible to imagine Biden making it for another four years in office, let alone four months or so to November.
And so, given Biden’s performance, there are a lot of questions for the American people to chew on.
There’s no question now that the American people at least deserve to hear the audio of Biden’s interviews with special counsel Robert Hur that Attorney General Merrick Garland insists on withholding even under the threat of congressional censure.
If Biden is this bad in public, who exactly is running the show in the White House? Put another way: Who is the puppet master for the sock puppet?
There have been accusations that former President Barack Obama is running a sort of shadow presidency from his home in Washington. That certainly seems plausible.
Are there people in the White House who want to keep Biden there because he’s easily manipulated and unable to make important decisions now? Is Biden really still calling all the shots?
If so, then God help us.
There are even questions about what to do with a president who is no longer able to carry out the duties of his office.
And it’s not just the American people who saw Biden’s condition during the debate. Our enemies and rivals around the globe saw it, too.
In a dangerous world—one of instant communication and rapidly moving events—we can’t afford to have a president who seems completely out of it when he has a “cold.”
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said on X that we should start thinking about the 25th Amendment, a constitutional mechanism to replace a president who is incapacitated.
One way or another, after tonight, maybe we should be thinking less about Biden and more about who is going to replace him.
