In the closing moments of the first 2024 presidential debate on Thursday night, president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump were each asked versions of the same elephant-in-the-room question: Given that they would be 86 and 82, respectively, at the end of a prospective second term in office, what would they say to voters who are understandably skeptical of their ability to do the job?
Biden offered a brief answer in which he appealed to his record: new jobs, more manufacturing jobs, investment in American businesses—all the sorts of generic, pleasant-sounding things that politicians usually invoke when framing their reelection as the natural, logical choice.
Trump proposed a very different metric: golf tournament performance. “I just won two club championships—not even senior! Two regular club championships,” he said. “To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way.” Biden, he added, “can’t hit a ball 50 yards.”
When a visibly incredulous Biden retorted that he is a six-handicap golfer, an even more visibly incredulous Trump shook his head sadly. “That’s the biggest lie of all,” he said. “I’ve seen your swing. I know your swing. Let’s not act like children.”
A pair of senior citizens barking at each other about their golf games was not the most substantive exchange of the evening. But it might have been the most representative: a grim reminder that four years after Biden and Trump squared off for the first time, the country’s two major political parties are offering voters a faded version of the same choice in 2024. In all likelihood, the next president will be an elderly white guy whose debate performance suggests that he has—and I am being gentle here—lost a step or two, or a different elderly white guy whose relative confidence on the debate stage stems largely from the fact that most of what he says is entirely made up.
Biden, who has dealt with a steady drumbeat of speculation about his age and health of late, did not dispel those concerns. He appeared to spend the first few minutes on stage trying mightily to clear something stuck in his throat, and on more than one occasion lost his train of thought and could not get it back. The stumbles were excruciating to watch, and his affect was notable enough that Trump took an explicit shot at it: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said after Biden ended an answer about immigration rather abruptly. “I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
Biden rebounded a bit as the night went on, and just by skimming a transcript, you would probably not perceive much of a difference between the two candidates’ performances. But watching at home, it was impossible to shake the impression that he had made during those first few minutes, when he looked for all the world like a guy squinting to read cue cards that did not exist. Midway through the debate, Biden’s campaign revealed that he was dealing with a “cold,” which is generally not a detail you leak to spin-room reporters while a debate is still in progress unless there is a very urgent reason to do so.
Trump’s performance was different, but not better: He offered lots of vague superlatives, lots of reminiscing about people he fired, and lots of authoritarian-curious musings and casual xenophobia. As ever, most of his substantive claims were outright lies that sometimes bordered on farcical: During a discussion of reproductive rights, for example, Trump described Democrats as the party of “after birth” abortion, which forced beleaguered debate fact-checkers to dutifully crank out articles clarifying that, yes, actually, infanticide is a crime in every state, thank you for asking. He ducked questions about his responsibility for the January 6 insurrection, and described members of the mob of rioters who stormed the Capitol to capture Mike Pence as “so innocent.” After Biden referred to Trump’s recent felony convictions in New York, Trump suggested that Biden, too, could become a “convicted felon” after leaving office, before ticking off cryptic allusions to weirdo conspiracy theories that were only intelligible to people who are already steeped in the darkest corners of the Newsmax extended universe.
It is hard to remember a presidential debate in which anyone had anything good to say about the moderators afterwards. That said, CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper were almost cartoonishly feckless on Thursday night, nodding like bobblehead dolls at every deranged lie that came out of Trump’s mouth before ushering the candidates onto the next question. In one particularly wild exchange, Trump denied referring to dead U.S. service members in France as “suckers” and “losers,” which was a story that Jake Tapper personally reported just last year; Tapper, who is ostensibly a journalist, seemed to feel no personal or professional responsibility to follow up.
To be fair, I’m not sure that the job of fact-checking Trump should fall solely to Tapper or Bash or any one moderator because I’m not sure it’s possible to do that much real-time googling on live national television while still keeping track of when to cut to a commercial break. But herein lies the problem with the format: If no one within the closed universe of the debate stage is going to fact-check anything anyone says, what is the point of holding a debate in the first place? If, as a candidate, you can get up behind the podium and lie through your teeth without fear of challenge or interruption, that is not a “debate” in any meaningful sense of the word. That is a 90-minute bullshit-slinging session where the “winner” is whoever’s arm gets tired last.
The purpose of these debates, in theory, is to help (mainly undecided) voters learn more about the candidates from which they’ll select the next president. By this standard, Thursday’s event was an embarrassing failure for everyone involved. Drained of all policy substance, the debate was entirely about optics. Biden came across as an octogenarian public servant who, in a healthy political system, would be several years into enjoying his retirement. Meanwhile, pretty much everything Trump ranted about from the debate stage was a subject about which he’s been ranting for years whenever cameras are placed in front of him. If you’d heard this exact performance back in 2016 or 2020, your only real question might be what “January 6” is, and why everyone except for Trump seemed to be so disturbed by it.