No one who watched the first presidential debate of 2024, except maybe Jill Biden, believes that Joe did well last night. Excusing his performance on the basis of "well, he was sick" is laughable at best and downright delusional at worst. Colds don't make politicians who have worked in the field for 50-plus years completely lose track of everything happening around them and mistake million for billion and billion for trillion multiple times in one hour.
For the first time in his presidency, I simultaneously felt terrible for and furious at Biden. It felt like I was watching a feeble old man being forced to desperately fight to seem like his younger self. Anger rose in me as I realized how selfish he and his team must be to take the Democratic nomination, knowing how far Biden has fallen physically and mentally.
It is crucial that anyone in Biden’s camp who has respect for him should be urgently attempting to get him to step down. The man has much to be proud of, he’s spent over five decades serving our country as a part of the government, became the VP to the first black president in our country’s history for eight years, and then became president to dethrone the sitting president, saving many people from what they deem a plague on our country’s democracy. Biden has seemingly been a good father to his children and a good husband to his wife. It's time to step down, retire, and enjoy whatever time he has left with his family.
Incredibly, Biden did so horribly that he made Trump look like an intellectual in what I believe to be one of his worst performances as well. Trump seemed to break the record for the most lies uttered in 90 minutes, refused to answer any difficult questions (or simply couldn’t), and went on several non-sequitur tangents, having to be asked to respond to the initial question after minutes of rambling. At one point, the moderator asked Trump how he plans to deal with the opiate crisis because the problem only got worse under his rule. Trump responded to this by saying it has never been better than it was under him, and Biden is doing horribly. A 30-second Google search can dispel this lie. Top political scientists would have difficulty dispelling his hundreds of lies in real-time, let alone uneducated voters watching at home. Trump also seemed physically slower and weaker than I’ve ever seen him. Despite all of this, Trump ran laps around Biden.
Before yesterday's debate, I would’ve put my money on Biden in the fall. Asking Biden to drop out and allow someone else to take the nomination due to his declining health would have been humiliating and possibly fractured the voters against trump. However, the worst case scenario is here, and humiliation is the least of the democrats worries.