Biden-Trump Debate Prep
Will the author of “The Art of the Deal” get schooled by the President.
So, the dog finally caught the car — and now what? TrumpWorld had been chasing President Biden throughout the Spring, demanding a debate, in the principal’s words, "anytime, anywhere, anyplace.” It became an organizational mantra of sorts, even as the campaign avoided debates with primary challengers Nikki Haley and Ron deSantis (both of whom eventually endorsed Trump). The former President even went so far as to prop up an empty mic stand in Wisconsin on April 2nd, berating the vacant lectern for, what exactly, I don’t know …
“Anytime, anywhere, anyplace” was a rallying cry to raise campaign morale through March and April, the dying last gasp of President Biden’s fundraising advantage over Trump, the preferred candidate of billionaire bros and their well-tended families. As any longtime Trumpologist knows, the former President cares most about the appearance of the projection of strength (hence, “strongman”). Also, low key — money. And in the gladiatorial fundament, for good or for ill, the most quantifiable expression of a campaign’s material strength is its cash on hand. To that end, Biden raised $90 million and $51 million in April, with $191 million cash on hand roughly for both months. But the pendulum started swinging rightwards by the end of May, where Trump's campaign and the RNC reported about $170 million cash on hand while the Biden campaign and the DNC reported dropped to about $157 million.
Swell and lovely. So now, at long last, TrumpWorld has gotten its wish. Even as they have erased Biden’s fundraising advantage (largely as backlash to his felony conviction), they now face the prospect of dealing with President Biden in a one on one real time debate. We cannot fail to note here that in their first debate in 2020, it was conventional wisdom that Biden cleaned Trump’s clock. “The survey found that 54 percent of debate watchers believed Biden won the matchup, while 39 percent said Trump did,” Politico concluded at the time. “Only 8 percent of those who watched said they didn’t know or had no opinion.” So, what does the scrappy terrier do when it finally captures the car?
Trump has described the President, at various times, as “senile,” “Sleepy Joe” and even “Crooked.” Which is rich, if anything, considering that it is 45 himself that has 34 convictions on his record, to POTUS’s zero. It further makes for humorous — if ageist — moments on the trail, to be sure. Still, more importantly, those sobriquets inadvertently lower expectations for Team Biden, performance-wise, on Thursday night. Which is exactly where an opposition campaign does not want to be on the cusp of a momentous debate. As Oliver Darcy puts it this way in Reliable Sources:
For years, and particularly over the last few months, MAGA Media has portrayed Biden as a senile, mentally incapacitated elderly man who cannot remember what he had for breakfast, let alone run the federal government. That might sound like an exaggeration to those who don't tune in to Fox News or listen to talk radio, but it has been a real and constant theme in the right-wing media universe.
To support the narrative, these outlets and personalities have seized on Biden's verbal gaffes (while ignoring Trump's) and presented out-of-context video clips to their large audiences — a deceptive, but effective strategy that the Biden campaign has struggled to meaningfully rebut.
Enter Thursday's high-stakes political showdown. The debate, which will be one of the most-watched moments of the 2024 presidential campaign cycle, will allow audiences from coast-to-coast the opportunity to watch an unfiltered Biden go head-to-head with Trump for some 90 minutes. While the two will undoubtedly tangle over a host of issues, the stage also will afford Biden a unique opportunity to puncture the narrative he lacks the mental fitness to be commander-in-chief.
Which is why Trump is slowly walking back his contradictory attacks on the President as being simultaneously “crooked” and “sleepy” going back years, in an attempt to not lower expectations. It is an interesting maneuver, this, one clearly pressed upon him by his campaign (as well as his walking back the green card visa promise he made on Jason Calacannis’s podcast). But it will have little, if any, effect on perceptions going into Thursday night’s fight. For, how could it? Trump as the Trumpists have been attacking Biden’s cognitive abilities since 2020. To reverse course a week before the debate is at this point largely performative for the press. The urgency, however, with which he is walking back this central line of attack suggests that chasing the car is far easier than actually bringing the 4,000 pound vehicle to heel.
This is because of three factors that make this debate more difficult for Trump than the President. The first of which is what I like to call “Thumotic Excess.” Every autocrat manqué has this defect. What is Thumotic Excess, you may ask. “Thumos, in the context of ancient Greece, refers to a sense of righteous anger, a need and desire to fight against the perceived injustice of the world,” writes the Classic Wisdom blogger, "‘Socrates.’ “ Thumos can refer to the rage, grief, horror or sorrow of any individual who is faced with insurmountable atrocities.” Insurmountable atrocities can be many things to different people. In the case of Achilleus it was large — epic, even — and all consuming. Trump’s, by contrast, is small, retributive in nature and uncontrollable. “Thumotic excess.” Even as we “speak,” the Biden campaign is trying to find a way to exploit this, to make Trump commit an unforced error and reveal the unfathomable depths of his smallness, reveling to a live audience the excessiveness of his thymos.
Trump’s rhetorical tactics are, clearly, calculated to rasp. But the second and third factors that will make Trump’s debate performance an uphill battle involve the negotiated rules themselves. It was Trump’s thumotic excess that made him chase Biden throughout the Spring in search of a debate; it was also Trump’s thumotic excess, his inability to control his “spiritedness,” that led him to accept two rules that clearly advantage the President and disadvantage him. One of those rules is the mic cut-off. Microphones will be muted, according to the CNN debate rules, except for the candidate asked to speak. This negates Trump’s ability to heckle and bully with impunity, to chatter, to overtalk his opponent, a scalpel he used with Machiavellian precision in 2020. “As a debating tactic, Trump’s choice of endless chatter succeeded in dominating the conversation,” concluded Richard Wolff in The Guardian. And although he lost that debate, Trump created enough chaos in a heated exchange about the Supreme Court to rankle even-tempered Biden to actually get angry, in real time. “Will you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential,” he said, clearly rankled. Trump no longer has that dark art within his rhetorical toolbox.
The final difficulty that Trump will face on Thursday night, one that he also poorly negotiated due to his thumotic excess, is the fact that there is no audience. Whatever one thinks of candidate Trump, the far-right populist, he is a formidable public speaker — especially in front of a crowd. He is naturally funny and charismatic, though his humor is often too cruel and too ugly by a whisker. Still, when the crowd pops at a joke or a reference or, quite frankly at the sheer audacity of someone saying things so shameful, it imbues him with a certain power. The laughter of the crowd normalizes Trump’s very un-normal language and style. In negotiating for no audience, he bargained away a tremendous advantage all because of the fact that he needed — needed! — to debate “anytime, anywhere, anyplace.” And, in retrospect, the thumotic excess that brought Trump to that bargaining position involved his weakness vis-a-vis fundraising in March and April.
That disadvantaged position is no longer. It was a temporary situation. The conviction, ironically, turned around his fundraising fortunes. That, of course, and the fact that he took over the RNC in March. So if Trump loses this debate — like he lost the last debate against Biden — it will be because of his “spiritedness,” it will be because he could not wait a few months to negotiate debates from a better bargaining position. And I believe that is indeed what will occur.
Trump’s thumotic excess led to his impatience, which led to his bargaining from a weak position into getting a bad deal on the debates. The author of “The Art of the Deal,” in fine, got schooled by the President. The final lesson is probably coming in two night’s time. And on that night, President Biden will be playing precisely to that thumotic excess, trying to get Trump to explode, which is not an entirely improbable event. President Biden, by contrast, is twofold advantaged in that the mic cutoff rule impedes Trump’s ability to heckle and the lack of an audience erases the laughter that almost certainly would have been to his detriment. Without and audience and with mics cutting out it is as close as one can get to a one-on-one debate, where issues and seriousness are of value. Humor is less important in such a setup. This is the best possible format for Biden. Let’s see what he does with this opportunity.
“Israel’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Tuesday that ultra-Orthodox Jewish students must immediately be conscripted into the military, a decision that could lead to the collapse of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s already-fragile governing coalition, which relies on two ultra-Orthodox parties who oppose enlistment. The court said that in the absence of a law distinguishing between Jewish seminary students and other draftees, Israel’s compulsory service laws must also apply to the ultra-Orthodox. Military service is mandatory for most Israelis once they turn 18, but ultra-Orthodox Jews have been largely exempt.“ (Mizy Clifton/semafor)
“Putin never trusted Barack Obama. He always believed that when American politicians talked about values, it was all hypocrisy, masking some cunning, inevitably anti-Russian plans. In 2013, Putin watched the (fictional) series House of Cards, and he took it as proof that he was right. All his expectations and fears were confirmed: Indeed, American politicians were cynical, cruel, and deceitful. He just needed to wait for the right person to come to power. Back in 2011 and 2012, Putin believed that the mass protests against his third term were organized and funded by the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Therefore, in 2016, he had no doubts. He saw the Democratic candidate as a personal enemy. From the moment Trump was elected, the word Yalta became one of the most popular among Kremlin officials. They were confident that Trump was the right person to agree to such a spectacle. This did not mean that Russian authorities considered Trump ‘their puppet’—the Kremlin never had any means to influence him. Putin simply believed that Trump was morally close and understandable to him: a fellow cynic who also thought that money solved everything. However, the scandal over Russian interference in American elections ruined all these plans. No rapprochement occurred. Moreover, aside from a few brief meetings during international summits, Putin and Trump held only one full-fledged negotiation—in Helsinki in 2018. But now the Kremlin believes that if Trump wins in November, everything will be different. It hopes he will no longer pay attention to the liberal media or the criticism of the Democrats. Moreover, the Kremlin is convinced that Trump is ready (at least rhetorically) to dismantle the old world order and claim credit for creating a new one.” (Mikhail Zygar/VF)
“Obama is increasingly involved in Biden’s campaign, but his role looks different from what it was in 2020, as does their relationship — which has always been far more complicated than understood by much of the public and many Democrats. Largely because of their shared time in office, Biden and Obama remain as close as any two occupants of the Oval Office have been, yet both of them have mused about how their approaches to the job have diverged starkly at times, leading to comparisons that have alternately flattered one and the other over the past three years. Throughout Biden’s presidency, Obama has been careful to be almost universally positive about him, often casting private analysis of the administration in a sympathetic light with regular reminders that the presidency is complicated. Biden has always spoken fondly of Obama but has equally made no secret of his wish to avoid what he regards as some of Obama’s biggest errors in office, including in his interactions with Congress and the military brass, especially over the war in Afghanistan. He has not always taken Obama’s political advice either and has at times outright questioned Obama’s judgment when it came to recent campaigns. (He has not forgotten Obama’s past skepticism of his own presidential ambitions.) Though they still usually see eye-to-eye on big-picture political matters, they have not always kept in regular close touch during Biden’s administration, sometimes leaving any coordination to their aides. Today, there is not much for Biden to consider about Obama’s role beyond the specific ways his old boss might be most useful.” (Gabriel DeBenedetti/NYM)