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September 30, 2020

Last night there was a presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It was a real circus because Trump refused to follow the rules and ranted and raved like an unmedicated lunatic. Thanks to his chaotic rampage, the conversation was hard to follow. Very few issues were debated in a way that happens in The West Wing. And the second it was over, everyone on television proclaimed it a mess. "Who was the winner? No one," was a regular refrain. "The only thing I know is America lost," I heard someone say on Fox. This morning, several newspapers led coverage with a bit of both-siderism.

This is nonsense. It was clear in the debate that there was a winner, and that winner's name is Joe Biden. Donald Trump did what Donald Trump does: He bullied and hectored and rambled and ceaselessly interrupted. Liberals don't trust their own senses sometimes: There is a nagging suspicion that although we see a volcano erupting and feel the heat on our face as the lava flows toward us, it might not "play that way" to the other villagers around this mountain. Too many times before, we think, this volcano erupted but our screams were dismissed. And so everyone watched last night and many people thought "no one won." But that's not true, and it was immediately born out by polls that showed Trump had disappointed even his supporters and that Biden gained in all demographics on all issues. 

People are very bad at guessing what other people think when they stop thinking they're like other people. Don't go too far with it. Don't think everyone has your exact taste or ideology, but you can assume other people also don't like lava. There are some who do like lava. Pyromaniacs and other lava-fetishists. But they're not a majority. Far from it.

And so Trump, the lava, he flows, as he does, and people panic that everyone will jump into the lava, but Trump has never been popular. His most popular is when he's shut his mouth and let people forget that he is his irrepressible self.

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times observed last night that Trump's rambling was reminiscent of his daily coronavirus briefings in the spring. Absolutely! I had flashbacks to those briefings. But the interesting thing about them is they were a disaster for Trump politically. People do not like his ranting. They do not like it on a train, they do like it in the rain. Some people do! Some people go to the rallies and love it! But not many. And not enough to save him.

I can't stop thinking about the conventional wisdom that the debate was a "disaster." I don't think that's true. Both candidates showed up and were exactly who they are. They didn't paper themselves over in rehearsed speeches. They were there for the world to see. Is that not more informative than if Trump had taken, say, Ritalin and, for the first time in his life, kept himself in control? What would that say about the man who'd be president for four more years? Not much. There are people who watched and think "This Trump guy is for me!" And those voters should vote for him. There are also people, I suspect in far greater numbers, who did not feel that way, but instead felt, as one focus group participant told Frank Luntz, that Trump acted like "a crackhead."

"But polls showed Hillary won the debates against Trump too, and she still lost!" This is true! If James Comey sends a letter opening an investigation into Joe Biden, all bets will be off. 

That doesn't mean Biden won the election last night. Of course it doesn't. Time moves forward and things happen and they change the course of everything. Last night doesn't mean everyone should pop champagne and forget to vote. Nothing will or could mean that, but it does mean Biden won the debate and Trump fell further behind, squandering one of his final opportunities for a comeback. More opportunities will come, but never again as many as there were before those two walked onstage last night and showed us exactly who they are.

—Ben Dreyfuss

Algonquin Books
Top Story
 
Top Story

At the Debate, Biden and Trump Showed America Who They Really Are. That’s a Win for Biden.

An ugly debate can be a public service.

BY DAVID CORN

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The Proud Boys loved Trump's debate response telling them to "stand by"

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Trump caused chaos at the debate. Newspapers blamed both sides.

BY JEREMY SCHULMAN

Donald Trump took credit for making insulin "so cheap it's like water." Tell that to people paying for it.

BY TIM MURPHY

The worst moments in the worst presidential debate? When they talked about race.

BY NATHALIE BAPTISTE

Algonquin Books
The Mother Jones Podcast
 
Special Feature

The Debate Gave Americans the Starkest Choice Yet. That’s a Good Thing.

“Trump revealing Trump”: His trashy performance helped prove Biden’s point.

BY MOLLY SCHWARTZ

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SOME GOOD NEWS, FOR ONCE

Our Coverage of the Debate? Good. The Debate…Well, Read Our Coverage.

Still spinning, unsure what to make of last night’s debate?

Amid the bad (I mean really bad) crap that spun out of it, a sliver of a silver lining—according to our own David Corn—is that the debate “provided voters accurate impressions of these two men.” Trump was “full of lies and bluster.” Biden “stumbled through some answers” but came across as “competent.” You can read Corn’s full analysis here.

Throughout the evening, Mother Jones reporters provided the analysis and commentary necessary to make sense of…whatever that was. Ali Breland peeked into the internet conversation by the Proud Boys, who celebrated Trump’s order to “stand by.” Breland wrote:

In their publicly viewable Telegram channels, the Proud Boys immediately responded to Trump’s words with an eruption of praise. “Stand by!!! PROUD BOYS ARE HEROES!!!” one member of a large channel wrote. “They begged him to stab us in the back and he didn’t,” another wrote in a different channel.

Nathalie Baptiste elucidated the exhausting experience of watching older white men discuss race while using “law and order” as a shorthand to call for the entrenchment and reinforcement of racial hierarchies. Kara Voght pointed out that, yes, Trump is going after your health care. Jeremy Schulman caught the false both-siderism of newspaper headlines this morning. And Rebecca Leber unpacked the surprisingly substantive climate change discussion.

Big picture? It’s this point from our editor-in-chief, Clara Jeffery: Trump wants to delegitimize everything.

—Jacob Rosenberg

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