Thursday night’s debate was a microcosm of where we are. It told you everything you need about the two presumptive nominees as human beings, everything about the two political parties they represent, everything about the media that both provided and described the event, and everything about America in 2024. On stage were one man who derives sick pleasure from breaking things, one man who tries to make everything better, and a network that invited them both into a glass house and handed them mallets. Then, after 90 minutes of watching the first man send shards in all directions, we got to listen to everyone complain that the second man didn’t swing his mallet with sufficient vigor. If you give a minute to Donald Trump, he will use it to lie. If you give a minute to President Joe Biden, he will use it to try and correct the lie—and answer the original question that Trump ignored. If it seems like Trump has the easier task, you’re right. If you think Biden should do something else, you’re on the wrong team. In a YouGov survey published on Wednesday, Americans said they trusted Joe Biden more than Donald Trump to babysit their kids. They think Biden would be a more thoughtful houseguest. That he would give better advice on parenting and relationships. And they think, by a large margin, that Biden would be more willing to return a lost wallet. That’s who they are: the guy who would seek you out if he found your wallet on the street, and the man who would pocket the cash and move on. That, in a nutshell, is the choice America faces. Before Trump walked onto the debate stage Thursday evening, CNN had already explained that they would do no fact-checking. Not because this was impossible—after all, NPR teamed up with PolitiFact and ran real-time fact-checking right down to the candidates’ respective golf handicaps—but because … because. Sorry, it’s impossible to think of any good reason that CNN didn’t choose to do this. It took Trump about one second to begin exploiting this by simply lying. It took less than five minutes for him to discover that CNN would also not attempt to make him answer the question asked. Better still, they would respond to anything he said—anything—with “Thank you, President Trump.” This was Trump’s wet dream. If Jake Tapper had called him “sir” at some point, Trump would have needed new pants. Biden made the huge mistake of trying to answer the questions. From the very first moment, he was running a hundred miles an hour, trying to fit in an evening’s worth of policy discussions into the one- or two-minute space when his light was green. And when Trump started piling on lies, Biden tried to correct Trump and answer the questions. On multiple occasions, Biden tried to deal with all the lies Trump had just spat out, then jump to a completely different topic—the actual topic of the question—and then deal with that as well. All in one or two minutes. That’s who they are. Biden is the guy who helps out a stranger. Trump is the guy who scams him. Biden returns that lost wallet. Trump steals it. Trump didn’t just drive the nation into a ditch during his administration, he left behind a devastated economy, thousands of Americans dying each week from a pandemic he mishandled, and international alliances in shambles. Biden has spent every moment since his inauguration rebuilding that economy, mending those alliances, and—oh yeah—saving those lives. If you think that Biden should be more willing to let Trump’s lies slip past, let the questions go unanswered, and concentrate instead on the optics, you are always, always going to be disappointed. The trouble is, pundits watched an hour of a convicted felon lying his ass off—and not just small lies, not just stories or fibs or misstatements. If there was anything to admire about Trump’s performance on Thursday evening, it was the sheer scale of his lies: Democrats want to abort babies after they are born, Nancy Pelosi took full responsibility for Jan. 6. These are the King Kong and Godzilla of lies. Oh, excuse me. I did that wrong. Democrats want to abort babies after they are born. “Thank you, President Trump.” Nancy Pelosi took full responsibility for Jan. 6. “Thank you, President Trump.” There. That’s the CNN way. Pundits—even some supposed Democratic pundits—are admiring the massive, nonchalant lying of a convicted criminal while clutching their pearls over Biden trying to set things right, and that tells you everything about them. If the Democratic Party fails to dust itself off, stand in front of the cameras, defend Biden, and explain how a lying felon is worse than laryngitis and some verbal stumbles, then it will say everything about us.
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