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Trump Wins Second Debate. Will It Be Enough?
The second debate was a completely different animal from the first. President Trump and former Vice President Biden were able to present their answers, arguments, and attacks without constant interruptions from each other or the moderator.
The new muted mics rule worked quite well and we should expect to see it in future debates. When one candidate answered a question, the other’s mic was muted. After both provided their statements, the mics were left open for that lively partisan bickering we’ve come to expect.
This worked greatly to Donald Trump’s favor.
The President vastly improved his performance, holding Joe Biden’s feet to the fire while maintaining his cool. Biden turned in the journeyman performance one would expect from a frontrunner. His job was to remain upright and not commit some outlandish gaffe, a feat he achieved. And yet…
That tricky Trump fellow laid several traps and Joe eagerly jumped right into them.
To start the debate, Trump hit Biden hard on the growing “laptop from hell” controversy. Biden’s answers were either unsatisfactory or downright deceptive; that will come back to bite him. Since about 20 minutes were dedicated to the issue, the press will have a hard time maintaining their embargo.
Impressively, Trump focused on the Biden family’s lucrative arrangements with China, Russia, and Ukraine in a relaxed manner. His “more in sadness than in anger” tone raised question after question without the need to bang the table. Trump concern-trolled the hell out of Biden and it worked like a charm.
He also got Joe to deny that he ever wanted ban fracking, although we saw him say just that in the Democratic primary debates. Trump has the video and promised to release it yet again to our ever-incurious press.
When Biden blasted Trump over putting children in cages, POTUS kept reminding him that Obama created them. “Who built the cages, Joe?” Trump kept asking. Biden had no response.
Biden’s worst moment was when Trump actually got him to admit that he will end the US oil industry. Later, Joe tried to massage that promise but Trump highlighted it repeatedly, calling out voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and Oklahoma to pay close attention to what that will mean for their jobs. Let a thousand ads bloom.
In addition to creating headaches for himself, Biden was remarkably inconsistent. Angry one moment, fake laughing the next, marble-mouthing convoluted answers. His energy level waxed and waned over the 90-minute affair, while Trump always appeared in command.
Moderator Kristen Welker of NBC wasn’t as dreadful as Chris Wallace or Savannah Guthrie, but she was faster to interrupt Trump than Biden, especially when the President was on a roll. According to the numbers, there were 24 interTrumps to two for Biden. And, of course, all the questions came from the left.
By the end of Thursday’s debate, the former vice president was looking at his watch, a move that doomed George H.W. Bush’s re-election (at least according to the press at the time). It was a visual reminder that Biden is playing a Prevent Defense and hoping to run out the clock.
A lot can happen in the second half of the fourth quarter. Tonight, Trump was moving down the field.
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Well, their Twitter feed seems to be run by some millennial idiot. (Tim Miller?) So . . . yeah, ignorance is built-in.
Er, . . . that’s because they weren’t cogent.
Address the facts. You beclowned yourself again. 30 seconds of research would have shown your entire “people I have talked to” talking point is false. But of course thats your style. Make a ludicrous statement, refuse to address facts that make you look like a clown.
‘Poor Boys”?
“Zero emissions in 5 years”?
With proper preparation, he can fake it for a minute. But he did start mumbling towards the end, he’s been absent from the public all week, and he’s been rambling incoherently for the past two years. You can’t say one hour proves your point when we have hundreds of examples, over two years, proving otherwise
Seriously? I have a question: Is Biden a willful liar, or is he suffering sufficiently from dementia not to know he is lying? The man can’t answer a question without contradicting himself within the first 20 seconds. The only option other than those two is that he is not, and never was, very bright.
I think all three apply.
As I saw someone posted elsewhere, “embrace the power of ‘and.'”
Certainly possible. For example, I’ve never understood how Biden and the fools who support him can claim that Trump is responsible for 200K+ deaths. Yes, they happened while he is in office, but the original estimate was over 2,000,000+. Holding the loss to 10% of predicted is a success, not a failure.
I’m going to stand up for Gary again.
I mean… Geez. This is starting to sound like Twitter!
Please state with specificity at what moment in the debate Biden showed even a twinge of dementia.
I think he’s massaging an emotional narrative like any conventional politician would because many Americans are happy to blame Trump for Covid, whether or not it’s logical to do so. Does that mean some American voters aren’t bright? Probably, but people don’t like to think hard. They’d rather have an easy scapegoat. I mean… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “we’re doing worse than everyone else,” which seems pretty ridiculous if you look at comparative data in context.
That said, Biden has never struck me as a brilliant man in general, and how he talks reminds me a lot of Bart Simpson. Per his many “Uncle Joe” moments, I’m not sure how he’s viewed as a statesman. I think he looked old and tired last night, but I will cop to my biases since I’ve never liked him much.
No. I am not asked to rationalize my positions, it is demanded that I submit myself to cross-examination. I respectfully decline.
Please cite with specificity at what point during last night’s debate that Biden was not cogent. I am not saying that you agree with him, but that his argument, while wrong, was not out of the universe of rationality.
You keep elevating the discussion.
Biden hung in there for 90 minutes and finished very strong. The dementia meme is dead.
Gary, Biden hasn’t been all there since he pretended to be Neil Kinnock, a Welsh coal miner’s son, in 1987.
My wife is a registered independent. Trumps response to Covid is the biggest reason she would hesitate to vote for him (she does not like Biden either) This is exactly what I pointed out to her before the second debate. Biden’s answer was the same in the first debate. “we don’t have a plan, we need a plan” with no even back of envelope rough draft over view of what having a plan means, what it would look like.
Sometimes I think I must have been in an alternate universe in early 2020. I seem to recall the initial estimate for a vaccine was two to three years, more likely three. Trump said that was unacceptable and Operation Warp Speed came about at Trump’s direction. The man and his administration is on the verge of working a miracle if the vaccine is available in just over a year. WTH more do his critics want him to have done?
No. He didn’t say that he was Neil Kinnock’s son, he just lifted Neil’s words. That is being dishonest (which Trump excels at), and not dementia.
I would have wanted Trump to act like Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine or Maryland Republican Governor Larry Hogan and provide rational updates to the nation, not what Trump did.
My wife works in health care and so this may color her view on things, but it would seem that the polling (for what it is worth) shows that the Covid response is a very weak point for Trump.
That said I would answer your question “what more do his critics want him to have done” with an important but vague answer. They wanted him to show better leadership. Leadership is an amorphous term but it is important to people. Leadership is only partially having and implementing a good policy.
Trump too often seems to cater to the part of the Republican party that is anti-mask, he seems to often to minimize the pandemic. This is what I here from the people who have problems with Trump on Covid. This was an area where he needed to be clear and concise. We are all in this together, here is what we need to do to stay healthy and keep the economy open. This needed to be Trump at his “best” , easy to understand and repeated often.
There is a measurable group of Republicans/independents that do not reflexively hate Trump but do not fully think he has handled all aspects , not just the policy, of the Covid response well.
Define “rational updates”, if you can, and distinguish it from what Trump did. Otherwise, you’re just nit-picking.
BTW, Operation Warp Speed came from the mind of a businessman used to accomplishing goals and holding people accountable, and would not have occurred otherwise.
He didn’t just lift some words, he took things that happened to Kinnock and pretended they applied to him! That is pretty off. And he hasn’t improved with age.
And telling me that Trump is dishonest doesn’t make stupid ol’ Joe any more honest. You see, if you vote for Biden because you feel Trump is too awful you not only vote against Trump, you vote FOR Biden. That is much too high a price to pay.
It seems like too much of what some people would consider “leadership” amounts to coddling and encouraging those on the fearful side. Getting through the virus himself in just a couple days, qualifies far more as “leadership” in my book.
Leadership is sometimes about style. His attempt to “minimize” the pandemic was, as he said, an attempt to avoid panic in the populace, to project confidence in the ability of his administration to deal with what was coming. Worked for me because I understood it. Maybe it didn’t work for others.
Trump seems to do in public and in real time what I’d prefer to not see, and that is evaluating all feasible alternatives. He sometimes seems to think out loud. Again, it doesn’t bother me, but I’m used to that. Before I retired, I took part in many engineering trades where we evaluated options that we knew were not very good, and we did it for completeness. Someone was always going to ask, “Did you consider Option Y?” And we had to have been able to say, “Yes. It was rejected because …”
I hope you had a chance at least once to make it “It was rejected because we’re not stupid…”
Maybe a couple years ago now, I regularly bought 12-packs of canned cat food, in larger cans, because I was feeding a lot of outside cats in Phoenix. One of the cans turned out to be swollen, like a can of tuna when it’s gone bad.
I took it outside to open and see what was going on. As soon as I just STARTED to “pop” the top (it was one of those pull-open deals), it went BANG! and the top just disappeared. It was night, and I wasn’t able to find the top until the next morning.
As it turned out, the food was bad to the point that the cats wouldn’t touch it.
When I called the company, and explained what had happened, I said “I took the can outside, and tilted it away from me, because I wasn’t born yesterday…” the lady laughed, and I wound up getting a replacement coupon for a whole 12-pack, not just one can.
But it’s surprising how dim some “customer service” people can be. Sometimes I suppose they’re just following company rules, but at times their actual dimness really… shines?… through.
Since my move, I bought a new dining room table with 4 chairs. I wasn’t able to bring it home myself, because I don’t have any kind of vehicle, let alone one that could hold a dining table and 4 chairs. So I asked a neighbor with a truck to pick it up for me, and they did. This store didn’t give them any trouble, like “proving” they were supposed to get it, etc. Which has been an issue at other places I’ve dealt with. But this place turns out to be far more sensible than many.
When I found a problem with one of the chairs not setting flat on the floor, I called the store and they got a replacement for me, to exchange.
Since I still didn’t have a vehicle, I asked if someone could return the bad chair for me, and pick up the new one. And the lady said “I don’t see a problem, it’s not like we get lots of anonymous people coming in trying to exchange chairs.”
Very refreshing.
People’s opinion of Trump’s response is based on media lies.
Trump’s administration was swinging into action despite what The Who said and Democrats were doing to attack and thwart him.
You actually listen to them? Why waste your time. NeverTrumpers are banished from support. And they will be in the future whatever happens to Trump.