Donald Trump blew it. Thursday night was his last, best chance to save his Presidency. With a national television audience and a reprieve after his horrible first debate performance and coronavirus hospitalization, the President could have used his second, and final, debate with Joe Biden to make a late play to win the election, which is only eleven days from now. He could have spoken to Americans’ pain and suffering during this unprecedented pandemic and economic crisis. He could have offered a program for recovery, and for his next four years in office.
But he did not. To anyone who has been watching Trump closely these last few years, that is not a surprise. He did not, because he could not. Instead, he said that a vaccine he once promised by October would be approved any day now. “I take full responsibility,” he said of his Administration’s response to the virus. And also, “It’s not my fault that it came here.” The plague was China’s doing, he said, and the blame for failing to pass a coronavirus-relief package was all Nancy Pelosi’s. He promised a health-care plan soon, and to release his tax returns whenever that mysterious, long-running I.R.S. audit is done. He called Biden a crook, and himself the greatest thing to happen for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln. “I am the least racist person in this room,” he insisted to the Black moderator. Biden, meanwhile, is so corrupt that he somehow managed to get money from Russia and China and Ukraine in ways that were utterly nefarious and also, in Trump’s contorted telling, completely unclear. Trump is never Trumpier than when he is behind, and he only knows one mode—of slashing attack and personal grievance—when asked to defend his indefensible record.
This does not, of course, mean the race is over and that Biden has definitely won. That asteroid currently hurtling toward Earth could actually hit. The Russian hackers could strike again: just this week, U.S. intelligence agencies said that Vladimir Putin’s agents are, once more, acting to interfere in the American election on Trump’s behalf. Attorney General William Barr or some super-secret F.B.I. investigation could yet smear Biden in the replay of 2016 that Trump so palpably craves. The polls, while leaning Biden’s way, are still close in battleground states. Trump effectively bashed Biden on Thursday night as a career politician, and career politicians are still not exactly popular in this country. Anything could happen.
It won’t be because of Thursday’s debate, however, which may well be remembered for what it was not. Neither a debacle nor a shouting match, it fell well short of the race-altering reset that Trump needed, even as it cleared the very low bar for mostly civil discourse set by the first encounter between Trump and Biden, an interruption-filled disaster for the President that caused Trump’s already weak poll numbers to sag. This time, after the Commission on Presidential Debates threatened to cut off his microphone, Trump responded by more or less following the rules, and there were fewer outrages to dissect, of either the behavioral or the rhetorical sort. He steered clear of white supremacy and QAnon, and he even complimented the moderator, NBC’s Kristen Welker, at one point, after he and his campaign had spent days beforehand attacking her as biased and unfair. Over on Fox News, Chris Wallace, who moderated that first debate to general dismay, had perhaps the line of the night. Asked what he thought about the second contest between the two men, Wallace replied, “I’m jealous.”
As much as Trump proved unable to win the debate, the likelier scenario all along was that Biden might still lose it. Few Americans are undecided about Trump after four years of his divisive, inescapable Presidency, but, if the polls are to be believed, there remain at least some swing-state voters who are not yet sure about Biden. For months, Trump and his surrogates have gone on and on about the former Vice-President, suggesting he is too old, too incoherent, and just too sleepy to survive the debates with Trump. Right before Thursday night’s session, the Fox commentator Brit Hume once again came right out and called Biden “senile.” But Biden seemed neither sleepy nor senile during the heated ninety-minute debate. He held his own against the inevitable Trump barrage. He delivered prepared one-liners with the right amount of outrage and incredulity. “He’s a very confused guy,” Biden said of Trump when the President claimed, per usual, that Biden was some sort of radical socialist pawn. “He thinks he’s running against somebody else.” Biden was especially strong on the issue that matters most of all, Trump’s incoherent, lethal response to the coronavirus, and he promised a government that might actually act in the face of the country’s metastasizing crises.
Biden, in short, came into the night as the consistent leader in the race, ahead in the national polls and in all the major battleground states, and that is how he left it. “Biden did not do a face plant,” the nonpartisan election analyst Charlie Cook tweeted afterward. “That is all he needed to do.”
Four years ago, in his final debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump called the upcoming election—which everyone, including Trump, still thought he was going to lose—“rigged.” In the previous debate, he sought to distract from the many allegations of his misconduct toward women—the infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” tape had been released days earlier—by bringing along as his guests several of the women who accused Clinton’s husband of sexual abuse. This time, Biden’s son, not his spouse, was the target, but the gimmick was essentially the same.
There are no new plays in the Trump playbook. Everything is a repeat of 2016, when he pulled off the impossible and beat Clinton. Everything. Hence the last-minute announcement of Trump’s guest for the evening debate: Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s estranged former business partner, who has accused the younger Biden son of dirty dealings abroad, in a wannabe scandal that Trump & Co. are determined to elevate to a last-minute campaign issue, no matter the facts or lack thereof. Trump was even willing to get impeached over his effort to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden in Ukraine, and now, in the final days of his campaign, the President is willing to do just about anything to put that dirt out there, even if it is manufactured by his allies. It was hard to understand from Trump’s account at the debate just what he was accusing Biden of, beyond being right in the middle of his family’s affairs, but even that seemed tenuous, all the more so when, the same evening, the Wall Street Journal published a major debunking of the allegation that Biden had anything to do with his son’s overseas business.
Bobulinski was at the debate in Nashville to take the attention off everything else: the pandemic, the economic crisis, the lies, Trump’s own heavily indebted businesses, his Chinese bank account, his payment of just seven hundred and fifty dollars in federal income taxes during each of his first two years in office. But inviting Bobulinski didn’t work out the way that Trump intended. For one thing, the President had a hard time explaining exactly what Hunter Biden had done wrong and, most importantly, how Joe Biden was connected to it. There was something about a “laptop from hell” and how Biden was hardly an “innocent baby.” Anyone who does not watch Fox News intensively would have been hard-pressed to decipher Trump’s claims. There is also the problem, for Trump, that Hunter Biden is not actually running for President. Trump is, and his actual opponent mostly avoided descending into complicated arguments about his son’s business dealings, instead attacking Trump for his own questionable foreign business ties and less than transparent finances. I’m not sure that Bobulinski’s name will be remembered next week, never mind next year.
That’s because, whether Trump admits it or not, the country is in a historic crisis on his watch. On the same day that Trump appeared on national television attacking his opponent’s son, almost a thousand Americans died of COVID-19, and more than seventy-four thousand new cases of the disease were recorded, one of the highest single-day totals in the U.S. since the pandemic began. With cases rising in almost every state, expect more such days as Election Day approaches.
Yet Trump, who has remained a fierce coronavirus denier even after contracting the disease, insisted once again that it was no big deal. “It’s going away,” he said peevishly, during the debate. “We’re rounding the corner.” But that is not true, and there’s a horrific American body count—the highest in the world—to prove it. A whole lot of talking followed, but Biden’s opening salvo about the pandemic may have been the only one-liner that mattered on Thursday night. “Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America,” he said. Trump, more obsessed with Hunter Biden’s e-mails than with the plague stalking Americans, hardly bothered to rebut that statement. Eleven days from now, the voters will deliver their answer.
