The Too Late Debate
The televised debacle revealed much more than Biden’s brain death or Trump’s narcissistic buffoonery, it exposed late-stage America’s own terminal illness
By Mark Cromer
More than 50 million Americans and God knows how many others across the globe tuned into the first round of the main event in the title fight of Biden v. Trump and became immediately transfixed by Biden’s dilapidated condition, his rambling punch-drunk stupor. The split screen portrait of Biden’s slack-jawed, dead-eyed gaze was as devastating as the word salads he muttered throughout the night.
Allegedly rising to the occasion, Trump attempted to keep his garish showboating in the ring to a minimum—for him—but found it simply impossible to completely conceal his circus act routine of blurting out self-aggrandizing declarations as a showcase of his own genius and Jedi-like powers.
But what was missing from the debate is what ultimately is the most damning indictment of an electorate that put these two nincompoops onstage once again.
Neither candidate appeared capable or willing to articulate actual plans to deal with the numerous challenges and crises that have converged on what remains of the American homeland as well as those that confront it abroad. It was plain for all to see that each man is simply not up for the job and neither of them have any business remaining in the ring for the commander in chief position, Trump for the third time and Biden for the fifth.
And yet here we are again.
The televised trainwreck is another grim reflection of the accelerating retardation of the electorate, and especially those primary voters who chose the two mentally impaired specimens as the major parties’ standard-bearers. Tens of millions of primary voters in both parties happily cast their ballots for this top of the card rematch and now the consequences of their vote fall upon an already battered nation.
The debate once more demonstrated, for the umpteenth time, that President Joe Biden was, is and remains the chief executive of the United States in name alone.
He is perhaps the greatest stalking horse in modern history, a grinning cutout prone to occasional outbursts of shouting who was tapped to advance the progressive policies of the junta that actually calls the shots for the administrative state in Washington. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan likely form the core of the ruling committee surrounding Biden, with Jill Biden perhaps afforded a shareholder’s vote on some of the domestic issues.
Biden’s brain death has been on public display for years and the debate simply brought it into full primetime relief once again. There was no Easter Bunny on the south lawn to rescue a wandering Joe, no foreign head of state or former President Obama to gently lead him off the stage, no fixer standing ready to administer another syringe full of Dr. Feel Good’s magical restorative potion. Hunter could not pull his dad behind the curtain and invitingly hold up cigarette case lined with fine Bolivian powder to advise: “Whiff away, pops, it’s fentanyl-free. A toot for the show courtesy of bumpers for Biden!”
No, all the cabal surrounding Biden could do was watch and worry that the jig might finally be up.
As for Donald Trump, he revealed once more his own severe limitations, most of which are rooted in a 5th grade intellect that’s hobbled by a 4th grade vocabulary and the attention span of a gnat. In lieu of offering cogent arguments presented in at least a somewhat linear fashion, Trump defaults into canned loops of dialog, repeating ad nauseam the generic boasts and hurling the childish insults that have long been his calling card.
When CNN’s Dana Bash forthrightly asked Trump if he accepted Russia’s stated conditions to end the war in Ukraine—specifically accepting Russia’s annexation of eastern provinces claimed by Kiev and a formal acknowledgement that Ukraine will never be part of NATO—The Donald didn’t disappoint his ardent base, snapping back: “First of all, our veterans and 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.”
Answering a direct question about Russia and Ukraine, Trump didn’t mention either country or the war raging in Eastern Europe or America’s involvement in it or a framework for ending the destruction but rather started burping about Biden again before declaring American soldiers “like” him more than any other president.
Such congenitally deformed linguistics were then supplemented by Trump repeating his boasts that the Kremlin would never have rolled into Ukraine had he been in the White House and Hamas never would have attacked Israel if he was still sitting in the Oval Office. This is at least consistent with Trump’s crowing on the campaign trail that if he wins in November, he will end the war in Ukraine in one day. Of course, Trump never explains just how he will accomplish such a diplomatic masterstroke, because he can’t, but that doesn’t stop him from regurgitating such a fantastical claim over and over.
And so, in the high summer of 2024, American voters are faced with a severely cognitively diminished cutout and a do-nothing dolt whose signature feature is bellicose bragging.
How did this happen?
After all, both the Democratic and Republican parties have benches deep enough to field a variety of plausible national candidates that are a relatively young and are not grotesque political retreads—Biden has appeared on four of the past five national presidential ballots, Trump on three. Republicans in particular seemed poised, if only for a moment, to move ahead into NextGen leadership with a breadth of potential candidates that ranged from established leaders like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to promising youngbloods like Vivek Ramaswamy, the successful businessman whose intellectual heft and vibrant communication skills offer the America First movement some real opportunities. Even globalist neocon stalwart Nikki Haley offered Republicans more vim and vigor and intellectual latitude than the Cal Worthington campaign of Donald Trump.
But the so-called MAGA ‘base’ wouldn’t consider it and instead bootstrapped themselves to another spastic go around with Trump.
While the Democratic Party could also have fielded candidates like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar or California Governor Gavin Newsom or handed the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris and let her sprint with it, it chose to not even hold a contested primary season of any consequence. After selling Biden to American voters in 2020 with the claim that he was a unifying ‘bridge’ candidate, the stand-in who targeted half the country with violent verbal attacks became the party’s indispensable man in 2024.
The Democratic Party’s base voting bloc of white progressive cultists and their self-declared ‘BIPOC’ cadres saw in another Biden run the prospect, if successful, of four more years of the chaotic decline that advances their agenda from the border to the classroom to the courthouse.
Despite all the public histrionics over Biden since the debate, the fact remains that Democratic Party voters—by the millions—wanted him there. Despite the lies they seem to be telling themselves now, nothing was kept from them, nothing was foisted upon them. They have known Biden’s presidency was a Weekend at Bernie’s in the Oval Office from the get go and they were good with it.
There’s a reason that more than two weeks after his debate performance, Biden remains essentially tied with Trump even if he is trailing within the margin of error in some of the battleground states. At Nate Silver’s esteemed 538 polling outfit, heading into mid-July Biden was still winning 50 out of 100 election simulations, with Trump prevailing 49 times. The polling averages at Real Clear Politics show Trump has a slight edge in some of the battlegrounds, but leading by less than three-percent in the national averages.
How could this be?
Comedian Bill Maher has famously stated he would vote for Biden’s severed head suspended in a jar of blue liquid in order to keep Trump out of the White House, but the real joke is that so will close to 80 million-plus other voters. In very real terms, they are willing to risk dramatically escalating the chance of a world-ending nuclear war with Russia by the missteps of the unelected junta now surrounding Biden rather than see Trump win.
Now, that’s pure fanaticism distilled by the single factor of Trump’s presence alone, which is why the Democrats were so desperate to run against him in the first place. Had the top of the GOP ticket been DeSantis, Ramaswamy or even a neocon like Haley, it’s hard to imagine Biden now winning many states outside of the Democrats’ coastal redoubts. Against Trump, Biden is still leading in states like Colorado by more than six points.
For their part, the Republicans again seem to be imbibing on the same gin and juice that got them so giddy in 2022, when they were predicting a massive ‘Red Wave’ that would sweep them to power in both chambers of Congress. Over the past few weeks, GOP glee club members on Fox News have declared New York to be a battleground state and urged Trump to run a ’50 state campaign’ that would pretend the Republicans were competitive once again in places like California, Colorado, New Mexico and Washington. This is what GOP fantasy play looks like, dreaming of the 1980s.
The red electoral tidal wave in 2022 never materialized and while the GOP did win a tenuous majority in the House, under Trump’s direction it has blown successive elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022.
The Republicans now appear well placed to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in 2024 and the Democrats can’t be written off from not only holding on to the White House and the Senate but also of recapturing the House. If that were to happen, it would spell the end of the Republican Party as a nationally viable entity and the Age of One-Party Rule in Washington will have irrevocably arrived.
The GOP is living on borrowed time as it is. Its national death as a going concern is only a matter of time as its decades of deception and self-dealing on mass immigration and surrendering virtually all of the cultural power centers to the Left over the past half-century will pay it the only dividend it can in the end: its total destruction.
Its voters have rewarded this electoral death march every step of the way, including by nominating Trump a third time after the betrayals of his first term and his pathetic loss to Biden during his reelection bid.
But really no matter how it shakes out now, the 2024 election has highlighted that voters bear the ultimate culpability for this disastrous November title fight.
