No More Biden Time, Joe's Gotta Go (2024)

Well, so much for hoping that President Joe Biden would rise to the occasion. In last night's CNN debate he stumbled out onto the stage looking like he didn't know if he could make it to the podium and then sounded like it for the next 90 minutes. Whether sickness, fatigue, or old age explains his hoarse, clueless demeanor is immaterial. We are too close to the election to parse the reasons for his weird and worrisome performance. The relatively normal version of former PresidentDonald Trump unexpectedly showed up to this debate and absolutely mopped the floor with the president. There's no sugarcoating this: Joe Biden needs to drop out of this race immediately if Democrats, and the country, are to avoid the history-warping disaster of a second Trump term.

The debate started out badly and got worse. Biden's opening remarks were clipped and slow, and he immediately reached for a greatest hits album from the 2020 election, including Trump's recommendation of injecting bleach from the Covid-19 pandemic. He stumbled repeatedly out of the gate, saying, for example, that there are "a thousand trillionaires in America" before correcting himself to say "billionaires." The president, appearing lost, confused and on his heels, was so distractingly terrible that it drowned out any possible substantive takeaways from the debate. That's a shame, because Trump's bombast was as absurd as ever, beginning with his claim that "everybody wanted" abortion returned to the states. The former president lied over and over and over again, as he has been doing for years, and Biden was incapable of joining the fray.

Biden just didn't look or sound like he was in his right mind. When he tried to say "constitutional scholars" it came out "consishal scholars." Trimester was "shimester." It is no exaggeration to say that most people probably didn't hear what he was saying because his dismal performance was so distracting that it was impossible to concentrate on anything anyone was saying. Anyone with aging parents or grandparents was likely hit with the terrible, helpless feeling of not understanding the words of someone they love and care about. But most people don't have to worry that their declining loved one is the only thing standing between them and autocracy. We do.

It is, of course, hard to comment on Biden's demeanor without seeming disrespectful to the elderly. But when he was listening to the moderators' questions, there is no other way to say it: he looked confused and almost completely out of it. Talking about the border, he said, "And I'm going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the – the total initiative relative to what we're going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers."

In a question about the military, he talked about Agent Orange for no apparent reason. He mixed up WWI and WWII. He couldn't say "United Nations Security Council" without incredibly worrisome difficulty that seemed to have little to do with a stutter. He said something about having "beat Medicare." In his closing statement—two minutes to save the country!-—he bizarrely focused on the tax system and claimed that Trump had raised everyone's taxes. I could go on, but what's the point? You watched the same debate that I did, and I'm sure you felt the same way.

It wasn't lost on Trump. At one point he said, "I don't think he knows what he said either." He pounced on Biden's lines like he was tipped off about them ahead of time, like Kevin Costner telling the batter that Nuke Laloosh was going to throw a fastball in "Bull Durham." When Biden brought up his opponent's infamous "suckers and losers" quote, Trump turned to him and denied it categorically. "He made up the suckers and losers, so he should apologize to me now." Biden pushed back but the damage was done.

Of course, both CNN and the moderators of this absolute fiasco should be ashamed of themselves. They let Trump freebase lies and hallucinations without any pushback whatsoever. "That's why you had no terror at all under my administration," Trump said at one point. There were, in fact, multiple terrorist attacks in the United States under his administration. Trump later claimed that Biden has "destroyed Social Security and Medicare." How exactly? No one thought it was important to ask. But Biden couldn't capitalize at all, and the moderators seemed disinterested in correcting him. Biden said something about Iran giving American troops brain damage, and that Trump did nothing about it. Not only was it a weird response, it also isn't true, given that Trump ordered the assassination of a top Iranian military commander right before he "left" office.

Please don't misunderstand: Trump was terrible throughout the entire proceedings. His very loose grasp on normalcy started slipping five minutes into the debate. He went on a long and bizarre tirade about Nancy Pelosi and her alleged responsibility for January 6. He concocted bizarre lies about how Democrats want to murder babies after they are born, a lie repeated so often by GOP politicians that it no longer seems as brazen and outrageous as it actually is. He often sounded like a total crackpot, but when it was turned back over to Biden, the president simply could not muster a single, sustained and coherent thought. That made Trump the winner of exchange after exchange after exchange, by a kind of fumfering forfeit.

And if Biden wants to avoid forfeiting the election—and American democracy—to Donald Trump, he needs to get gone, the sooner the better.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.