Joe Biden Set All the Rules in the Presidential Debate 2024—And Still Got Trounced by Donald Trump

It was an awful night.

Donald Trump is an aspiring authoritarian, a liar, a bigot, a criminal—not to mention an idiot. His presidency was an unmitigated disaster. But most people knew that going into Thursday night’s debate. The question heading into the evening was whether President Joe Biden could overcome the stubborn concerns that have been a storm cloud over his election bid: the unfavorable poll numbers, the intra-party divisions, and, of course, the matter of his age and vigor.

That last part was, unfortunately, the story of the night Thursday. Biden struggled. His voice was hoarse. He strained to make an impression. Trump lied and lied and lied, spewed bullshit and bullshit and more bullshit—but Biden seemed unable to block the blows, let alone land any haymakers of his own. The closest he came? “You have the morals of an alley cat,” Biden said as he ticked off a few of Trump’s civil and legal issues, including the 34 felonies he was recently convicted on.

But by that point, the damage was done. Trump was as mendacious and horrifying as ever—and looked every one of his 78 years, under the caked-on makeup and curiously coiffed hair. But he came out of the gate with more energy than Biden, and that energy overpowered the 81-year-old president’s efforts to bring him back to reality. “I really don’t know what he said,” Trump said after one Biden attack. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

Biden was able to beat back those kinds of barbs when the two met on the debate stage four years ago. “Will you shut up, man?” an exasperated Biden asked that time around, on his way to a 2020 victory that ended Trump’s chaotic four years in office and brought substantive policy changes on a number of fronts.

But this time, the president had trouble making that positive case for his presidency, and one imagines many of his surrogates—from Vice President Kamala Harris on down—could have done better. Biden reportedly had a cold during the proceedings, which would explain the raspy voice. But so many Democrats would’ve made mincemeat of Trump when the former president claimed, for instance, that “we had H20, the best numbers ever” in a typically-asinine response to a climate change question. Biden found himself litigating the size of Trump’s height and getting cut off on a “by the way…” after running up against the rules his own campaign put forth.

The mic cut-off and the lack of a crowd was supposed to allow Biden to focus on substance, to keep Trump from steamrolling him, as is the former president’s preferred debate style. But he still let Trump steamroll him, getting sidetracked by a debate over the number of presidential historians who rank his predecessor as the worst of all time. “Look it up, go online,” Biden said. “159, 158—I don’t know the exact number—presidential historians, they’ve had meetings and they voted. ‘Who is the worst president in American history?’ Best to worst. They said he was the worst in all of American history.”

And Trump could somehow be president again, if Biden and the Democrats aren’t careful. This is an election, as Democrats have rightly warned, that the future of American democracy depends on. Yet the man standing between us and Trump’s nascent authoritarianism somehow got suckered into an extended exchange about their respective golf handicaps. “I just won two club championships…to do that, you have to be quite smart, and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way, and I do it,” Trump said, after boasting about being administered and having “aced” two cognitive tests. “ “He doesn’t do it—he can’t hit the ball 50 yards.” Biden’s response? “I’d be happy to have a driving contest with him,” the president said. “I got my handicap, when I was vice president, down to a six.” As Trump smirked one of those big, smug smirks of his, and suggested his opponent’s “biggest lie” was about his golf game, Biden amended it: “I was an eight handicap.”

“I’ve seen you swing,” Trump said, cutting Biden off. “I know how you swing. Let’s not act like children.”

That threatened to overshadow the central question of the night: “Will you accept the results of this election regardless of who wins?” asked Dana Bash, who with Jake Tapper was solid in hosting the contest. Trump, who tried to overthrow democracy the last time Biden beat him, was equivocal. “If it’s a fair and legal and good election,” he finally said, after several promptings, “absolutely.” That should be the story of the night—that the Republican nominee, for the third time in a row, is a corrupt demagogue slowly wrapping his hands around the throat of American democracy. Instead, it’s this: “I think conversations range from whether [Biden] should be in this race tomorrow morning,” MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said Thursday, “to what was wrong with him.”