What Does Biden’s Disastrous Debate Mean for Democrats? 34:26

Well, what can you say about last night? We're live from Georgia, a key battleground state in the race for the White House. In just moments, the current U.S. president will debate the former U.S. president as their party's presumptive nominees of first in American history. The question we had last week was, do debates make a difference for voters? But today, the question that seems far more urgent is this one.

How will President Biden move forward from his performance? And can he? It's true, the 78-year-old Donald Trump was as rambling and incoherent and untruthful as ever. But watching President Biden, age 81, seeking a second term, his voice hoarse and his answers unclear,

It now seems all but impossible for him or his campaign to escape the question of his age and fitness for another term in office. Today, we'll talk about what happened last night and what we should take away from this disaster of a debate. ♪

Welcome to the political scene. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm very grateful on this week of all weeks to be joined as always by my colleagues, Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos. If there was ever something that needed talking about, it was this. Hi, Jane. Hi, Evan. And thank you for telling us to be with you today.

Now, here in the clear light of morning, do we have a better sense of what just happened? Jane, what do you think? You know, OK, for me, I have to say this was kind of a deja vu moment. I was transported back to covering Reagan's debate in 1984 when he started wandering away verbally. The system is still where it was with regard to the president.

With regard to the progressivity, as I've said?

After that debate, Mondale got off the stage and turned to an aide and said, we've lost him. This is terrifying. I remember talking to Mondale about it, too. And what happened after that? Okay, he made a joke in the next debate. He got reelected. It was a terrible second term. He was absent so much from the job that his own aides considered invoking the 25th Amendment. They blundered into the Iran-Contra affair, and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's later.

It's unclear whether he was suffering from it in his second term, but it certainly looked that way. What we saw last night, I just think the elephant's out of the room. Okay? For a long time, they have said to us...

It's an attack that's ageist. We all saw it right in front of us. Now we have to discuss it. It's right there. There's no other way to put it. It's a political catastrophe for the Democrats and for the country. There's a great observation by Bill Clinton who once said that strong and wrong beats weak and right every time.

And that's more or less what you saw over and over again over the course of this night. There were these moments whenever it seemed as if Biden might be able to punch back at some ludicrous offensive lie that Trump had said, and he didn't have the capacity. He just couldn't do it.

I think it comes down to whether or not he, in the end, chooses one of his instincts over the other, his two instincts. One is that if you're Joe Biden, you always somehow find a way to get back up. This is like the defining mythology that gets him through the day. And we all know the reasons why he's been through these kinds of

agonies and professional failures before. And he always, in his mind, gets back up and so on and so on. The problem is, this is not one of those moments, meaning this is not a moment in which will and grit sees you through. And does that collide ultimately with his other instinct, which is that he has had some ability to sense the

Susan, I got to know what you're thinking, too. What was your reaction?

You know, Jane, I too thought of that Reagan 1984 moment because in the end, the story is almost certainly a different one politically than the one we're dealing with right now because Reagan had another debate scheduled in the fall of 1984. He was able to come back with a well-timed quip. I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit...

for political purposes my opponents youth and inexperience at the time the age issue predominated but he was much younger

than Joe Biden is today. - He was 73, yeah. - That's right. And the political situation in the country was actually radically different. It was a moment in time when our politics still responded to externality, still responded to events, that the country was not so locked in to a partisan stalemate, essentially, as the one that we're in right now. And Reagan went on to win a historic 49-state landslide in 1984.

And to Evan's point, is there anyone around Biden who was able to speak truth to power in a way that would get through? And even if that is the case, are there viable options for moving forward?

We all know that age is the inescapable factor for Biden. It's not like it's just coming up now. But there was an element of some kind of a curtain being pulled back that Democrats who prefer to focus understandably in many respects on Donald Trump's lies and misrepresentations for this hour and a half, at least, they could not avoid the evidence of their own standard bearers, you

you know, very obvious diminution over the last four years. And I'm just wondering, Jane, how quickly did that become apparent to you in the debate last night? Were there any other revealing moments that really stood out for you? Oh, my God. I mean, it was apparent so fast that it was shocking, I think. Face it, Trump provided so many opportunities for knockout punches on the part of Biden, and he pretty much missed all of them.

I mean, it was almost a sort of visceral physical reaction, I think, that people had just literally to the very first impression of seeing him. There's something just almost biological, just that we register when we see somebody who looked as he did when he walked out from the wings looking, in effect, kind of frozen.

and sort of tremulous. And I think there was a way in which from that moment on, and then when he opened his mouth and he sounded as hoarse as he was and as weak as he was. We got to take a look at what I was left when I became president and what Mr. Trump left me. That was the beginning. It's sort of that set the tone. And I think what's striking to me about it is that the campaign and specifically Joe Biden's

So.

It's important to mention that because, you know, the question of like, has the has Joe Biden, has the campaign, has everybody sort of been secretly saying, oh, we know that this guy is is past his sell by day. Then we got to keep him under wraps. If that was the case, it would have been a weird choice to put him out in a debate like this so early. I think in some ways it was like they imagined that they could engineer and guarantee that they would get State of the Union Joe Biden. Now, it's interesting, Evan.

that you're making this point, it's not about any particular moment. It was about the overall overwhelming sense that Biden was just a man who was

wasn't up to the moment. He failed to deliver, wrote answers that probably any Democratic elected official in the country could provide. On Roe versus Wade, the entire foundation in many ways of the Democratic campaign this year built around Trump's responsibility for getting rid of reproductive rights in this country. Joe Biden couldn't answer in a coherent sentence.

on the foundation of their own campaign. And to me, that was so important of a moment because he can't even deliver talking points. Which had three trimesters. The first time is between the woman and the doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. The third time is between the doctor, I mean, between the woman and the state. Not only did Biden offer an answer that seemed...

incoherent in terms of understanding the actual decision row and the trimester system. But he also completely inexplicably went into some kind of anecdote about immigration and

She was murdered by an immigrant coming in. They talk about that. But here's the deal. There's a lot of young women to be raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters. This is why people in the party are actually saying, do we need to get the hook?

One of the things that you noticed, by the way, if you were listening to those moments where he would descend into this incomprehensible set of bullet points about some big issue, you could see that he had almost like these index cards kind of filed up in his mind that were just collapsing in a pile on the floor. Because, you know, I, you know, having heard all of these answers over the years on each of these policy questions, you could more or less reasonably anticipate, OK, here's what he's going to say about Roe. Here's what he's going to say about this.

But instead of them coming out, I could see that they were like colliding like cars on a highway, one slamming into the next. And that's what you got the first moment, the real moment.

freeze when he made this comment about Medicare, when he said, we beat Medicare, which was this nonsensical declaration. Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if

We finally beat Medicare. It was like he missed three turns off the highway and drove right into the wall. And, you know, I think some of that is going to be this question of what was happening in these last six or seven days that led up to this moment. But I don't think anybody pretends that this is somehow specific to Medicare.

I mean, there has been that claim that he was overprepared and the preparers stuffed too many facts into his head. That is a risk. And actually, I've heard that same excuse given about Reagan at one point. Nancy Reagan claimed that Ronnie was overprepared and that they brutalized him in the process of debate prep. I'm sure that's what Jill Biden is saying, to be honest. I mean, I think like the people around him will be finding reasons to try to explain it. It just doesn't fly.

Here's some evidence to that argument that Jane throws out there, but I don't think it's exculpatory, at least to a Democrat looking to win the election,

I think another revealing moment for exactly this reason is the closing statement offered by Biden. And actually, it's juxtaposition with Trump, because here's the thing that presumably was prepared in advance. He had a commercial break on CNN to collect his thoughts before coming back into it after this very shaky performance. If ever there was at least two minutes when he could have given, you know, a message that could at least provide some solace to his supporters, this would have been it.

And what did he do? He launched into this bizarre, technocratic, pre-rehearsed answer. I ask anyone out there in the audience or anyone out watching this debate, do you think the tax system is fair? The fact is that I said nobody would make it under $400,000 at a single penny increase in their taxes. And if I'm reelected, that'll be the case again. It looks like he's trying to make a broader argument

point about Trump's agenda for a second term and how that's going to bring us more inflation and how that's going to bring us more tax cuts for rich people and more burden for poor people. And yet it comes out as this sort of technocratic mumbo jumbo, completely at odds with the tenor and thrust of the debate as we had experienced it for an hour and a half. And then in contrast to that, you have this sort of

trademark insanity from Donald Trump. He said, "We want to do this, we want to do that, we want to get rid of this tax, that tax."

But he doesn't do anything. Donald Trump's closing statement is not about the unfairness of the tax system. It's about the unfairness of everything in regards to him. That's why I had the highest approval rating in the history of the VA. So all of these things, we're in a failing nation. You know, it doesn't make any sense, except that we've been conditioned to understand what Trump's rants are at this moment in time. And I thought that juxtaposition kind of summed up nicely that it was

partially an unmitigated disaster because of Biden's own condition, but partially, you've got to say there was kind of a premeditated mess. Evan, what kind of staff work would lead to that closing? Well, it almost can sound like, you know, you're trying to exonerate him when we say, well, what about the staff work? But I think it is in the end, the staff work is a reflection of the man in the sense that if the staff feels as if they don't have the

to speak freely, then you end up with people who essentially try to fortify something that was, at this point, pretty clearly beyond fortification. I think the argument that it was a slow start and got better is beaten back pretty clearly by moments like that closing statement, which, after all, was the final moment of the night, or this bizarre back and forth about golf. You can't hit a ball 50 yards. I got my handicap when I was vice president

Which I think was the moment when, for a lot of us, our souls left our bodies. I got texts at that moment, including from my daughter saying, WTF? Yeah. You know, like, what are they talking about? What is this? Yeah. But...

Something that struck me about why this has been so devastating in particular is that among the many advantages that Biden had going into this race was that he cares about the country and

Trump only cares about himself. Yet, it inevitably raised questions about Biden's selfishness going forward and whether this campaign is about himself indulging himself or does he care about the country and preserving democracy. If there's that much concern about his ability, it's a big risk that he ran for the whole country. There's that. And the other thing is, the other thing going for the Democrats and for Biden is that unlike Trump, the Democrats are

believe in the truth and telling the truth. And this has raised terrible questions about the Biden camp's credibility on the issue of his age issues. And so it's dented these two strengths that the Democrats have. I do want to just pick up on something Jane said, which I think is so important about the selfish quality that is ringing in the air right now about having chosen to go ahead in the sense that

I remember one of the conclusions that I reached earlier this year about him is how personal this is for him, for Biden, you know, that it wasn't just that Trump tried to steal the election. He tried to steal it from Joe Biden.

And over and over, people have said about Biden over the years, and he says it himself, that politics is not for him local. He always shoots that idea down. Politics is personal. It's personal. And that is, in its way, a painful fact because it means that the decision about why to do this, how to do this, is, for him, I think, inextricable from the strategic question. So interesting. Yeah.

When we come back, we'll talk more about how and why Biden got into this mess, but also a little bit about Donald Trump's performance last night. At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex.

Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. So let's talk about Donald Trump a little bit here, guys. It was by any standard a firehose of lies and misinformation. It was incoherent, but...

we have to say, delivered at a louder decibel level and from a man who seemed more in command of the situation than Joe Biden. Does what he said matter or just how he said it? Jane? I mean, it certainly matters. And that's why people are so upset, because what we saw was a completely unacceptable alternative and a very scary future with Trump.

you know, his boasts about his own record, which were completely wrong, whether it was about his economic record, his foreign policy record, his outrageous lies about what Roe enabled, claiming that it legalized infanticide. So that means he can take the life of the baby in the ninth month and even after birth. Which, of course, is a

total crock and allowed him to sort of spew this vividly disgusting language about what, you know, babies being ripped out of mothers and that kind of thing, which he's done in the past. I mean, they should have been ready for it. He was also incoherent, as he always is. I mean, he says things that make no sense. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever. And we did, we were using

All forms of energy, all forms, everything. His discussion of January 6th, which came way too late in this debate, I mean, 45 minutes in before they even got to the subject of Trump trying to overturn a fair and free election in this country for the first time. They talk about a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol and

and in many cases were ushered in by the police. And as Nancy Pelosi said, it was her responsibility, not mine. She said that loud and clear. His claims were preposterous, blaming it on Nancy Pelosi for not calling the National Guard when it's the president who had the authority to call in the National Guard. It's just on and on and on. Yeah, and I think there was a way in which he was almost getting more

confident in how brazen his lies were as the evening wore on. It was like, I think once he realized that he had this commanding position, pretending that he didn't say about the Nazis in Charlottesville that there were good people on both sides. I mean, it was almost this kind of challenging the public to figure out a way how to really live in a world in which he is willing to say absolutely anything unrelated to the reality of it.

But it was the scariest thing about this whole evening because, of course, Joe Biden's been telling us, don't compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. And we saw in so many ways what the alternative is really like in its most gruesome form. I think that the format, again, that the Biden team agreed to ended up

benefiting Donald Trump. And there's no question that the decision by CNN to announce preemptively in advance, we will not be conducting any fact checking in real time by our moderators was basically, it's like, you know, saying to Donald Trump, like, here's the keys to the bank vault, and we will not be stationing a guard outside the door.

You know, Americans are not equipped, nor should they have to be, to have at their own disposal in real time an armor of facts and figures to protect themselves from the lies and misinformation spread by Donald Trump. So in a way, it was the most empowering possible situation for him, knowing that

that he could basically say anything unchallenged and that the efforts to correct it and to fix it would either withstand with one opponent, Joe Biden, who's trying to make a political message of his own, or would be hours later and in different formats where millions of Americans wouldn't be tuned in. Jane, you mentioned January 6th and how late it came during the debate. I think one of the most breathtaking moments for me was Donald Trump saying,

possibly expressing the only human empathy that he expressed for anyone in the course of this debate for the January 6th defendants. What they've done to some people that are so innocent, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. What you have done, how you've destroyed the lives of so many people. And for me, that I think will go down in the history books as a very revealing moment. And then the other thing that I thought was very interesting was that Dana Bash

Two or three times had to go back to Trump. She asked a very straightforward question, which is, will you accept the results of this election even if you lose? And he wouldn't even bring up the topic. He was actually going on a long rant about Russia and Ukraine and basically attacking Ukraine's president, Vladimir Zelensky, when she had to call him back to answer that question. I thought he actually eventually said exactly the quiet part out loud.

I mean, it was he essentially said that he plans to defy and challenge the result. So there's no mystery around that. Trump was so frightening as a presentation that all Biden had to do in order to succeed was to prove that he was capable of

of being better than that. I do wonder if the failure in this debate is a reflection of what it would mean to be president. Does it mean that he would fail as a second-term president? Is this a litmus test to measure whether, you know, he's capable or not capable? The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back.

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Evan, you've done a ton of reporting over the years, of course, on Joe Biden. Your terrific biography, I think, is the gold standard for understanding this man. Right now, we're in need of some pretty serious Bidenology. What the hell? What's next? Well, there were these moments over the course of the first part of the night when you began to see pieces of his body.

support structure falling away. So, you know, you saw Nick Kristof from The New York Times kind of establishment liberal columnist saying it's time to replace him, whereas Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or Gina Raimondo

Then this morning, Tom Friedman, who has been, after all, more than just a columnist with Joe Biden, he's been an advisor to him on the Middle East, saying as explicitly as one can be, Joe, as he said, here's the headline, Joe Biden is a good man, a good president. He must bow out of the race.

I was talking to somebody on the campaign this morning trying to understand how that reverberates inside Biden's world. And, you know, I think they're doing what a campaign does when they spin at this point. And they're saying, no, no, you know, we had a great night of grassroots fundraising and best hour we've ever had between 11 and 12.

But what we all know is that there are donors who are thinking about right now, am I going to continue supporting this guy? And we can talk in a moment about who is around Joe Biden, who actually has influence with him.

But I got mixed messages from people overnight, people who were, after all, financing the Democratic campaign. Some people whose hair was on fire and said, there's no way this is going to go on for another couple weeks. And others who said, we have to wait and see. And you have to just bad night, but be patient.

My sense of Biden is that his immediate response to this will be to say, I've been down before and I'll show him again. But that's not an absolute principle. He has dropped out twice from campaigns in 87 after a plagiarism scandal.

When his friend Ted Kaufman said to him, and I'm paraphrasing, but it was words to the effect of the only way you get the sharks to go away is by dropping out. And then in the 2008 campaign, when he dropped out, when it was clear that he had no path. But getting to that point is a matter of his very, very heart.

private personal chemistry and a tiny group of people around him. And I think the reality is most opinion columnists don't have a huge impact on him. Jane, what do you think? Well, I mean, I think, you know, you can make up the scenarios on who would come and see him. It's interesting to try to analyze who in the democratic world has the power to go speak to him and talk to him about this incredibly sensitive issue. I mean, if I were listing who...

could conceivably do it, it would be Nancy Pelosi. It would be Chuck Schumer. It would be Hakeem Jeffries. If they went to him and said, we're going to lose every race across the country if you don't enable somebody else to be at the top of the ticket here, that might mean something to him. He is a Democrat who wants Democrats to win. I imagine if some of the big donors from Hollywood came and said, Jeffrey Katzenberg, we've been with you completely, but I can't

keep people in line behind you at this point. Those things would matter. I...

You know, I was thinking, what would you do if you were his campaign chairman or something? I mean, they could potentially try to put him out there where he will be having a press conference. If he could show himself to be in command and energetic and quick, they might be able to engineer some appearances that would make this disappear into the rearview mirror a little. It's not going to go away.

The campaign, by the way, is a lot of folks are thinking about the John Fetterman debate, which he had after his stroke against Mehmet Oz. Look, the fact they're invoking a stroke victim is not a good sign, but that is a case where he had a terrible debate and went on to win the race. So that's if you if you're actually curious about what they're saying to one another, that's the one they're talking about.

Well, and Evan, I'm so glad you brought that up because it does beg the question of was this so bad that it was literally an unspinnable event, as one young campaign staffer said last night. The flip side is we have so many examples, including very recent examples of

politicians recovering from the unrecoverable. Think about Donald Trump and January 6th. Think about Donald Trump and the Access Hollywood case. One of the questions is whether those laws of political gravity that have not applied to Donald Trump apply to Joe Biden. But I have a final question for both of you, which is, let's just say that the party machinery operates in some ways that are opaque to us now, but somehow result

in replacement. Is there a viable Democratic candidate in your view? And did anyone else like me watch Kamala Harris last night late on CNN after the debate and think, wow, she just made the case for Joe Biden a million times more coherently and persuasively than Joe Biden made the case for himself?

I mean, I think there's a very impressive bench of potential 2028 candidates in the Democratic Party. We can all name them. We've seen them. I think there are a whole bunch of people and whether any of them could now substitute at the top of the ticket.

It's very, very hard to imagine how they maneuver that. It's not impossible, I don't think, but it's very hard to imagine. A Democrat told me last night, the problem is we are a hollow party, not meaning that we don't have a bench, meaning that we don't have a powerful structure at the center. We don't have mandarins who are able to actually go and say, here is what we do next. And this is, Jane, you know better than anybody, a function of how we fund our politics.

that it's really the – it's the politician. It's the person who has the power. It's the party is – And it's the funders. I mean, honestly, it's the people – a handful of people who were billionaires have an incredible amount of power. And I don't know whether – what role they're playing behind the scenes here. So I'll mention just a personal element about Biden that I think is important to –

The way this family works is that there are a couple people, we know who that is, Jill Biden, Val Biden, Owens, his sister, his son Hunter, the people around him who he checks in with constantly, his grandchildren. This goes back to this earlier point I mentioned about him trying to pick up what's in the atmosphere, and he will be listening to those folks and figuring out if this thing is over.

I mean, it would seem that they are the last people who would tell him the truth. I mean, they have their own personal reasons for wanting to have him run again as well. I mean...

A granddaughter talking to their grandfather, it's very hard to say, you know, pop, it's time to be old and go, you know, off into the sunset. I agree. But there are also the people that do care about him. And if they are getting the sense from the world that this is now doing damage to him, I just think you have to consider that in your spectrum of possibilities.

Yeah, the American presidency is such an incredible protective bubble. And, you know, one thing I've been struck by, Evan, reading your reporting in The Print New Yorker, reading a big piece that my husband, Peter Baker, did in The New York Times this week, was the lack of a meaningful, rigorous, independent process inside the party, inside the White House, with people of stature who were evaluating and debating whether Biden was

really should run again for a second term. You know, as Peter was reporting that piece, you know, he was looking for evidence and could not find it that there was a meaningful process. If there was, no one has really come forward to admit it in a way that is credible.

And all last night, I was thinking about that. And I was thinking about this moment in history that we're going to look back on when it appears that Joe Biden, perhaps in counsel with Jill Biden and his grandchildren or his son,

made this incredibly consequential decision without the benefit of people sitting down, forced to confront all of the negative possibilities in a room, at a table, at a decision meeting. And I feel like we could look back on that as a dangerous turning point for our democracy.

If he does stay in and is defeated by Trump, I think that there will be tremendous amount of blame placed on the Democratic Party's leaders for having allowed this to happen.

not just blame on Biden, which will be also just tremendous. Instead of being able to be seen as a hero who defeated Trump, he will be seen as the person who enabled Trump to come back. But the people around Biden as well will take a tremendous amount of blame, his advisors and that tight circle of people and the other party leaders.

And let's just remember one person who did say something a little bit about this. Nancy Pelosi said she would not have done this debate before it. She said she would not have gone forward with it. So I think that was sort of an interesting moment. That moment that Susan was describing where it was a sort of absence of a decision rather than an active decision, this kind of groupthink effect. Yeah.

It was really around the 2022 midterms because there had been this assumption that we're going to get crushed as Democrats and that that will force a conversation about who comes to the presidential race instead of Joe Biden. And then when that didn't happen, it was like they just sort of.

glided into the assumption that he would do it and he didn't stop them. And that in its way is kind of one of those hinge moments in history. Yeah, a chilling moment to end on really is that the what might have been. Thank you to both Jane and Evan for being with us today. Thanks, Susan. Great to be with you guys, too.

This has been the political scene from The New Yorker. I'm Susan Glasser. We had research assistants today from Alex D'Elia. Our producer is Julia Nutter and our editor is Gianna Palmer. Mixing by Mike Kutchman. Thanks to Stephanie Kariuki for her support today. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer and Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thank you so much for listening.

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