Well, that was a disaster (2024)

There’s no mincing words—the first presidential debate was a travesty of the highest order. The leading story is President Joe Biden’s horrendous performance and the political crisis it’s sparked among the Democrats. But the failure of the media, not to mention former President Donald Trump’s antics, should also be called out. TRNN contributor Adam H. Johnson joins Mel Buer and Marc Steiner for a postmortem on the debate, and, from the way it’s looking, American democracy itself.

Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: David Hebden

Transcript

Mel Buer: Welcome back, my friends, to The Real News Network podcast. I’m your host, Mel Buer.

Before we dive into today’s analysis of the first 2024 presidential debate, I would like to make an important ask of you, our listeners. Whether you’ve got our shows on while you’re making coffee in the morning, put on our podcast during your commute to and from work, or give us a listen throughout the workday, The Real News Network is committed to bringing you ad-free, independent journalism that you can count on. We care a lot about what we do and it’s through donations from dedicated listeners like you that we can keep on doing it.

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Today we’re talking about last night’s first presidential debate, an event that was billed as a historical, momentous occasion for all involved, where former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden squared off against one another for the first time since 2020. It was quite a watch.

With us today to discuss last night’s debate is Adam Johnson, In These Times and Real News Network columnist and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed; and our very own Marc Steiner, host of The Marc Steiner Show on The Real News Network.

Welcome, guys. Let’s dive in.

Marc Steiner: Let’s do it.

Adam Johnson: Thank you for having me on.

Mel Buer: I think probably a good place to start is to discuss the immediate reaction that filtered through the internet after the disastrous performance by President Joe Biden last night. Democratic Party officials were texting reporters at CNN and MSNBC talking about the aggressive panic that was filtering through the ranks, and potentially talking about pushing Biden to drop off the ticket ahead of the DNC in August.

Where do we want to start with this? Quite a, I would say, sudden change, based on what’s been filtering out as the Democratic Party for the last year. Wouldn’t you say, Adam?

Adam Johnson: Yeah. If I can play pundit here for a second rather than media critic, there’s obviously been grumblings about Biden’s very, I think it’s fair to say, if we’re going to be in the reality-based community, his very obvious, manifest cognitive problems, to put it gently. You look at video even from 2020, God forbid one looks at video from 2016, he’s obviously completely different. It’s very clear there’s some kind of decline going on. This is, I think, manifest to any intellectually honest person.

But the idea, I think, was that they could stave it off and that, regardless of that, he was a fundamentally good person who had the working man’s interest at heart, which I’ll dispute. But he certainly was, and I think it’s probably fair to say, at least on the domestic front, assuming — Which, most of our media doesn’t view Palestinians as human beings — But assuming one accepts that they’re not, that he was fundamentally a decent guy and was better than Trump on pretty much everything. And assuming Gaza, let’s say, is a wash. That that calculation would push him over the edge, Weekend At Bernie’s style.

But there had been grumblings for, obviously, a while. You had in 2020 even some people gently touch the issue. Because you don’t want to be too explicit, because then, of course, you, one worries, or these Democratic pundits, worry about fueling Republican attack ads.

But David Ignatius, a few months ago at The Washington Post, who’s kind of a CIA mouthpiece, was like, hey, buddy, it’s time to wrap it up. Obviously Jon Stewart got a lot of flak for when he stated the obvious, when he said the Emperor was only wearing a G-string.

But everyone hand waved it away, because, again, there was this threat of Trump. Biden had beaten Trump before, so there was a sense that he had a very long leash because of the fact that, unlike Hillary Clinton, he actually did beat Trump, and that he was broadly popular amongst key demos.

But then he began tanking in the polls. And then, of course, last night, I think where he clearly failed, he fails to maintain a thought for longer than 10 seconds, 15 seconds. If it’s a quick little punchy 10 or 15 second sound bite, he can make it. But it’s very much a struggle to watch him try to do anything over that. I think that, again, that much is obvious.

Now, that isn’t to say Trump doesn’t also have cognitive decline. He’s only three years younger. And I think it’s clear that he does, but it’s just not as profound. And also, I’m pretty sure Trump’s, maybe I’m bordering on libelous here, but I think he’s probably on some kind of amphetamine cocktail that, for whatever reason, Biden is not on. And this is obvious to everybody, right?

And so today we had a full-blown media, well last night and this morning, you had a full-blown media acknowledgement. This is just the front page of The New York Times. Frank Bruni: “Biden cannot go on this.” Nicholas Kristof: “President Biden, it’s time to drop out.” Thomas Friedman: “Joe Biden is a good man and a good president. He must bow out of the race.” Paul Krugman: “The best president of my adult life needs to withdraw.” And of course, Ezra Klein has been one of the early advocates of him dropping out.

This is now, from my opinion — And again, I’m curious what you all think — It seems like a Rubicon has been crossed. It seems like the way that coups work, whether it’s a coup in 2014 in Turkey or in Bolivia in 2019, or, in this case, a very soft and media coup, you passed the point of no return where you can’t really play it off.

And what all these articles just did and what last night even Claire McCaskill, who’s a very loyal, centrist partisan, even some MSNBC panelists, John King at CNN — None of this is ideological, none of these people are left-wing or hate Biden for his support of genocide or whatever — What you’ve done is you’ve cut Trump’s ad campaign for him. He’s just going to say, here’s what the liberal media and Democrats think about Biden.

I don’t see how you come back from that, even if Biden decides to power through. Because I think, in terms of practical legal reasons, he’s the only one who can really make that decision, that his nomination is more or less a done deal, and the mechanisms to undo that would require a degree of coordination that simply doesn’t exist within the Democratic Party — Unless, of course, they’re trying to stop Bernie Sanders, but that’s a separate grievance just with me, more or less. I’m one of those Japanese soldiers who’s still fighting in 1953. I’m not letting that go.

But in this case, it seemed like there was a line that was crossed. And again, I’m curious what you all think. But optically, I don’t see how you come back from that. Because if I’m the RNC, I’m just cutting an ad with Paul Krugman and Claire McCaskill and all these top Dems saying, yeah, this guy’s brain is not working, more or less is what they said. They were obviously more gentle about it.

And it seems like the only people not acknowledging that reality are those who are playing to the diehard blue wave crowd who view everything as a team sport and view everything as locked in. That Dear Leader has made his decision to stay in and we all have to play our respective roles.

And there comes a point where reality becomes too obvious. Obviously he’s tanking in the polls, he’s tanking in the betting markets, for whatever merit one puts onto that. And, more importantly — I think this is really the thing that’s pushed it over the edge — In addition to the fact that last night there were two questions where he genuinely struggled to make a coherent thought and it looked bad, objectively, was that he’s beginning to really pull down other Democrats down ballot in terms of the Senate races, House races. Everybody, dogcatcher.

There is a bottom-up revolt against that because the splits between how Democrats are polling versus how he’s polling are enormous. In some states, they’re as much as 10 points. So my guess is this is the moment where it’s like, okay, let’s…

And it seems like, from a media perspective, they’ve definitely crossed. It’s like the line from The Wire: “If you come at the king, you best not miss.” That’s how coups work. And they’ve come after the king, and if they do miss and he powers through or his team decides to power through, I don’t know how Biden even comes back from that because the narrative is now a bipartisan consensus.

Mel Buer: Right. Well, I want to throw this to you, but before I throw this to you, Marc, I want to draw attention to the fact that if you look at Biden’s debate performance in 2020 to what we saw last night, it really is night and day.

There’s some videos circulating on social media of some of the responses that he had in 2020. He sounds far more coherent. He has a strong grasp of policy. He knows what he’s talking about. He’s able to spar with Trump in a meaningful way that is bringing his base together and encouraging the voters that may be on the fence that he’s got a handle on what’s going on.

And again, the Biden campaign has put a lot of money and time into presenting Biden as this natural choice, this good challenger to a second Trump term.

Marc, you didn’t really come away from last night’s debate feeling very confident in that anymore. Would you say that’s a fair assessment?

Marc Steiner: Yep. I mean, I came away from watching that debate last night absolutely depressed and angry. The choices that America faces at this moment are really dangerous because Biden clearly is not up to the task and Trump is a racist neo-fascist. And that’s what we’re stuck with at the moment.

I don’t see Biden’s ego allowing him to be pushed out of the race. It’ll take a lot to make him move over. I have a difficult time seeing that happen.

Look, I was saying this to friends this morning about this, thinking about Real News and how this place is run and how you run institutions, how you run governments. People my age — I’m their age — People my age have had their day to run organizations, to run a country, to run the government. And your role is different as you get older, and they have to be aware of that. And neither one of them wants to be aware of that.

I think that we’re facing an utter disaster, because the momentum against Biden because of his performance could turn the country over to the right wing in Senate, House, and the White House. I think we have to really think about that.

And I think that, I talked to two people really early this morning, two congressional representatives who are on the left who I really respect a lot, and they’re terrified that the Democrats are going to lose everything. And since there’s no left-wing party, there’s no left that can actually fill the vacuum, that would mean that we are facing a really frightening next four years, and it could be a disaster for this democracy in total.

So I can’t overemphasize what a dangerous moment we’re facing. The people on the inside have to convince Biden not to run, and I don’t see that happening.

Mel Buer: As a thought experiment, because these conversations have really opened up debate about what an open convention would look like, in the off chance that Jill Biden can convince, if she even wants to, convince her husband to step aside and open the doors for a potentially younger, a different nominee, what’s the process? What does an open convention look like at the DNC in August?

Marc, you’ve spent a lot of time covering Democratic conventions. What does that process look like, for anyone in our audience who isn’t quite aware or doesn’t know what that might entail?

Marc Steiner: An open convention without any agenda about where you’re going and what you think is going to happen is a disaster, because the infighting will erupt and it could implode. The Democrats could absolutely implode in an open convention. It sounds horrendously anti-democratic, but they better get their shit together before that.

Adam Johnson: I tend to agree. I think, look, if they can coordinate like they did in March of 2020 to rally around Biden to prevent Sanders, it seems like they can rally around someone. And those names are pretty obvious. They’re ideologically, in the case of Newsom, demographically aligned with Biden. You’re just plugging and playing.

If one’s goal is to beat Trump, I think that’s a no-brainer. Because people say, oh, well, they have their own problems, like a Gavin Newsom or what have you. And it’s like, yeah, whatever, but they’re not dying on stage. I don’t want to sound cruel about it.

But the people like Paul Krugman and Frank Bruni and David Ignatius do not intervene here unless this is a DEFCON 2 critical situation. These are not frivolous people. These are not people who don’t have their fingers on the pulse of the elites in the party, and frankly, Wall Street or people who fear Trump… This is not ideological, this is purely a process criticism.

And if Biden was 20 years younger, obviously we would not even be having this conversation, and he would probably be up 10, 15 points. But 74% of Americans have said they have issues with his cognitive issues.

And I actually think the framing of age is actually the wrong framing. Maybe I’m being a bit of a precious left-winger here in terms of ageism, but I actually think there are plenty of 80-plus year olds who… Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese are still pumping out bangers. Just the other day, Dick Van Dyke was tap dancing on the red carpet. He’s 98 years old. Bernie Sanders is perfectly cognitively fine.

The issue is not age. It’s the fact that he has manifest problems answering basic questions. And I think, in many ways, the age discourse has permitted people to dance around that fact and abstract it out into this generational discourse. And I actually think that’s not the issue. The issue is he can’t complete a fucking sentence without meandering off. Whether he’s 55 or whether he’s 95 doing that, that’s a fucking problem.

Marc Steiner: Two things here, man. A, when we talk about age. I interviewed Studs Terkel a dozen times over the course of his life, we got to know each other pretty well. He was really brilliant, could speak and talk and think up until the moment he died, almost. Some people can, some people can’t. Biden can’t. And the greatest danger here is that we are facing a right-wing, neo-fascist tide in this country, and it’s huge.

If you study Reconstruction in our history, you can see the roots of it, you can see where it comes from, and you can see its power. And it’s been building, it’s been building since 1970, since ’72, I should say. They’ve been building this movement, and they’re on the verge of seizing power in our country because Biden is going to run, and Biden can’t handle the race. That’s the danger we face.

And so that’s why the liberal capitalists in this country are so frightened at the moment, because they don’t want the right wing of their class to take power.

Adam Johnson: Yeah. No, it’s definitely it. I think that’s absolutely correct.

Marc Steiner: And we are in a really, really scary spot. It’s so scary on a personal level, I want my kids to get foreign passports.

Adam Johnson: That’s why all these leftists being like, oh, you should have listened to the left about Biden’s age. And it’s like, yeah, okay, a lot of leftists did say that, but this is absolutely me coming from the center too. This is not a leftist versus right issue. David Ignatius is not a left-winger, and he said it nine months ago. And obviously, in 2020, people had broached it on CNN in a very gentle way.

So this is very much a process criticism, it is not an ideological proxy battle, as much as I’d love it to be one. I’d love somehow Biden’s inability to speak to be somehow validating my leftist priors. It isn’t really the issue. The issue is they just committed… Well, you could argue that they backed him in 2020 for ideological reasons, knowing these risks. I think that’s a fair assessment. I think that’s true because this was obvious on the campaign trail in Iowa when he would sort of mutter off, and even in February and January of 2020.

So that’s true. But I think really it is just not a sexy ideological issue, it is fundamentally about his ability to look like he can complete sentences, which is, as it turns out, pretty much the most important part about being a president. It’s fundamentally a speech-giving job.

Marc Steiner: It is. And when you look at him physically, though, as well, people watch… Deal with the reality here, that people do not want to put a doddering old man in office. A huge part of people who don’t want that. He can barely walk his ass off the stage. The folks like Obama and other people in the Democratic Party need to sit down and talk with this man. They need to say, it’s time. You’ve got to back off. We’ll use a medical excuse, anything, to back off, to give it to somebody else so that you can stop the right wing from coming into power.

Mel Buer: Before we move on to Adam’s bread and butter, which is CNN’s handling of moderating the debate —

Marc Steiner: Oh my God [inaudible].

Mel Buer: …I do want to draw attention to some of the conversation. I know this is not necessarily just an age thing, but there is something to be said for the way that power is consolidated in politics in American society, and that it really comes down to tenure and seniority rather than the merits of younger individuals.

And unfortunately, in both sides of our political system, younger folks who have the ability to inject energy into the parties, or the ability to understand what the vast majority of working people are going through, really it gets shunted aside in favor of what we have now, which is the geriatric gerontocracy that is currently running this country.

Individuals who may be able to put their finger better on the pulse in United States politics, specifically the material conditions that many people are living under, do not get a foothold in these parties.

And so what we end up with is elder statesmen who prioritize things that are important to them, so social security, and pension funds, and Medicaid are big ticket items in a way that doesn’t affect very many individuals writ large.

So there is something to be said about drawing attention to this issue, and to say that if we are looking for a solution to what is a cyclical problem at this point, election after election where we are continuing to elect individuals who are increasingly older. Again, this is not an ageist argument, it’s simply just —

Adam Johnson: I have somewhat of an unpopular opinion about that discourse. And we did a whole episode on it, so I’ll rehash my thesis, and you can take it or leave it, which is that I think that that’s not the way, it’s good to look at it. I think, to the extent to which those who are much older have a tendency to be much more conservative, I think the causality is a little backwards. I think that those who survive in politics, it’s an evolutionary selection, they survive because they’re conservative.

Jamal Bowman’s career was just cut short after a mere four years because he took a controversial opinion on Israel. I could tell you of a countless amount of liberals and leftists who were run out of Congress because they got outspent five to one, 10 to one, 20 to one because they took controversial or left-wing opinions. So, conservatives simply last longer.

So the causality is not that they’re old, therefore they’re conservative. The reason why they’re there, and why they remain until their 70s and 80s, is because they took the conservative route.

And so I think for every single Biden we replace with some Pete Buttigieg clone who’s 40 years old but has more or less the same shitty politics — In the primary in 2020, Buttigieg ran on against single payer. He had more billionaire donors at one point than Biden did. And Kamala Harris is, of course, a little bit younger, also had a ton of billionaire donors.

So I worry too much about orienting this as a generational thing only because there are so many 25-year-olds working their way through Georgetown and volunteering for these campaigns with very similar politics that I feel like… And of course, you have Bernie Sanders who’s 80 million years old and obviously has better politics.

And so it’s the idea that we can somehow tap some sort of Pepsi generation Z, I’m a little cynical, especially when you look at all the psycho-fascists coming up in the Republican ranks. They had about a dozen Trump clones who were 35 years old that they elected in 2020 and 2022. So, yeah, it matters. I think once one qualifies for things like ideology, class, race, as a fourth and fifth thing, it does matter.

But ultimately, I don’t know. Because, again, I know so many of these people, I’ve seen them with their dead eyes in DC, that I don’t really… I think one can fall into a trap thinking that somehow the youths are going to save us when there are these ideological neoliberal schools where they pump these fucking people out. And so I’m a little dubious about that. But that’s my personal orientation on this.

Mel Buer: Any thoughts, Marc?

Marc Steiner: Well, one of the big failures here for the Democrats at this moment, no matter where they fit on the ideological spectrum from progressive left to moderately conservative, they’re strategically blowing it, and that’s really… A, in my time, I’ve run a lot of campaigns. There are certain aspects of the campaign you’ve got to get right. One is getting people excited and getting out to vote. They’ve forgotten how to organize.

The roots of the Democratic Party are the Civil Rights Movement and the labor movement. Organizing was key to those two movements. And whether it was my time as a labor organizer, or in the Civil Rights down South when I was young, that’s what moved the ball. You get down with the people, you organize, you pull people out, and you make a fight, and you win strategically. They’re not doing that at all.

Adam Johnson: Well, in many ways, it’s because they pissed off all the young voters by supporting a genocide in Gaza, and by going hard right on immigration, and doubling down on more cops and cages.

Look, in 2020, Biden, for cynical reasons maybe, but he rode the coattails of the George Floyd protests and the kids in cages stuff, and even some of the anti-war movement latched on to him because of what he said about Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen.

And then he just told them all to go fuck off. And so they wonder why they have no enthusiasm in terms of not… I know young people don’t vote, but like you said, they do organize, and there’s an evangelical wing of any campaign to some extent. And he told them all to go to hell.

So it’s like, yeah, of course he’s not going to have that kind of following. He built some left-wing goodwill in 2020 — Now it may have been pure rhetoric, but he did. And then he alienated a lot of those people. Even setting aside the cognitive issues, he basically just said, we’re going to try to win over conservative white swing voters in Fairfax County, Virginia, and that was it, and everyone else can go jump in a lake.

Marc Steiner: And what they could be doing or should be doing is focusing in on working-class voters. There were some really interesting articles that just came out this morning, one in The Nation, and one I think I saw in Common Dreams, talking about what it would take to win over a percentage of white working-class voters to ensure that the right wing can’t win. And they’ve got to be able to run a campaign with that in mind, and they’re not doing it. And I —

Adam Johnson: Well, yeah… Sorry, go ahead.

Marc Steiner: Go ahead. No, go ahead. What were you going to say, Adam?

Adam Johnson: I was going to say they have done a little bit better than in the past, but it’s not nearly sufficient. Obviously, they picketed with UAW, things like that, and supported some NLRB stuff. But you’re right in the sense that it’s not central to their message, by their own admission.

And Axios, they said they were going to focus on preserving democracy. And that’s fine and good, but ultimately that’s not like… How does that put food on my table, right?

Mel Buer: We’ll definitely touch on what the Biden campaign has decided not to prioritize, especially in the context of last night’s debate.

But I do want to move forward, Adam, and talk about this column that you have coming out soon for In These Times about the performance of Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and just generally CNN’s handling of and moderation of the debate. And you had some key points that I want to give you some time to touch on in the context of this conversation.

Adam Johnson: Yeah. So I had basically four criticisms, and we can drill down from there. The first one was that — And this is one that everybody pointed out, so this is not an original observation — But they did zero fact-checking at all of Trump’s obvious manifest lies. He said the sky was magenta, and they went, all right, and moved on.

So according to The New York Times, Reid Epstein says that the Democrats agreed to that format, but I’m not sure that that’s totally accurate, and maybe you can enlighten me on this a little more. I’m pretty sure that Tapper could have pushed back on at least one of the lies.

When Trump started talking about liberal doctors murdering newborn babies in cold blood, I feel like that could have been like, hey, what’s your evidence on that? It would have been nice. So that was the first thing, I think, that was obviously — And again, something that Biden partisans have been pointing out, I think, correctly.

I have others, but we could talk about the total lack of any fact-checking — And I don’t mean fact-checking in some kind of nerdy hall monitor sense after the fact. In real time, he was saying things that were clearly not true. They should have confronted him.

The thing is, there’s a whole cottage industry of Trump fact-checking since 2016, but rarely do you get an opportunity to actually confront him with it since he mostly avoids contentious interviews. But here was a chance where they could have done it, even gently, and they just didn’t do it at all. At all, not once. He had dozens of falsehoods, dozens of not even debatable… I know sometimes these things exist in the area of the gray subjective, but they’re not even debatable.

Mel Buer: Right. Well, and in the hours, days leading up to this debate, there was a lot of concern and conversation in the media and amongst individuals on social media about how they were going to handle Trump’s falsehoods. We’ve been dealing with Trump talking out of his ass for 10 years now. 10 years. And I wonder at what point are we going to stop seeing this hindsight, we should have said something, nonsense that usually comes out of mainstream media, and actually have the ability to check him on these statements?

What sucks about this when we’re talking about Trump’s performance versus Biden’s performance is we are focusing on Biden’s complete inability to hang on to a thought when Trump is just talking out of his ass. He’s absolutely lying as he’s standing there, but he sounds a little bit more lucid, so people are more willing to hear what he has to say in comparison to Biden’s very abysmal performance.

But it’s total nonsense the whole way through. It was 90 minutes of absolute nonsense that devolved into incoherent shit-slinging, you know what I mean? And I’m frustrated by it. A lot of this could have been very slam dunk pushback and rebuttal on Biden’s part.

And I’m equally as frustrated that we have specifically Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, who have been CNN’s best propagandists against the Palestinian cause, essentially, and screaming about protesters on their shows, being the ones who are supposed to be moderating what is very consequential conversation, debate between these two candidates.

Marc Steiner: One of the biggest failures in this debate were the moderators. They didn’t do their job. When you moderate a debate between candidates and you know one of the candidates has lied and stated falsehoods, you stop and you confront that and you confront them with the facts and say, explain yourself.

They didn’t do it at all. They just sat there like a lump on a log and allowed lies to happen. That’s not how you run a debate. That’s not how you run a discussion.

Mel Buer: It’s particularly frustrating because they had the ability to cut off the mics. There’s no live audience that causes disruptions, right? The actual space that they created in order to have this debate is purpose built to be able to take a moment, fact check, ask these questions, turn off the mics, be able to inject those rebuttals that need to be made in order to challenge them on these statements.

And instead we get… I don’t know what their reasoning was. Did they think that if they gave Trump enough rope to hang himself with that, it would actually —

Adam Johnson: My guess is that was —

Mel Buer: — He’d be clear.

Adam Johnson: It was clearly an editorial decision. I suspect that that was the terms they agreed to with the Trump campaign to get him to show up. The question then becomes… Well, again, CNN forfeiting any kind of journalistic integrity for the purpose of having a debate is its own discussion.

But then the question becomes why would Biden agree to that knowing that he A, can’t really rebut things because he can’t form a thought longer than 15 seconds, which he didn’t do at all? He did towards the end a little bit, but it was kind of flailing and it was more of the less complicated stuff, like, on Jan. 6, I was out fly-fishing, what are you talking about? kind of stuff.

But the lack of any plan for that from the Biden White House… Again, clearly they didn’t think they were going to do it, and they supposedly agreed to terms that were going to just let Trump say whatever he wanted regardless of its fidelity to reality. So I don’t know. It’s incompetence on the Biden’s White House either way.

But ultimately, again, it’s 50% CNN’s responsibility too. As an extensive news organization, their job is to delineate between things that are obviously false. Again, I know there’s a lot of gray area, but these things he said about governors murdering babies and immigrant rapists by the millions…

And all this stuff he said lie after lie after lie. You can go read it at NPR or CNN. These fact checks are pretty straightforward. They didn’t do anything.

And even I, the most jaded, black-hearted media critic in the world, was a little taken aback that they didn’t even bother doing any. Sometimes they’ll do a token one here and there. They did that in 2020, but they didn’t even do that. So my assumption is it was actually an editorial choice from the beginning that they were not going to push back on anything on a factual basis that we were. This was a purely postmodern debate.

Mel Buer: In the context of these moderations and potential future debates, there are supposed to be future debates between Trump and Biden and the Biden campaign this week, today, has already put out statements saying that they are planning to do an additional debate in September after the DNC closes.

First off, Marc or Adam, do you think the Trump campaign will agree to it? Is that even up in the air? Because it seems like this was already a nightmare scenario, trying to get him to agree to this current debate.

And secondly, is this advisable, given Biden’s performance? Do we really think that in the next couple of months there’s going to be a chance to turn this around? Are we hopeful…?

It seems to me like if the Biden campaign is saying, we’re committed to September. Not only is that signaling the DNC will go the way that we think it will go and will not be an open convention, which we already think is unlikely. And two, folks are closing the wagons around the idea where it was just one bad debate performance. What happens if his performance is the same or worse? Thoughts, Adam, Marc?

Adam Johnson: Unless he has a secret cure for cognitive decline, I don’t know what that even means.

Marc Steiner: The issue here is that between now and September, in order to stop Trump and the right wing, Democrats have to take everything they have with massive media campaigns and doing stuff on the grassroots level to turn it around.

They can make a mockery of everything Trump said and what he’s done. And I think that they’ve got to play hardball. They got to go out and fight. It’s the only way they’re going to stop this.

And Biden, let him have his sound bites. Let him take a rest over the summer. Let him make his speeches and walk off the stage, and hopefully they can prep him and have him ready for September.

But the Democratic Party itself, if it’s worth anything, has to be out there, gloves off, fighting in the street, on the airwaves, organizing. It’s the only way they stop this, and I don’t know if they have the wherewithal to do it. I just don’t know.

Adam Johnson: The fish rots from the head. Look at Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, and Anthony Blinken, the secretary of state. Even on the topic of Gaza, which I follow very closely, they contradict each other all the time. One person says one thing and the other person says another thing.

So even on foreign policy, the CIA is negotiating one thing, meanwhile the State Department’s negotiating something else. There is clearly not really anyone in charge other than maybe the chief of staff. And even that gets convoluted.

So as far as the campaign goes, what you appear to have is a lot of people… Now, I’ll be generous and say some of them genuinely feel like they have the best shot of beating Trump, and they think Biden’s fundamentally a decent guy even if he’s not all there, but they have a lot of people want to keep their jobs, keep their status, who have every incentive to live in denial.

They live in a media bubble. They read Matt Yglesias. They’re watching MSNBC — Which is why yesterday was so significant because Matt Yglesias and MSNBC came out and said, this guy’s got to drop out. Morning Joe, who Biden watches religiously, said it. So there’s a real threshold that was broken.

Whether or not it works, who knows, but this is not like it was a few months ago or a year ago or four years ago. And there’s not really any incentive for them to stop.

And what you’ve needed is you’ve needed this crescendo again. Like all coups, whether it be a hard coup or a soft coup, it’s in the air, and people formulate and pick a side, and you hope to God you’re on the winning side.

Now, obviously Biden’s not going to go around summarily executing people who criticize him in The New York Times, although that would be pretty cool, but it’s the same dynamic. There’s just no way he comes back from this.

And I have a rule when I go into pundit mode, which I’ve mostly been in this episode or this show. I don’t like to be predictive because I’m never right. I’m a horrible gambler. I’m never right about guessing the future.

But I will say that I just can’t foresee… I’ll phrase it in a more conservative way. I don’t know how you come back from the entire liberal media apparatus calling you a doddering old fool. I don’t know what that even looks like. And to the extent to which he was already down three or four points on average — Models had him a 2-1 underdog — I don’t know what you build from that. Especially since you’ve told your base, your progressive base, to go jump on a bike with no seat. So I don’t even know where this energy is supposed to come from.

Are we supposed to assume that the Wall Street people running his campaign suddenly develop a backbone or some ideological commitments? It’s not even clear what they’re fighting for. It’s basically status quo maintenance. There’s no vision. It’s like, we’ve just got to fend off Trump. We’ve got to maintain what we have.

And I get that, and there’s value to that. And Trump’s Supreme Court justices being dispositive in destroying the liberal state in the last 24 hours is evidence of why that’s important.

But nevertheless, I don’t know where that comes from. So I don’t even know what that looks like. I don’t see any other out here but for him to come up with some face-saving narrative about wanting to be close to his son or some bullshit and something… Maybe some other —

Marc Steiner: Even the CNN poll found that, I think it was 57% of the people who watched that debate said Biden lost, and they don’t have any confidence in Biden, of the people who watched that debate.

Mel Buer: On the flip side though, that flash poll also said that 81% of individuals did not have their voting commitment changed by watching the debate. So that’s also something to look at. I don’t want to dive too heavily into polling because, as we know, those numbers are famously difficult to parse, and we really don’t know how this is going to change the electorate’s opinions just one day after.

But I think, Adam, you bring up a point that I think is really a good way for us to move into the next section of this conversation before we wind it down, is “substantive policy issues” that were brought up — And I put that in air quotes because really so much of this was incoherent shit-slinging against each other. There really wasn’t the ability to have what we would normally see from a debate. It felt more like two old men arguing over the last backgammon game in the nursing home, unfortunately.

But there are things that we want to draw out here. One, and I think this is a good place to start, Adam and Marc, if you have thoughts about this, is the severity of Trump’s xenophobic, racist statements that he made that, over the course of the debate, got even more brutal as he realized that Biden was not going to substantively push back against what comments he was making.

Adam Johnson: Well, they’ve embraced the Republican playbook on immigration, so there’s not a lot of leg to stand on. His surrogates last February literally called it the GOP plan in terms of when he went hard right on immigration. So it’s hard to substantively… I agree with this. Was he going to say, I agree with your substance, I agree we should further militarize the border and undermine decades of asylum law and carry on all your agenda, but do so less racistly? I mean, what’s he really going to say, even if he was… It involves —

Mel Buer: Fair point, yeah.

Adam Johnson: Even if his marbles were all there in terms of Palestine, Gaza, Trump used “Palestinian” as a pejorative. He said, “You’re acting like a Palestinian.” Of course, Tapper didn’t push back, and Bash didn’t push back, and Biden just shrugged and said, yeah, whatever. They’re not human. They don’t matter.

So again, this is a microcosm of our political environment. The fascists say something extreme and racist, and the Democrats sort of maybe hemming a little bit, but mostly just move on, and there’s not really any sense that anyone’s worth fighting for, that any vulnerable community can be thrown under the bus at any minute if it’s seen as slightly electorally advantageous to the Democrats. So there’s no real sense of solidarity, there’s no sense of racial justice.

They’ve just gone from kneeling in kente cloth to embracing Latimer and punitive right-wing policies at the border and, of course, in Gaza. So there’s no counter vision. It’s mostly just kinder, gentler machine gun hand type stuff. So I am not even sure how he would push back.

And this is why, of course, Tapper and Bash indulge these racist framings, which I wrote they did around immigration. They framed them as criminals and their burden on society. They weren’t even seen as humans that have any constituency in this race or any stake in what the so-called border security is because both parties have embraced that premise.

And when something’s bipartisan, that’s it. That’s the end of the conversation. The worst place to be in the world is on the business end of a bipartisan consensus because you’re fringe. You don’t matter. Whether you’re an immigrant or whether you’re in Palestine, if you’re on the business end of a bipartisan consensus, there’s no pushback.

And so this is the world with which Bash and Tapper — Sounds like a TNT show — Bash and Tapper operate in, which is once it’s decided that Republicans and Democrats are going to embrace this militant border militarization, border security framework, then that’s it. So that’s why all the questions are going to be super glib and racist, and then they just move on.

Mel Buer: Marc, do you want to talk about what wasn’t discussed? There were no questions about labor, which I shouldn’t be surprised by, but a big part of Biden’s administration and what he ran on in 2020, and in some circles what Trump tries to position himself as is this friend of labor.

And as we discussed earlier in our conversation, a huge part of grassroots organizing is the labor movement. And the labor movement has been experiencing a really encouraging uptick in new organizing, in labor wins, electoral wins, contract wins, won strikes in the last 18 months, and I was frankly a little surprised that we didn’t even get to that point where we could… That seemed like, in terms of rhetoric, that seemed like a really no-brainer place to go, and we didn’t hear anything about that at all last night.

Marc Steiner: No, nothing. I think that the whole debate, the way it was structured sucked from top to bottom, and I just can’t say enough about how I really disliked the moderators. It’s not how you moderate a debate, not a political debate in this country for the future of the country, or if it’s a mayor’s debate. You push. You don’t just sit there.

And I think that the labor aspect of this is that if they had been given time for real strong opening and closing statements, he could have pushed the labor issue. He could have pushed it into Trump’s face as being only there for the billionaires, only there for the wealthy, not caring about the working man in America. They’re making no effort to appeal to that at all.

And there is, because there’s a rising labor movement. We cover it here at The Real News. Things are happening out there, the class is moving, and they have to address that. And they’re not going to address it.

Mel Buer: Unfortunately, it’s just a real missed opportunity. As you know, I cover the labor movement pretty extensively, and some of the largest labor unions in the country and organizations like the AFL-CIO have really put their weight behind endorsements for Biden. As a union journalist, as an individual part of a union, it is a bit of a sting to not see anyone in the administration prioritize that in such a high-profile event like the debate last night.

Adam Johnson: Yeah, we can talk about that too, because in my piece I write about the fact that the words “poverty”, “union”, “poor”, “labor”, or “homelessness” weren’t mentioned at all. Labor wasn’t mentioned at all. So the poor and the working class, of course, are invisibilized.

They did touch on inflation, they touched on the racial wealth gap a little bit and the rising cost of childcare, but that was it. But poverty, and certainly not organized labor, especially given the rise in organized labor since the last debate, just a non-issue. And of course, it’s an issue that would ultimately arm Trump despite his superficial rhetoric.

Marc Steiner: Can you imagine if someone actually said, if Biden actually said something like, we’re supporting the rise in labor unions in America. We want to make sure the working man has everything that he deserves, working people, everything they deserve. If he had pushed that idea he could have bridged the racial divide talking about class and labor. He could have done many things that would’ve excited voters and brought them in. He didn’t do a thing.

Mel Buer: It’s a night and day difference, too, between Trump’s handling of the labor movement during his tenure and his administration and what Biden has done in the last four years.

Adam Johnson: And the thing is, we also have to measure it in relative terms. This is someone who has been convicted of 34 felonies a few weeks ago, someone who’s under 91 different indictments, someone who is, again, cheated on his pregnant wife in a public way, someone who habitually lies, someone who’s… Again, Biden pointed this out, somewhat sheepishly, but 40 of his 44 former cabinet officials won’t endorse him.

This is someone who’s just a vile fucking human being, and he’s up in the polls by 5%. That is a testament to the utter collapse and failure of the Democratic establishment. We’re not talking about fucking Mitt Romney. We’re not talking about some plug-and-play Republican. We’re talking about someone who has unfavorables as high as herpes, and they’re still losing.

Marc Steiner: I’m going to go back to the moderators again for a minute.

Mel Buer: Yeah. Go for it.

Marc Steiner: They should have pushed those issues specifically at Trump. Ask Trump the question, you’re under x amount of indictments. You’ve been accused of rape. We need you to respond to that for the American people.

Adam Johnson: Yeah, they didn’t do any of that.

Marc Steiner: They didn’t do that. How could you not do that? If you are a journalist, if you’re in front of a person running for office, you ask those kinds of questions. You don’t just let it sit there.

Adam Johnson: We’re just so desensitized to all the evil shit he’s done. It’s just taken for granted, like, oh, it’s just given. It’s a given. It’s like, I don’t know. We should still talk about it. We should still talk about, again, the multiple rape charges, the campaign fraud, the multiple crimes. Again, all this stuff just gets washed away, and we’re asking… They have to treat him like he’s some sort of esteemed statesman.

Mel Buer: Well, and even the important questions. I know Dana Bash pushed back at least once on getting him to answer about honoring the results of the election. He gave a non-answer both times, and she just lets that second non-answer go —

Marc Steiner: Right. She should have said, you didn’t answer the question.

Mel Buer: Yes or no.

Marc Steiner: This is what I asked you.

Mel Buer: Right. And —

Adam Johnson: Well, he did the if/then. He was like, if it’s legal, and it’s like, well, clearly you’re never going to think it’s legal because you live in an alternate fucking universe.

Mel Buer: Yeah, so all in all, ridiculous evening.

Before we close it out here, I do just want to take a moment, perhaps in absurd levity… I don’t know how to really handle… My brain is still trying to handle exactly what the hell happened last night.

But I do want to touch on the fact that it was an absurd debate, surreal levels of absurd. It still blows my mind that these two men derailed the entire conversation for at least five minutes to have a dick-swinging contest about golf. Are you kidding? Why? Why is this our political reality right now?

Adam Johnson: Because they’re old white guys who play golf. I think it might be one of the things they have in common. Trump owns golf courses. I think it was a reference to him lying about his weight on his arrest record. I think that was what he was referencing. He said he was 235. I think he was trying to —

Mel Buer: Oh, that was in response [crosstalk] to the question about their age, actually.

Adam Johnson: Oh, was it? There was some point where he tried to fat-bait him, and I was like, Jesus Christ. And it wasn’t done well, so it was just awkward.

Mel Buer: If we want to talk about final questions, that was a question that was posed to both of them. And Biden’s answer was to say, you know, back in my day, I was considered the youngest member of the Senate, or whatever, and then he goes, and now I’m considered the oldest and I have a lot of experience, and then he mumbled off and lost the plot there.

And Trump’s answer was about his vitality, and brings up golf as the marker of his vitality as a 78-year-old man, and it led to the two of them ribbing each other about their golf swings and who would win on a back nine.

I find that to be so absurd. I find it absurd that we even have to ask this question in the first place, really. If your physical fitness for office is called into question because you are 80 years old, I don’t know, man. I’m frustrated.

Marc Steiner: [Laughs] as a 78-year-old guy myself, I don’t play golf, but people in power love playing golf. They can’t get enough of it. The absurdity of last night’s debate was profound. I don’t care if they were 78, 81, or 36 and 47. The debate was absurd. These two men should not be vying for leadership of the United States of America. Period. They’re incompetent, and I think that’s what came out of last night, was total incompetence.

Again, I’ll go back to what I said in the very beginning. Last night’s debate, in my going back and forth online with people, is painting a very frightening picture of the future of the United States and the planet, and we have to be on top of it, and we have to be resisting it and standing up to it and organizing in the face of it because we’re facing a shit-show.

Mel Buer: Well said, Marc. Any final thoughts, Adam? We’re coming to the close [crosstalk] —

Adam Johnson: Yeah, it’s a popular rhetoric, people say, well, people want to obsess over Biden, his cognitive this and cognitive of that, but what about Trump’s scandals and this and that. It’s like the Republicans, they just fall in line. And it’s like, well, yeah, they’re Republicans. They’re kind of axiomatically evil. That’s the point. They’re authoritarians. Democrats are supposed to be the sober, responsible party.

And the centrists revolt against Biden because, again, I think very clearly he looks bad and is declining, and his poll numbers are in the garbage. These are people who want to be Trump. Hanging on to a bad hand does not make you a more passionate poker player. It makes you an idiot.

This idea that somehow abandoning Biden is a pro-Trump position, I think at this point, again, for things to get this bad, for these people to do this… Again, these are not frivolous people. These are people who have a lot to lose to step out on a limb and who are partisan hacks. I don’t even mean that pejoratively; it’s just their job. They wouldn’t do it unless it was a really bad emergency.

And I think that this idea that you’re doing the party a favor by being a blind loyalist is bizarre to me because the Democrats are supposed to be the responsible party. They’re supposed to be the party that thinks about the world outside of their own little media bubbles.

Mel Buer: I would say my final thought is along those lines, Adam, that if we are faced with this very real existential threat to our democracy in the form of Trump’s Christofascism, then it would behoove the opposing party to furnish a candidate who can be challenger to that. It is distressing that this was not recognized, or willfully ignored, at the first sign of trouble.

And now we’ve reached a point where millions of people watched that debate last night and are rethinking their choice, and that is unfortunate. I guess it remains to be seen how it’ll be handled and what’s going to happen over the next couple of years.

But thank you to both of you for coming on and talking about this and offering some really good analysis of the incoherence that we witnessed last night, and I look forward to having further conversations about what’s going on as we get closer to the general election. So thanks for coming on, both of you, and I really appreciate it.

Marc Steiner: Thank you. It was great. Good to meet you, Adam.

Adam Johnson: Good to meet you.

Mel Buer: That’s it for us here at The Real News Network podcast. Once again, I am your host, Mel Buer. If you liked today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get notified when the next one drops. You can find us on most platforms, including Spotify and YouTube. Thank you so much for sticking around, and we’ll see you next time.

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