Last night’s US presidential debate in Atlanta, Georgia, made a Bronx bar fight between two incontinent retirees look decorous.
Biden and Trump reminded me of Statler and Waldorf, the quarrelsome old folks in the front row of the Muppets balcony.
This political horror made me long for the dignity of last night’s depressing verbal confrontation between Sunak and Starmer in Nottingham. The word unedifying does not do it justice.
From the moment Biden took the stage and greeted a non-existent studio audience, it was frighteningly evident that the leader of the free world was away with the fairies.
If the president had been a racehorse at Ascot last week, the stewards would have put him out of his misery with a single shot to the temple.
Game over, Joe.
But Biden could not rise to the occasion, or even figure out where he was, writes Richard Littlejohn.
I have long believed that Biden will not run in the next election. From what I saw in the post-match analysis, the Democrats have also come to that conclusion.
He was like Tony Soprano’s Uncle Junior, stumbling around in a robe, drooling, not just pretending to be ga-ga, but clinically certifiable.
Biden was unable to string together a coherent sentence and coughed from the start like Theresa May during her disastrous inaugural speech at the Conservative conference that marked the beginning of the end of her mediocre tenure as prime minister.
Irritably, the Democratic machine tried to pretend that the reason Biden hadn’t been seen in public for more than a week was because he was suffering from a bad cold.
Earlier, we had been told that he was preparing for the debate at Camp David, the presidential residence. One wondered why the President would have to put on purdah to prepare for a few easy questions from the friendly CNN anchors, one of whom had previously described Donald Trump as “literally Hitler.”
But Biden couldn’t rise to the occasion, or even determine where he stood. His rambling answers about everything from the shameful exit from Afghanistan to the illegal immigration crisis at the US southern border were as incomprehensible as they were insulting.
Before the debate, Trump’s camp had said that Biden was being injected with performance-enhancing drugs to help him get through the night.
If you were thinking about Viagra, or even a couple of pints of Lemsip, think again. I guess it’s Imodium, to make sure I made it through the 90 minutes on CNN without another unfortunate bathroom incident.
This debate wasn’t so much a car accident as it was the multiple vehicle crash at the climax of the original Blues Brothers movie.
Biden’s toast. The dead man barely walks. But the problem for Democrats is how to get rid of him. They can’t risk replacing him with their Veep, the goofy, smiling Kamala Harris. Houston, we have a problem.
Perhaps the fact that California’s toothy governor, Gavin Newson, was busy in the press room after the debate indicates a Plan B.
Creepy Uncle Joe will get a bandit send-off at the party convention and Kamala will be taken to a side room and made an offer she can’t refuse.
Commentators on the Republican-friendly Fox News show enthusiastically discussed last night’s events as a victory for Trump, which, given Biden’s embarrassing collapse, it probably was.
The fact is, as this column has argued for the past two years, that it’s NOT JUST America that deserves better than the current clown show. Newsom should be the Democratic nominee for president against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a new generation that offers a clear choice between big-state, high-tax, progressive government, and low-tax, plundering libertarianism.
What has prevented such a confrontation is the sheer vanity of Biden and Trump, who still believe they were robbed last time.
Yes, Trump makes a lot of correct comments about taxes, about the border, about law and order, about Iran, etc., but he’s had his turn.
Postgame quarterbacks on Republican-friendly Fox News enthusiastically described last night as a victory for Trump. Which, given Biden’s chilling meltdown, it probably was.
But, honestly, Trump was kicking a cripple. It was unbearable to watch. If Basket Case Biden is Uncle Junior, then Trump looked like Phil Leotardo, Tony’s bitter New York rival from across the river.
Trump’s campaign is out for revenge, and admittedly with some justification. Biden has used the state as a weapon to declare legal war on Trump, but that hasn’t done him much good.
Bad Orange Man is ahead in the polls, where it really matters. My sister, who lives in Michigan, a key state where Republicans are in power, tells me that negotiators in her office are supporting Trump again after supporting Biden the last time.
Much of America yearns for Trump’s booming, pre-COVID-19 economy. Democrats’ obsession with Net Zero has repelled union members in “blue-collar states” like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Support for Trump is sky-high among traditional autoworkers in Detroit.
He also has a strong trend among black and Hispanic voters, putting him in first place in November.
And yet, the most important thing last night was Biden’s complete and utter implosion. But Trump did his part by turning what was supposed to be a serious exercise in representative democracy into little more than a shouting match in the mud.
Two men who should have retired to Cocoon Central long ago were forced to haggle over who had the lowest golf handicap, with no aspirations of leading the free world.
I’m sorry, but as someone who loves the US, I came away from last night’s debate thinking that America deserves better than this. The free world deserves better than this. The only winners last night were Putin, China and the ayatollahs.
What struck me as absent, in the absence of a CNN studio audience, was the audacious British grandfather Robert Blackstock, the standout actor on the Sunak/Starmer show on Wednesday night, who asked the contenders:
‘Are you two really the best we have?’
It’s the same question that America’s heartland must be asking itself today.