Biden Might Not Win the Debates—but Trump Will Definitely Lose Them

Donald Trump came out shooting blanks with his usual baggy, insecure rhetoric after agreeing to two debates with Joe Biden. “Crooked Joe Biden is the WORST debater I have ever faced,” “He can’t put two sentences together!” et cetera. He does it because he knows the media reports it and there are still people who fall for it.

The truth, of course, is that Trump is a terrible debater. In this as in everything else, he wants people to forget the past and ignore the truth. So let’s remind him, and everyone, of what happened when Trump and Biden met in 2020.

The first debate, hosted by Fox, took place in Cleveland on September 29. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died; Trump had nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court three days before, so the court was on everyone’s mind, and of course the pandemic.

Trump did two main things. First, he lied a lot. He’d reduced prescription drug prices by “80 to 90 percent”; insulin was getting “so cheap, it’s like water”; he’d “brought back [college] football.” Second, he interrupted and interrupted. He turned the whole thing into a shitshow, because he knows that shit benefits from shitshows.

But the main thing he did was send that little message to the Proud Boys: “Stand back and stand by.” Those words seemed self-contradictory to me, but not to the Proud Boys themselves, who took it as a clear order to await his further instructions, which came in the build-up to January 6, 2021.

Result? Biden mopped the floor with him. A CNN poll found that viewers favored Biden’s performance by—get this—60 to 28 percent. Think about that 28. It means that even a good chunk of MAGA-heads couldn’t bring themselves to say he won. Some polls were closer, but Biden won them all.

For the second debate, October 22, 2020, in Nashville, NBC decided to cut the microphones when Biden and Trump weren’t speaking, which limited the interruptions. Well, wait! Actually, Nashville was supposed to be the third debate. The second debate, scheduled for October 15 in Miami, never happened; it was canceled because Trump had tested positive for Covid. The debate commission suggested holding it virtually. Biden said yes. Trump backed out and held a rally instead. This is worth remembering.

OK, back to Nashville, which did happen: Trump said he’d done more for Black Americans than any president with the “possible exception” of Abraham Lincoln. He made a lot of comments ducking responsibility on the pandemic. It was less of a madhouse. And Biden won that debate, CNN found, by 53 to 39 percent.

Flash-forward. Biden is four years older and definitely a step slower. No use denying it. It’s hard to imagine him delivering a dominating performance. For my money, the best thing he can do on a stage with Trump has nothing to do with policy. He should needle Trump and get under his skin: about Trump constantly confusing Biden with Barack Obama; about confusing Jimmy Carter with Jimmy Connors; about praising Hannibal Lecter as a “wonderful man.” And about more consequential things too, like his stated plans for his second term that would turn the country into a fascist state (on this, read our new issue, it is excellent and chilling). But no, Biden probably does not have it in him to crush Trump in a debate.

In sum: Biden may not win these debates, but Trump will definitely lose them. He’ll lose them the same way he lost them last time, by lying and interrupting and sneering and being an off-putting bully. It’s true that Biden has a record to defend this time, and Trump will attack attack attack. He’ll probably score some points. But he’ll overdo it. He always does.

That is, if he shows up. This week, he started yelping instantly about the debate format—the absence of an audience, the cutting off of the mics. Amanda Marcotte in Salon noticed that Republicans “are already spinning Trump’s faceplant even before it happens.” Lara Trump whined on Fox that the debates are “rigged so heavily in Joe Biden’s favor, but everything always is.”

My guess is that the first one will happen. Trump is delusional enough to believe that he’s going to wipe the floor with Biden. Then he’ll see that Biden isn’t the blithering idiot he believes him to be and can actually hold his own on a debate stage, and the debate won’t have any clear winner or loser, but because Biden simply isn’t an aggressive asshole and raging egomaniac and will come across as more empathetic, he’ll win the insta-polls by 10 to 15 points, and Trump will eventually find an excuse to skip the second one and identify some little Nuremberg where he can hold a rally and whimper about being the most persecuted man in the history of the planet.

The last few days remind me more broadly that we must always bear in mind all the constituent elements of authoritarian fascism. There are the obvious ones we think of immediately, like contempt for democracy and reliance on a narrative of resentment against the “vermin” who are destroying the country. But the less obvious ones are important too. Staggering corruption is always, always, always a characteristic of fascist regimes, and Trump already proved this in term one, with the flagrant and constant violations of the emoluments clause.

And another constant feature is the whining. The system is so unfair to us. Mussolini used this trope, as did Hitler, as have they all. Everything is everybody else’s fault. And these people try to say that liberals are snowflakes?

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.