Thursday night was the president’s biggest misstep along the campaign trail.
Before Thursday’s CNN debate even started, as Donald Trump deboarded from his plane, it was evident that Melania Trump did not come along to support her man. Jill Biden, however, did come to support her man … quite literally when she rushed on stage after the debate to help guide him off the platform, taking secure hold of his arm, leading him in the right direction, and then steadying him as he feebly felt out his first step down on the path that will end his career as president.
From the first moment of the debate as the current president entered, trouble became evident. Biden strutted onto the platform in his pretend-I’m-strong brisk gate and, turning slightly to the side, beaming as he waved to a crowd that wasn’t there in what has become classic Biden style.
“Folks, how are you?” said the current president to a room that CNN had said would have no audience, not even family or staff, present. No one but the production team.
Biden’s main achievement during the debate was that he managed to stand the entire time without falling over … or falling asleep. He kept his eyes open throughout the hour-and-a-half marathon, often gazing blankly around the room as he listened to Trump.
Nothing has ever united Democrats in the mainstream media so much as this career-changing trial of the two leading presidential candidates. Here, on a stage set up by Trump’s leading media antagonist, CNN, one would almost think the Democrats had planned to use this platform to initiate a candidate change if the debate didn’t go well because not one of CNN’s commentators spoke on Biden’s behalf after the debate was done. To a person, as though they were Republican apparatchiks, they declared the debate a total loss for #NoMoJo:
CNNs chief national correspondent and election political analyst John King, exclaimed right out of the chute that Democrats were saying, “Oh, my God what do we do about this?” King held up his phone and indicated text messages were streaming in to him from Democratic leaders who were chilled to the bone by the debate.
“I have never ever had what happened tonight that started in the middle of the debate,” said King.
David Axelrod, former Obama campaign strategist, declared, “Democrats were shocked about how he came into the debate with his voice weak and cracking…. It’s the one night that helped confirm everybody’s fears.”
CNN anchor and senior political correspondent Abby Phillip, typically, the objective voice in the room, concurred: ”Panic among Democrats is above anything we’ve ever heard. There is a real concern here that damage has been done that cannot be undone. They are now seeing a president they don’t necessarily believe can do this another four years.”
One of the most partial members on the panel, political analyst Van Jones, even admitted, “I worked for Joe Biden. I love Joe Biden, but there is no doubt Biden did not do well at all. He had a test to restore confidence in his base, and he didn’t do that. That was not what we needed for Joe Biden and it is personally painful.”
From the Republican side of the panel, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Trump’s White House Director of Strategic Communications and Assistant to the President in 2020, said, “I’m someone who believes Trump is a threat to democracy, but Biden lost in just a few minutes. If [democracy] is the threat, he’s not the one [to take it on]. It was hard to watch. I had to occasionally look away because it was so painful.”
It seems Democrats—and even Never-Again Trumpers—all over are worried they are going to lose to Trump. If Biden is their ticket, he’s a ticket on a one-way train wreck along the tracks to Nowhere-Anyone-Wants-to-Go.
Following up on the panel, CNN’s Chris Wallace summarized, “Joe Biden needed to change the narrative, and he did change the narrative. He sunk his campaign tonight.”