I’m not sure I have anything to say about last night’s debate between Donald Trump and Joseph Biden that other commentators haven’t said, but here’s my take.
The winner of the debate was clearly . . . the moderator, Kristen Welker, NBC’s White House correspondent and a co-host of “Weekend Today.” Admittedly, she had an easier job of it than Chris Wallace did, since Trump was considerably restrained relative to his performance in the first debate, apparently chastened by the near-unanimous assessment that his rude and bullying behavior last time did him more harm than good.
But while Trump’s demeanor was more civil, he offered up as many lies as ever, including his well-worn prediction that the coronavirus is going away, and one I hadn’t heard: that many of the 545 children who were separated from their parents at the U.S. border whose parents the government now can’t find were not separated from their parents but rather from “coyotes” who had smuggled them into the country.
There were a couple of things Trump said which I suspect dismayed his advisors. In his efforts to downplay the threat of the coronavirus — asserting that while there have been spikes, they’ve ended or are going away; that a vaccine is weeks away; and so on — he also said, “We’re learning to live with it.” That provided Biden with an opening to respond that, on the contrary, “people are learning to die with it.”
Trump also made oblique references to intimations of corruption on Biden’s part that have been getting wide play on right-wing media but which most voters haven’t heard of. It was as if Trump assumes that everyone watches Fox news and thus would make sense of things like his allusion to “the big guy.” It was another example of how Trump continues to play to his base, as if keeping his most ardent supporters energized is all he has to do to win.
Before the debate, pundits were saying that, in order for Trump to make up ground on Biden, either he had to provide voters beyond his base with a compelling reason to vote for him, or Biden had to shoot himself in the foot. It doesn’t appear that either happened last night.
I did wince a little when Biden said he would provide a path to citizenship for the 11 million people who are in the country illegally; a lot of voters who aren’t necessarily Trump fans are nonetheless concerned if not angry about illegal immigration, so that might not have been a great move. And Trump lit up when Biden asserted that the country had to transition away from fossil fuels. “That’s a big statement,” Trump said. “Will you remember that Texas?” Will you remember that Pennsylvania, Oklahoma?” Again, it was a perfectly reasonable policy position, but Biden could pay a price for bringing it up in the debate.
In any case, neither of those statements amounted to the kind of big, embarrassing gaffe that analysts thought could have materially hurt Biden’s chances. So with eleven days until the election, Trump’s defeat still looks likely. Among other blessings, that would mean we’d never again have to endure watching him in a presidential debate.