Debating, Debasing: Notes on the CNN Shitshow

That was no debate for old men.

Two weeks ago, on Allison Gill’s Daily Beans tour, we were asked about the upcoming debate. I didn’t believe it would happen. I thought Trump would bail. Clearly I underestimated his hard-on for spewing unfiltered lies and doling out abuse. So I got that wrong.

Yesterday, as the showdown loomed, I worked through what tack Biden should take in the debate. He might say this, I suggested: “Good evening. I’d like to thank the debate commission, the moderators, CNN, everyone watching at home, and especially, my opponent’s parole officer, for allowing him to leave the state.”

Or this: “And I know my fellow Democrats are not happy with Judge Cannon, but if she promptly started my opponent’s criminal trial in which he’s accused of stealing our nation’s most highly guarded secrets, we may not be here tonight. Thank you, Judge.”

Or this: “I’d also like to say that it’s great to be in a place where the flags are flying right-side up.”

But when I really thought about it, I was incensed that the President, the best of my lifetime, and a kind and decent human besides, should have to share a stage with a lying criminal who tried to overthrow the government. What Biden really should have done, I wrote, was this: “Joking aside: Biden should open w/ a denunciation of Trump’s many CRIMES, announce that he will not further DEBASE THE PRESIDENCY by sharing the stage with the leader of an INSURRECTION who tried to give him covid 4 yrs ago, and walk out, head held high. Enough with the charade.” (David Frum, I saw later, said much the same thing in The Atlantic.) On that, I was right.

Last night was a fucking disaster—for Biden, for CNN, for truth, justice, and the American way. That wasn’t a debate; it was elder abuse. And Jake Tapper and Dana Bash just sat there and watched it, like two math nerds ignoring the high school bully. I understand that CNN’s rules prevented fact-checking—they may as well have prevented journalism—but those two frauds just participated in an assault on democracy. Tapper, especially, knows better, and if he doesn’t resign after that debacle, I don’t see how we can take him seriously as a journalist ever again.

That the Biden campaign allowed this to happen is also unforgivable. They sent an old man with a bad cold into the Octagon with a predator. Trump, looking every bit like the nasty mob boss Jabba the Hutt, was relentless in his lies, his fabrications, his hollow accusations, his cruelty. But doubtless many Americans will watch clips of the ugly criminal and mistake mendacious bombast for strength. And no one at CNN was interested in disabusing them of the notion.

About CNN. They had, by my count, four score and seven analysts in the studio beforehand. Rule of thumb: you should never have more people on a panel than can fill all the boxes on Hollywood Squares. And every one of them, by participating in this exercise, helped normalize Trump, helped present the criminal rapist as somehow equivalent to Biden.

The debate itself was clunky and weird. There were no opening statements. There was no audience. Tapper and Bash raced through the questions like they had to make their tee time (what is Jake’s handicap, I wonder?). Not only did they not fact-check, but they rarely asked a follow-up, and if they did, it was because one of the candidates had avoided answering the initial question.

Biden, it seems, sought to project calm and reason, as his opponent ranted and raved. For the most part, his answers were fine. If we read the transcript, we see that all night long, he managed to give smart, thoughtful responses to the questions the moderators asked. For example, here is the first exchange:

TAPPER: What do you say to voters who feel they are worse off under your presidency than they were under President Trump?

BIDEN: We’ve got to take a look at what I was left when I became president, what Mr. Trump left me.

We had an economy that was in freefall. The pandemic was so badly handled. Many people were dying. All he said was it’s not that serious, just inject a little bleach in your arm. You’ll be all right.

The economy collapsed. There were no jobs. The unemployment rate rose to 15 percent. It was terrible.

And so, what we had to do is try to put things back together again. And that’s exactly what we began to do. We created fifteen thousand [sic] new jobs. We brought out in a position where we have 800,000 new manufacturing jobs.

But there’s more to be done. There’s more to be done. Working-class people are still in trouble. I come from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I come of household where the kitchen table—if things weren’t able to be met during the month, was a problem. Price of eggs, the price of gas, the price of housing, the price of a whole range of things.

That’s why I’m working so hard to make sure I deal with those problems, and we’re going to make sure that we have reduced the price of housing. We’re going to make sure we build two million new units. We’re going to make sure we cap rents, so corporate greed can’t take over.

The combination of what I was left with and corporate greed are the reason why we’re in this problem right now.

In addition to that, we’re in a situation where if you had to take a look at all that was done at his administration, he didn’t do much at all. By the time he left, there’s—things were in chaos, literally chaos.

And so we put things back together. We created, as I said, those jobs. We made sure we had a situation where we now—we brought down the price of prescription drugs, which is a major issue for many people, to $15 for…for an insulin shot, as opposed to $400. No senior has to pay more than $200 for any drug, all the drugs they can include beginning next year.

And the situation is making—and we’re going to make that available to everybody, to all Americans. So we’re working to bring down the price of – around the kitchen table. And that’s what we’re going to get done. But he did nothing to assuage the fears of his supporters, let alone the American people, that he’s too old for the job.

A few stumbles, sure, but he gets his point across. Here, by contrast, is Trump’s rebuttal:

We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We have never done so well. Every—everybody was amazed by it. Other countries were copying us.

We got hit with COVID. And when we did, we spent the money necessary so we wouldn’t end up in a Great Depression, the likes of which we had in 1929. By the time we finished—so we did a great job. We got a lot of credit for the economy, a lot of credit for the military, and no wars and so many other things. Everything was rocking good.

But the thing we never got the credit for, and we should have, is getting us out of that COVID mess. He created mandates—that was a disaster for our country.

But other than that, we had—we had given them back a…a country where the stock market actually was higher than pre-COVID. And nobody thought that was even possible. The only jobs he created are for illegal immigrants and bounce-back jobs, they’re bounced back from the COVID.

He has not done a good job. He has done a poor job. And inflation’s killing our country. It is absolutely killing us.

There is no substance there at all. There are wild generalizations that are flat-out lies. The last line is basically “I know you are but what am I?” But Trump spoke loudly and with authority, and that resonates with people.

Later, Donald said this:

First of all, our veterans and our soldiers can’t stand this guy. They can’t stand him. They think he’s the worst commander in chief, if that’s what you call him, that we’ve ever had. They can’t stand him. So let’s get that straight. And they like me more than just about any of them. And that’s based on every single bit of information.

As far as Russia and Ukraine, if we had a real president, a president that knew – that was respected by Putin, he would have never – he would have never invaded Ukraine. A lot of people are dead right now, much more than people know.

You know, they talk about numbers. You can double those numbers, maybe triple those numbers. He did nothing to stop it. In fact, I think he encouraged Russia from going in.

The concentration of bullshit in that answer is a scientific marvel that would have stumped J. Robert Oppenheimer. Every word is a lie, as Biden pointed out more than once. At one point, Trump blamed the insurrection on Nancy Pelosi, which, I mean, if Tapper and Bash don’t correct the record on that, why are we even here?

All night, Biden repeated phrases, probably to help with his stutter. He opened many rebuttals with “to think that…” He made lists. He cleared his throat a lot. He spoke softly, and of course the sound engineers at CNN made no attempt to raise the volume on his microphone—a conscious choice by the network that only served to make the President look weaker and frailer.

There’s no sugar-coating it: last night sucked. But is this the end for the Biden campaign? Of course not. He remains the best president of my lifetime. I would rather have Kamala Harris in the White House than anyone else the Democrats could recruit, including Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsome, and should Joe falter in his second term, that is exactly what would happen. I’m fine with that.

One last thing: After the commercial break, the candidates were asked about the impact of their policies on African-Americans. Trump said this:

He caused inflation. As sure as you’re sitting there, the fact is that his big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border. They’re taking Black jobs now and it could be 18. It could be 19 and even 20 million people. They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.

By that point, I was already zoned out and doomscrolling. But the line about “Black jobs” was not missed by Black Twitter.

“Update: Every Black person in America will be talking about ‘Black Jobs’ amongst ourselves tomorrow the second no white people are around,” tweeted BlackKnight10k, co-host of the Pardon the Insurrection podcast. “Trump is never going to recover from that. Might as well have just said the n word. Add Trump to the losers list.”

While you’re crying in your coffee this morning, please take a gander at this thread, which is a “greatest hits” of “Black Jobs” tweets. (You’re welcome.)

I’ll have more thoughts to share tonight, on The Five 8. Meantime, please remember that this is just a bad night in a long campaign, Trump the convicted felon is being sentenced in two weeks, and we shall prevail.

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See you tonight: