The first presidential debate of 2024 might also be the last—or at least, the last between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His voice weak and memory failing, Biden performed so poorly that putting him on stage was pure sadism and, for his party, tantamount to suicide. Biden isn’t too old for a second term; he’s too old for his first.
Trump is as old as Biden was in 2020, but he’s sharper than Biden was then, and by comparison with today’s Biden the ex-president seems like a brash bronze colossus. Trump was so confident that he wandered into minefields that would have been hazardous if he was facing any opponent more competent than Biden. Trump’s abortion answer was predictably tangled, emphasizing states’ rights but also the radicalism of the Democrats’ support for late-term and even partial-birth abortions—yet if, as Trump implied, those 8- and 9-month procedures are obvious to all as infanticide, they presumably should be banned by whatever level of government is necessary, with the federal government stepping in if states permit such horrors. Of course, if that’s true, then those for whom the humanity of the unborn is apparent even before the third trimester would be justified in calling for the federal government to overrule liberal states’ laws in other cases, and abortion wouldn’t re a state matter at all.
Yet pro-lifers who are displeased by Trump’s answers weren’t left in any doubt about how bad Biden would continue to be if he wins re-election. He wants to re-nationalize the issue in order to permit abortion everywhere. While single-issue abortion-rights voters will surely stick with the president for that reason, Trump’s triangulating will let him keep results-oriented pro-lifers while also giving him a chance of winning over voters on either side of the issue who are satisfied with a state-by-state approach. Roe was overturned in the first place not thanks to the efforts of pro-lifers alone, but thanks to originalists and federalists working with pro-lifers to overturn a decision wrong in method and substance alike. Trump’s approach keeps the victorious Dobbs coalition together.
Biden, by comparison, is touted by his supporters as a master of policy minutiae, but last night he often struggled to hold his train of thought in the middle of a sentence, leading to a disastrous gaff early in the night—“we finally beat Medicare,” he announced—that was echoed by another halting blunder when discussing the entitlement in his closing statement. Democrats have insisted with growing desperation in recent weeks that Biden really is still mentally competent, the latest iteration of this line, heavily promoted days before the debate, being that deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had “admitted” that Biden was still lucid in all their policy discussions. Before that, the Democrats’ mantra was “don’t believe your eyes” when photos and videos showed Biden appearing to wander off in the midst of a meeting with foreign leaders. Whatever value Biden might have reaped from such campaigns was more than wiped out by his own hushed, stumbling words and fazed look throughout the debate. The man is not dealing with a senior moment or two; he’s fading into senility, and no one can claim he’ll be more vigorous or cogent four years from now.
Until last night, many ambitious Democrats might have been content to see the Biden-Harris ticket go down to defeat, clearing the way for the party to make big gains in the 2026 midterms—with Trump rather than Biden in the White House—and leaving the field for the 2028 nomination wide open, without the burden of a second-term Biden record as a millstone around the nominee’s neck. Politics is a long game, and a party can make long-term advances from short-term sacrifices, even in presidential elections. But Biden now appears so feeble that there’s a dire danger he could start to drag down his party’s entire ballot. A blowout loss for Democrats in the House and Senate, and a lousy performance in state elections, would make 2024 so bad that a predictable 2026 pendulum swing away from Trump and the GOP might not be enough to restore the Democrats to dominance. Would-be future Democratic nominees like California’s Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer now have to fear that Biden will leave the party so shattered that their own ambitions might be jeopardized. To be sure, until now Democrats running for the U.S. Senate this year have been outperforming Biden in battleground-state polls. But if Biden res as much of an embarrassment as he was last night, the party as a whole is at risk.
Is there time for Biden to resign from office or refuse the party’s nomination in August? Would letting Kamala Harris ascend to the top of the ticket actually lead to any better result than sticking with Biden? Could even a white woman like Whitmer, to say nothing of a white man like Newsom, shove Harris aside and deny the nomination to the black woman who’s next in line? The answer to all these questions is still, most likely, “No.” Disposing of Biden at this late date would only make the party seem all the more ridiculous, when it has no choice but to run on the record it inherits from Biden anyway. Harris will not step aside quietly, and no politician as calculating as Whitmer or Newsom would favor the odds of winning in November after the agony of deposing Biden and thwarting Harris, only to be left with less than three months to mount a presidential campaign. It’s a kamikaze mission.
The Democrats are most likely stuck with Biden, and if he goes, Harris will take his place. Four years ago the party made the bet that Biden, an avuncular figure whose decrepitude was masked by the restrictions COVID imposed on campaigning, could beat Trump as a figure of stability and nostalgia—Biden would remind voters not only of the placid Obama-Biden era but also of such Irish-ish Democrats past as Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy. The working-class white voters who made Trump president in 2016 would defect to Biden in numbers significant enough to cost Trump the Rust Belt, and with it the presidency. The plan worked, only from that moment on, Democrats were stuck with a man who evoked the right memories but whose own memory was deteriorating by the day. The price of victory in 2020 would be defeat in 2024—unless Democrats could succeed in convincing a timorous GOP to inflict another Mitt Romney on itself, or failing that a bold but unpopular orthodox conservative.
The GOP elite would have cooperated with the Democrats in that. But the voters stayed loyal to Trump, and now he appears to be on track to win more states than he did in 2016. That’s not just because Biden is old. It’s also because Biden’s record is painful and humiliating to most Americans: Inflation is painful, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and Biden’s floundering response to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza has been humiliating, as has his administration’s inability to get the border under control even for the sake of winning an election.
The voters who backed Trump in this year’s primaries, and who have stayed true to him since 2020, were rewarded last night. He was in prime form, emphasizing two of the three themes that made him a tribune for a new populism in 2016. He made immigration restriction the issue of the night, and he rejected the interventionist, internationalist consensus in foreign policy. He was in no sense soft on Vladimir Putin, yet he insisted that NATO presents a raw deal for America, and that Europe is capable of paying for its own defense. Trump was also unabashed about celebrating the tax cuts and regulatory reductions of his first term, despite Biden’s attempts to demonize tax relief as something only benefiting the rich. The former president likewise didn’t back down from his proposal for a wide 10 percent tariff, though industrial strategy wasn’t so prominent as foreign policy or immigration in his debate remarks.
Trump reminded everyone in the wide coalition that has supported in the past of why he was their choice, and he drew a contrast between his record in office and Joe Biden’s so stark that voters who simply want to return to the way things were before COVID have every reason to cast their ballots for the GOP ticket this time. Trump didn’t have to make Biden’s age an issue; Biden did that all by himself. What Trump did was to paint the ugliness of the Biden era in the harshest hues possible. Biden could call Trump a liar, but Americans have felt, as well as seen, the truth for themselves. And the dismal truth about Biden’s record is as plain as the diminished capacity of the president himself.
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