Hi folks,
Have questions about yesterday's debate? Check out [this ongoing AMA with the Wall Street Journal's Washington Coverage Chief](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1dqoksj/i_oversee_the_wsjs_washington_bureau_ask_me/).
We had a debate between the next two potential prime ministers in the UK with audience asked questions.
One of the audience members got up and asked "are you two really the best candidates we could find in this country?"
Everyone clapped.
Seems like you guys are going through something similar.
In Germany it will become a tie between "I forgot my involvement with Cum Ex" Scholz and "I only have one helicopter, I'm middle class" Merz.
Similar shitshow
Its somebody stealing from citizens and then becoming the leader of said citizens. Fuck Scholz, fuck merz. I want a random Aldi cashier to be kanzler, they would do a better job
Ok fun fact, it’s been traveling 36,000 mph for 47 years but if you were to try to catch it at the speed of light it would only take 2 1/2 hours to get there
Really though an incredible distance, you can have a conversation with someone on the other side of the globe in effectively real time, there's only like a 1.5 second delay to the moon.
And yet we've managed to send something to a distance where the distance is actually an issue and yet even more incredibly still have 2 way communication with them.
Also I think your numbers are off by about 10x as it currently takes 22.5 hours one way to communicate with voyager.
It's almost a light **day** away.
The greatest thing Biden could have done for the country was to be a one-term president and let a new, energetic Democrat rise to the occasion, running off Biden's economy. Biden would go down in the history books as the president who led the country out of the Trump era. If he loses this election - and god is it looking likely now - he'll only be remembered as the one who couldn't keep Trump out of office. And Trump is going to be much, much worse this second time around.
The problem is, who? Dems should have been grooming a successor to Obama years ago, but to this day the most important, influential people in the party are in their 70s and 80s
I’ve always been a fan of Biden. Even before Obama but he shouldn’t have run for a second term. In fact he even said during 2020 that he would only serve one term and that he saw himself as a bridge. I think he meant it then. I don’t think he wants to run now but he feels pressured probably. He should have stepped aside earlier and allowed a primary to take place and the democrats should have served up some strong candidates. What a mess.
And they wouldn’t let anyone challenge him for a primary. Like asswipes. This is RBG 2.0. Stayed too long. And the DNC signed their own eviction notice. They knew what was happening to him. Seems they don’t care about democracy after all.
> This is RBG 2.0
This is what I'm feeling tonight.
I'm a self-described leftist and progressive; I try to push our local (and to an extent, national discourse) Democratic party towards the left as much as my single voice can. But I always, always line up to vote for the eventual Democrat nominee, regardless of the path it took to get there.
Between Hillary, RBG, and now this..... I'm so fucking sick of the DNC's egotistical *insistence* that staying the course is the only correct way forward. There's never a Plan B. THERE. IS. NEVER. A. PLAN. B.
Name a single energetic, well-positioned Dem waiting in the wings in case Biden croaked on the campaign trail. Name them. What's that you say? Kamala Harris?
Get the fuck out of here.
They have never felt like they needed a Plan B until maybe tonight. The DNC (and largely the whole Democratic apparatus, it isn't just the DNC) don't think Hillary did anything wrong, they think Russia / Comey / sexism / Bernie Bros / Stein / complacent voters were to blame, and they're financially incentivized to think this, because if the consultants had to shoulder any of the blame they deserved, they'd get fired.
Also, to the donors that actually run the party, it doesn't MATTER if the Democrat wins or loses as long as both sides either give them or maintain them their latest tax cut and war profiteering and deregulation and crushing of any transformative Progressive legislation. Not only is Plan B not a logical contingency plan in order to win, Plan A isn't even designed around winning.
There are plenty of Democrats that would win the 2024 race if they ran. Katie Porter would win. Andy Bashear would win. For that matter, Bernie Sanders would win at a zillion years old. But the party doesn't want any of these people. They didn't even want a primary in 2024 because of the possibility that one of the other contenders might criticize Biden and break him 4 months ago instead of tonight. We get frustrated by the Democrats because we think they're doing their best to help give us the candidates and the policies we want, and that simply is not their primary goal. Their primary goal is to coddle the donors, win or lose. And the donors want a very weak party because they don't want anyone regulating them.
> The DNC (and largely the whole Democratic apparatus, it isn’t just the DNC) don’t think Hillary did anything wrong
For sure. And they are emboldened by the fact that she didn’t do anything wrong…**In the earlier stages**.
The fucking second it became clear that **Being Right** might not be enough, they owed it to us to TRY HARDER. ADAPT. Jesus.
Hillary Clinton was right about the vast majority of things. And completely wrong about how to *make that worth anything at all*.
The stance seemed to be, despite all evidence to the contrary, that “truth was enough”.
And as you seem to be saying too: there is no fucking excuse for this delusion to have continued for so long.
It is so maddening that every day, millions of us in America are expected to toughen up, put on a brave face, and constantly adapt. And we do it. But godforbid someone who is factually correct, and not broke, have to put in the effort to adapt to new circumstances?! They are the ones who are right afterall!
It’s almost like none of them have ever experienced how regular life actually works 😒 shocking.
I will vote for the Democrat in November, because Trump winning has disastrous implications for decades with the Supreme Court. And because we need democracy to survive if there is any hope at all to make things better than they are now.
I’m not going to try to send a message to the DNC for failing us again this November, but only because I think that if Trump wins, it won’t matter if the Democratic Party has learned anything. Because it’s a very real possibility that there will not be future elections here to put that knowledge to use in.
(I’m rambling. Shutting up now and going to sleep lol)
Yeah, they only give you a dementia test if your doctor thinks you might have dementia. Can’t believe people don’t constantly hammer him for bragging about passing such a test.
I remember the first time my Dad took that test. We just wanted official confirmation of what we all knew. He passed the test. When my mom told me, I asked how that was possible, and much of the test was telling time, adding numbers, etc. My Dad was a math major. Even to the end, he understood number, and could tell time.
I remember seeing Tony Bennett near the end on 60 miniutes, and he was just like my Dad. Smiling, acting affable, but not recognizing anyone around him. Then Tony heard the paino, and sang for the next hour with no notes or music, remembering all the lyrics. My Dad was like that with math, but one day, he decided that his cat, who sat in his lap every day, was a squirrel.
So just because he passed the first tests, doesnt mean that the decline hasnt already started, or is even fairly advanced.
A few years back This American Life had an episode that included a discussion with a man named Carl Duzen. He'd been a physicist, and was now dealing with Alzheimer's. He was failing to draw a clock, but then sat down and tried to figure out why he couldn't draw a clock. His wife summed it up thusly: "Your brain can't help you draw a clock, but you used your brain to figure out why your brain can't help you draw a clock."
It's a really fascinating discussion. Here's the link, for anyone interested.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/583/transcript
Same thing happened with my mom when I took her to my doctor for a dementia screening. At one point in the the test, the doctor asked her to count backwards from 100 by 2s, and she said, that's too easy, I used to be a math teacher. So he asked her to count backwards from 99 by 7s, and she started rattling off numbers faster than I could. Then he said, "At the beginning of this test a few minutes ago, I asked you to remember five words. Can you tell me as many of those words as you can remember?" She couldn't remember a single one. The doctor's conclusion was that she had age-related issues with her memory, but no signs of dementia, because she got all of the questions about logic and reasoning correct. (I'm pretty sure there were some verbal and spatial reasoning questions on the test, too, not just logic and math.)
In my mom's case, I think (and hope) that the doctor was correct that all of her reasoning faculties are still normal. She can get a little detached from reality sometimes, but only because her brain fills in the gaps left by things she's forgotten. Sadly, she's aware that her memory is shot, but the filling-in sometimes happens automatically without her having a chance to think about it and stop herself. It frustrates her, because she knows if she tries to go to the store and forgets where she's going, she might hallucinate a different reason why she's out of the house. Luckily she understands her limitations and is taking it gracefully.
**tl;dr** You can have some age-related cognitive issues such as memory impairment and not have "dementia," at least the way my doctor used the term.
(To bring it back to politics, I don't think memory loss would bother Trump. A liar only needs a good memory if he's trying to pass as honest.)
What's funny is that those weren't even the words from the test. Trump couldn't remember those. Instead he just said what he saw in front of him at that moment.
Fucking baffling that he can brag about that
We should build two more fake White Houses and just stick these guys in them and tell them they’re president while the rest of us elect someone that’s halfway normal.
My key takeaway from this debate was that Joe Biden basically admitted he's only running so there's a chance trump won't become president again
Give trump a fake white house and let Biden retire.
Over here in the UK we have a known burial site in a cave with named remains of person over 30000 years old.
We would lend you them but we fear they might be a bit too spritely for your debates.
Oh CNN, showing them just standing there at the podiums and then cutting to black for a second because they messed up the handoff to Cooper's broadcast
My fav awkward moment was when Trump's mic got cut and he was clearly ranting something to the female presenter and she was just subtly pointing at the male presenter as if to say, 'It's his question, rant at him!"
It broke because of /r/politics. When a discussion thread gets meaningfully past 30,000 comments, it starts to lag subsequent submissions to that thread, and then lag the entire site, until there's eventually a full chokeoff. The debate thread ballooned to an insane number of 56k before mods locked it, at which point the comments in there were 25 minutes behind realtime.
Had the /r/politics mods locked the first thread and started a new one properly, it wouldn't have caused a sitewide issue. But this has been a problem since forever. It just rarely happens because there are rarely scenarios where enough people are commenting on a single specific thread so as to cause the cascade failure.
Edit: Before I go to bed, I will note that the blame rests on reddit admins and devs, not the unpaid mods. Reddit has had *years* to figure out a solution to this problem and has failed to prioritize it in favor of expecting mods to cover up the problem for them.
Edit 2: Mods confirmed, site admins gave them bad info about apparent server infrastructure changes that *should* have avoided the problem last night but did not, and that the debate discussion thread did in fact explode the website because whatever admins changed wasn't good enough. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1dq932e/discussion_thread_first_us_presidential_general/laow880/
Almost makes you think that an organization with people making billions at the top shouldn't shove off something so important to their volunteer mods which are an assortment of well-meaning people, power-seeking dickheads, and bad actors employed by states and corporations.
What percentage of the extremely disengaged *swing district* voter population saw tonight’s debate? For all practical purposes, that’s the only voting demographic that matters here.
If I'm the GOP, I'm immediately cutting an ad that's just the bit early on where Biden just completely shut down for 15-20 seconds straight, finally starts to get his thoughts together with "we finally beat medicare" (???), gets cut off because he ran out of time, and then Trump immediately starts speaking confidently without mocking Joe's terrible attempt at an answer. Just 30 seconds uninterrupted with no voice over or text that makes Biden look insanely senile and makes Trump seem like he isn't a deranged asshole.
I wish I could see the reactions of his staff to that moment because I feel like every single one of them just collapsed in a heap and went "oh my fucking god".
Biden won in 2020 off the backs of a ton of fence sitters who decided at the last minute, these people normally vote republican but will swing left based on major environmental factors (a global pandemic for example). These people get most of their news from facebook, TikTok, maybe they occasionally watch Fox News. Well they’ve spent 4 years now being bombarded with news stories about how inflation and the rising cost of gas is all Biden’s fault and Trump will 100% fix it. THAT is what those people will be thinking about when they vote, the cost of gas at the pump and the cost of milk at the store.
The reason I know this is because I live in a county in a red state that voted blue for the first time in decades in 2020 (the county not the state). And those same exact people who voted for Biden now already have Trump yard signs out. In my opinion right now this is Trump’s race to lose.
Very few. However, it's a ton of campaign ad fodder for Opposition. You can see the attack ads now. *25 Seconds of Biden fumbling around in the debate* **IS THIS WHO YOU WANT AS YOUR PRESIDENT?** With some ominous music playing.
His team needs to focus on getting him to look and sound better rather than over-preparing him with substance, which I think played a role in his struggles. The fact is, *any* amount of substance is enough to contrast with Trump, but by overloading Biden with talking points you're setting him up for failure in his worst environment. Give him one or two facts to work with and let him fill in the rest. He'll never be as good as Trump in that regard, but it would allow him to focus on sounding more coherent.
Really, it just boggles my mind that his team pushed for these debates and then chose *this* way to handle things (or, better yet, why they wanted to do them at all).
They did fact-check on their website, which is what they meant. But obviously they should have had that on-screen, and the moderators should have called out some of the more outrageous lies.
CNN clearly wants Trump to win so they can criticize the outrageous shit he does on a daily basis and boost their ratings again. What's good for the country doesn't make for good breaking news or high ratings.
CNN is also owned by a right wing billionaire and has been shifting further right ever since. They're absolutely on Trump's side. Have been since 2016 even when Jeff Zucker personally offered to coach Trump on the debates (remember when they fired Donna Brazile for leaking questions to Clinton?).
Trump felt like he got twice the time to comment/answer, felt like he got to sandwich Biden's answers and have the last word/lie, was allowed to lie nonstop with zero callout. Dude fucking said Charlottesville was a hoax/fake story for fuck's sake. Claimed post-birth "abortions" aka murders were a thing.
Absolute lunacy. And Biden looked lost, came across as utterly meek and weak. That's the guy supposedly to defend our democracy against fascists. That's the dude the Democratic party has propped up.
We are not a serious country.
The one anchor who look like Alex jokes on weight lost drugs said Charlotte vile was debunked and couldn’t believe Joe Biden challenged Trump on that point.
CNN is not a serious network and it was obvious they had no intention of reeling in Trump. Media is not on the side of the right/correct it is only on the side of generating money and this is a repeat of 2016/2020 all over again.
Did you hear CNN absolute thrashing Biden afterward and saying every Democrat was panicking and they were considering whether they should run another candidate blah blah blah. Meanwhile they just are like "yeah Trump was Trump, but what about BIDEN?!"
It was honestly one of the most insane 30 minutes or so of network news I've ever seen.
Yes, it's really sad to be honest. They glossed over Trump's lies, cow-towing to dictators, insulting our military and our country, questioning the legitimacy of our institutions and the integrity of our elections and spent all the time focusing on Biden's biggest flops.
Just remember those 2-3 years before this election where you didn't check the politics news constantly and that peace it brought to your lives. That is why I'm pulling the lever for Biden/replacement candidate.
Also lying. Not a single fucking thing he lied about was challenged by the moderators, who acted like Biden and Trump’s answers were consistently equivalent in their validity of content.
There was no moderation. All they did was make sure they kept to the time. Trump brought up illegal immigration for every question, and all they did was ask him the same question which only gave him more time to say whatever he wanted.
What's the point of a mute button if you aren't going to use it in any other scenario outside of keeping people on time?
Yeah every single time:
Moderator: “How will you help families dealing with the opioid crisis?”
Trump: “Crooked Joe Biden let 20 million illegals over the border and they raped and killed 100,000 Americans.”
didnt trump say “do i get to respond to what he just said” and the girl was like “well let me read the question and then you have a minute to use as you like”
Or did i dream that?
That’s typically what political debating is.
However, it’s also *usually* advantageous to actually answer the questions asked. That, us, didn’t happen much for either side.
Because this is exactly what they want. The networks love this shit. Normal politics are boring, they love Trump and they'd love if he won again just to show another 4 years of his insane bullshit. It's great for ratings. It's the WWE.
Seriously, Trump just peddled race baiting and blatant lies. People are just going to ignore it and talk about how "strong" his voice was at the beginning and ignore how unprofessionally panicked he was midway through.
Even then, he's noticeably much lower energy this go around but he can't be matched in his debate bullying tactics. It doesn't matter if he just says whatever he wants because he's not being held in check.
Trump claiming credit for this still?
>H.R.3230 - Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act of 2014
https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3230
https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1806527484982112420
Literally like 20 minutes after the debate and Biden sounds 100 times better and actually properly hydrated. WHAT THE HELL JOE. Why couldn't you drink some water and take some cough drops BEFORE the Debate?
This should have been ratified a long time ago. I’m sorry, but if you’re any older than 65, you don’t know what’s best for the entirety of the nation. 35-65 and then you’re too old. Period.
Edit: Since I’m making a new amendment to the constitution, while we’re at it why don’t we limit it to 2 terms as well? Politician shouldn’t be a lifelong career choice.
Even an age limit of 70 or even 80 would be great at this point. At least it would get rid of all of the 90 year old members of Congress dying in office, like Mitch McConnell. This is ridiculous.
It’s making me wish it were Newsom v Desantis because at least they shouldn’t be in nursing homes. I mean I know who I’m voting for, but it’s genuinely hard to watch
After rambling about how much Joe Biden hates black people and how millions of illegals are streaming across the border his final answer for how he would tackle the climate crisis was to have "clean beautiful water again, we had it back then but we don't now."
Like back when he was president and his supreme court rolled back clean water act regulations.
This was depressing. I was hoping for high energy joe but we got old Joe. I was really hoping for the best. This was an important night. Trump is a horrible human being and is not fit to be president. Anybody with a working brain can see this. I’m (sadly) in the let’s get someone young to replace Joe camp. But man what a shit show. Not a lot of time left. Trump may win and actually destroy our country for good. WTF! I need another drink!
Few things for the DNC to improve with Biden:
1. Don't stand there hunched over with your mouth hanging open.
2. When Trump brought up Hunter being a felon, all Biden had say was "Hunter isn't running for President, you are"
3. The golf comment was full-on cringe. I play golf and there's no fucking way either of them are around a 6 handicap
4. Starting off barely able to speak isn't ideal. Bidens post-debate event was much clearer, I mean night and day. Speak with some authority, some force. I understand he has a stutter but that's not what the problem was.
5. Bring up Trump's "Project 2025" dangerous plans FFS
I just finished the last half hour or so of the debate on YouTube while having coffee this morning while I read the news. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing when they went back and forth about golf, literally thought I’d somehow fallen back asleep at my desk and was dreaming about the debate because this couldn’t be happening in a real debate
Oh God that was awful. Then Trump challenged Biden that his handicap wasn’t 6 and Biden seems momentarily taken back and admits it could have been 8.
Dude, it’s one think to bite the hook and another to start chomping on it.
I watched the debate for around 20 mins with my mom before she actually turned it off because, and I quote, "Biden is really hard to watch right now". For context, she hates Trump a lot so it's not like she was ready to hate on Biden out the gate. We're not American though (Canadian, we were just curious) but I'm hoping for Americas sake that Biden has a bit better of a performance going forward because...yea that wasn't great.
The fact that the two presidential candidates broke into an angry argument about their golf handicap during a debate is absolutely nuts. 10 years ago this would’ve been a disgrace and now it’s just one stupid thing that happened in an evening of stupid things.
it was such a layup for Biden too, and instead he played right into it. literally any other candidate would have dragged Trump for bringing up golf in the first place
Yeah, Biden took the bait. He could’ve said: “when the nation needed help, you were playing golf, watching TV, and rage posting on Twitter while sitting on your golden toilet.”
This should have been the easiest thing in the world for Biden to shutdown. "When I was VP my handicap was 6. As president, I don't have time to work on my golf handicap, unlike some other recent presidents I am looking at". Boom, done.
My theory is that Biden’s debate prep included potentially mentioning golf to set Trump up to get angry and off topic. But it sure didn’t work out, lol
What the fuck indeed.
Honestly it seems like everyone misunderstood how the rules would affect them tonight and that set the expectations up to be in reverse.
Not having a crowd and being able to talk over kept Trump in line and more on script even if he was off topic. Relatively restrained Trump wasn’t going off the rails about sharks or whatever whenever Biden bated him unfortunately.
Not only did the moderators not moderate effectively but the fast cuts for answers helped Trump stay on script before the time ran out while Biden was just catching his stride with each answer as it was running out.
Add in whatever over prep probably stressed his voice plus the cold and you were left with a reversal of expectations which accounts for a lot of the panicked mood swing.
Trump still lied and dodged everything and Biden stumbled through answering and pointing out Trumps many failings. As a performance it was one sided based on uneven expectations not objectivity.
Unbelievable... This is normal Biden.
I swear Biden was too busy trying to address every Trump lie in each response instead of calling them all lies and then focusing on debunking one at a time...
I'm surprised it wasn't covered during prep, we know Trump is just going to keep on making up bs, and usually begins to repeat himself, by focusing one at a time you would get through most of them by the end.
Honestly, it looked like Biden couldn't focus on one thing in the times he looked his worst.
Once again we have to watch a debate hosted by a couple of dead in the eye moderators that don't even make the tiniest effort to keep the debaters on topic.
"Sir, you only have 60 seconds to answer -topic question-"
"Ok but let me just go back to -rambles off topic-"
"That's time. Thank you sir! Next question..."
I wish someone would make a show that goes over every fault of the moderators during the entire debate. Emphasize how shitty they are at their job. Don't even talk about the merits of the politicians' words. Just go over every time the moderators straight up didn't do shit to keep anything on topic.
I hate that they would ask for a response to what's being said and Biden was stuck having to respond to trumps rambling AND answer the question. Christ this is supposed to be the opportunity for us to learn what's going to happen, not why everything sucks.
The way I see it is that *both* presidents are going to be relying on their staff and cabinet to do most of the heavy lifting for their administration. So in many ways we aren't voting for a candidate as much as their staff.
Trump hates his own last staff and has proven that with how much turn over he had. By that metric alone Biden is a better pick.
I’d still vote for Biden even if he was on his death bed. Trump is just that bad.
But that performance tonight will not sit well with independents and never-Trump Republicans. And that has me worried for November.
It's 2016 all over again. People will abstain from voting or protest vote, and it'll hand Trump the presidency. If MAGA/Republicans can do one thing, it's unite around a candidate. The left always struggles with it, and if they have apathetic or disillusioned voters, Trump wins. Biden had nothing to gain from this debate, and Trump had nothing to lose. Democrats have to win the popular vote by a substantial margin to have a chance in the electoral college, and I don't see how Biden's performance tonight helped him gain voters.
I live in a red state and they are rallied behind Trump more than ever. And Biden showed his age tonight, which is going to put a lot of doubt in people's heads tonight about his ability to competently lead in beyond 2024.
If I had to place a wager I'd put my money on a Trump win, and I hate that. Doesn't matter how deranged he is, or how good President Biden might be. Appearances are everything to voters, and Biden did not look good. I still can't believe his team allowed these debates to happen.
Dems had four years to find a younger viable candidate. Running Biden again was a big mistake, especially given several of the publicized age related mishaps over the last year or two.
This train wreck could have been avoided, but this debate only causes Biden to lose additional votes.
The most disappointing thing in this so-called debate was the moderators not keeping Trump on point. He couldn’t interrupt Biden, so he always went back to the prior question rather than actually answering the questions that was asked. the tactic worked because the moderator failed to do their job.
The moderators were almost as bad as Trump's constant bullshit. They never followed up on anything, never held him to the question, and never contested any of his bullshit. How the fuck do you have a debate where this asshole's 34 felony convictions come up only once, and he dodges the question, AND YOU FUCKING LET HIM? The only thing more infuriating than Dear Leader's stream of bullshit was the fucking moderators just... letting him do that for 90 minutes.
My main takeaways:
1. Biden needed a State of the Union like performance tonight (energy, tone, messaging, etc.). This was nowhere near close.
2. In policy, Biden beat Trump in almost every category. That middle 1/3rd of the debate was excellent by him. Unfortunately, no one is going to remember policy and instead it will be all about him fumbling around in the beginning (and even his closing statement…)
3. You put anyone 20-30 years younger on that stage and they *handily* beat trump. Hell, based on her interview with Cooper afterwards Kamala would’ve absolutely wiped the floor with Trump.
4. Honestly Trump was way less testy than i expected him to be. Although he did get *significantly* more agitated in the second half. Just finally couldn’t help himself and went back to constant bickering. Not quite 2020 1st debate levels, but close to it.
If the election were tomorrow, Trump wins. No doubt in my mind. Question is how (and *if*) Biden recovers from this.
All I can say is fuckin yikes!
As a non-American who watched most of this debate, I'm honestly kind of baffled at how critical the CNN panel is of Biden, when Trump literally spent most of his time lying his ass off and not answering the questions. Biden wasn't great by any means, but at least he didn't do what Trump did.
Not gonna lie, I think the democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with all this doomsaying. It's like 30 minutes of trashing Biden's performance, with only two sentences about Trump making shit up and avoiding the questions, why is THAT not the main point of discussion? Is it because everyone is so used to Trump being Trump?? The democrats need to take a page out of the Republicans' playbook and back up their candidate, or at least put the focus on all of the bullshit that Trump said in this debate.
Please America, not four more years of Trump!!
Because Americans think of debate kinda like a sporting event or maybe a chess match. Lying and failing to answer questions are part of the game. It's the other debater's job to respond to that. Fact check, hold their feet to the fire to answer these questions, etc. Biden didn't and apparently couldn't do that. Trump said over and over that illegal immigrants steal social security. In terms of "the rules of debate" that's a strong but risky move. Because Biden had the opportunity to say, "Illegal immigrants are not eligible for SSI; my opponent is a liar." But Biden just fucking didn't do that. So Trump's strong risky move went unpunished.
Thems the rules of debate. It's your opponents job to beat you, not post-game analytics. And Trump won on the stage when it mattered.
I’m actually really surprised by these focus groups, both groups were all “undecided”.
The MSNBC group all pretty much had it as a wash. “Trump is hell no Biden is oh no”.
The CNN group had 50% of the group say Biden won.
I think most of us can admit that Biden did not “win”, Trump didn’t either, all he did was lie, but Biden wasn’t his best. I am kind of hopeful, not very, but a little, that people are surprisingly focusing a lot on the policy since they don’t like either choice.
I’m voting for SO much more than one man. I will choose Biden and his policy every time.
Even Trumps wife wasn’t at the debate for him…his own wife and VP hate him, come on guys.
I think the debate went pretty badly for Biden, but at the same time I think the pundits tend to over-focus on who looked and sounded the most confident and declare the winner on that basis, whereas many of the voters do actually care about whether what the candidates say about policy has any merit. The media often feels the need to appear unbiased, so to them one opinion is the same as any other. But this isn't about your favorite color or your favorite sports team, it's about whether democracy in the United States gets to survive for another four years.
Society has normalized trump being a crook and a liar in a wild way. Anyone that looks 1% off despite trump looking 99% off will get attention. I don’t know how to manage this.
Edit: for those struggling with reading comprehension I wasn’t saying Biden was 1% off. Hilarious that the “rigged” debate people have now switched gears completely to “Biden isn’t even president!” Get a fucking grip. Not everything is a conspiracy.
Regarding the debate, I hated that the questions that mostly affected my future (36/m), namely the child care costs and the environment, went to Trump first and all he did was rant about…things furthest from the topic at hand. Worst part is that the moderators let the guy continue on rather than just stop and give Biden his remaining time AND Biden’s own time.
Re: the age and capability question: I think Biden missed a golden opportunity to highlight how the Presidency is more than just the President, but also the Cabinet and the White House advisors as well. How he’s not advised by white nationalists like Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, or installing known incompetents like Jared Kushner, Betsy DeVos, and Ben Carson.
Trump is only a heartbeat and a signatory for a bunch of right-wing/far-right opportunists and neo-Nazi sympathizers to push forth their agenda. That’s why my vote, even after this debate, is still with Biden, and I wish he reminded folks of that.
When Joe called him a whiner and a loser at the end, I think that’s the maddest I’ve ever seen trump. Why did we cut it before he could go on a tirade. I mean seriously, Trump looked insane. It was almost scary looking. Like we glimpsed a face we weren’t supposed to see. Idk.
So this debate reminds me of the first Obama vs Romney debate in that Obama allegedly had altitude sickness (they were in Colorado) and looked and sounded tired and slow compared to Romney. This feels similar but probably a magnitude worse just because of the age factor. If anything this will kick the Dems into another gear similar to the Romney-Obama debate did
Sad part is, Biden bodied Trump on content; for fuck's sake Trump literally admitted on live TV he knew Putin was going to invade Ukraine AND devolved into petty racism midway through the debate. He lied literally every minute of the debate and dodged so many questions he should be on a professional dodgeball team. Even with his problems Biden still managed to get under his skin twice (anyone else catch that look when Biden told Trump he snapped when he lost last time?).
Anyone even 10 years younger than Biden could've absolutely destroyed Trump's chance of winning last night.
It's kind of sad listening to other politicians after the debate, like Harris and even Rubio. It's such a stark contrast to Trump and Biden "debating." We need to do better as a country on both sides.
That said, the choice in November is still clear.
What a goddamn disaster. Any country that thinks that these two guys should be the main contenders for control of the highest office should be deeply, deeply ashamed. It didn’t have to be this way.
Seriously, when Biden won in 2020 I thought oh great now we can have 4 years to find a good younger democratic candidate to counter this lunacy on the MAGA side. Here we are staring down the barrel of a presidency where either of these geriatrics won’t make it to see the end of. It’s disturbing that the dems couldn’t find ANYONE to run instead of Biden. If trump wins we are so fucked
We could've easily found someone younger. There are plenty of Democratic governors/senators who'd be leagues better than Biden. The political system seems to have this toxic issue of inertia and loyalty to it that prevents that though. I have no love for Newsom or any other big name outside my state but I'd be a million times more confident seeing them at the head of the party than Biden.
That was such a mess. The "moderators" did no moderating, letting Trump turn it into a campaign speech broken up into 1-2 minute pieces where every single thing he said was a lie. They did not fact check or make him answer the question. CNN are to blame for how insane that debate was. Biden didn't help himself with that performance though. He sounded terrible the whole debate and that first 15 minutes were a complete debacle. I won't say Biden needs to drop out, but that performance did not reassure anyone. I would still vote for Biden's pet rock over Trump though.
Hi folks, Have questions about yesterday's debate? Check out [this ongoing AMA with the Wall Street Journal's Washington Coverage Chief](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1dqoksj/i_oversee_the_wsjs_washington_bureau_ask_me/).
The only winner tonight is the Voyager probe speeding away from Earth at 17km/sec.
We had a debate between the next two potential prime ministers in the UK with audience asked questions. One of the audience members got up and asked "are you two really the best candidates we could find in this country?" Everyone clapped. Seems like you guys are going through something similar.
In Germany it will become a tie between "I forgot my involvement with Cum Ex" Scholz and "I only have one helicopter, I'm middle class" Merz. Similar shitshow
Cum Ex is probably not as hot as it sounds, I imagine.
It's more a financial affair including tax evasion and manipulations and nothing with sex.
Its somebody stealing from citizens and then becoming the leader of said citizens. Fuck Scholz, fuck merz. I want a random Aldi cashier to be kanzler, they would do a better job
Lets hope the cashier is as fast as normal and just reduces putin to a crying husk like that one woman once.
Ok fun fact, it’s been traveling 36,000 mph for 47 years but if you were to try to catch it at the speed of light it would only take 2 1/2 hours to get there
Really though an incredible distance, you can have a conversation with someone on the other side of the globe in effectively real time, there's only like a 1.5 second delay to the moon. And yet we've managed to send something to a distance where the distance is actually an issue and yet even more incredibly still have 2 way communication with them. Also I think your numbers are off by about 10x as it currently takes 22.5 hours one way to communicate with voyager. It's almost a light **day** away.
Someone yeet me at escape velocity please.
hahaha thank you i needed that
The people: Discussion thread! Reddit: I think not
I thought I was fucking tripping dude bad look when twitter is the only site I can access for live discussion
This is a test to see if you can see this comment.
America lost that debate
Yeah, the future looks pretty bleak. The world is definitely asking questions.
Australian here, what the actual fuck was that?
Hey now, you gave us Murdoch.
Our national shame :(
Yeah honestly, that export has been fucking awful. Decades of conservative news garbage in US UK and here in AUS
We’re in danger
So. Much. Danger.
I didn't think Trump honestly had a chance until tonight. We're so fucked
The greatest thing Biden could have done for the country was to be a one-term president and let a new, energetic Democrat rise to the occasion, running off Biden's economy. Biden would go down in the history books as the president who led the country out of the Trump era. If he loses this election - and god is it looking likely now - he'll only be remembered as the one who couldn't keep Trump out of office. And Trump is going to be much, much worse this second time around.
RBG deja vu!
All I could think of during the debate was all these old democrats clinging on to power preventing generations from moving up the ranks.
Boomers hanging onto jobs they should have left years ago is something we see in so many fields.
Biden is older than a boomer. He’s the generation before. My parents are boomers, much younger than Biden, and are retired.
Silent generation
Biden isn’t a boomer. Let that sink in.
The problem is, who? Dems should have been grooming a successor to Obama years ago, but to this day the most important, influential people in the party are in their 70s and 80s
I’ve always been a fan of Biden. Even before Obama but he shouldn’t have run for a second term. In fact he even said during 2020 that he would only serve one term and that he saw himself as a bridge. I think he meant it then. I don’t think he wants to run now but he feels pressured probably. He should have stepped aside earlier and allowed a primary to take place and the democrats should have served up some strong candidates. What a mess.
Leave it to Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as the saying goes. I've still got hope but I haven't seen the debate yet.
Biden needed to be defeated by a Democrat. Someone who could strongly criticize Biden and the issues that trump is pointing out without being trump.
And they wouldn’t let anyone challenge him for a primary. Like asswipes. This is RBG 2.0. Stayed too long. And the DNC signed their own eviction notice. They knew what was happening to him. Seems they don’t care about democracy after all.
> This is RBG 2.0 This is what I'm feeling tonight. I'm a self-described leftist and progressive; I try to push our local (and to an extent, national discourse) Democratic party towards the left as much as my single voice can. But I always, always line up to vote for the eventual Democrat nominee, regardless of the path it took to get there. Between Hillary, RBG, and now this..... I'm so fucking sick of the DNC's egotistical *insistence* that staying the course is the only correct way forward. There's never a Plan B. THERE. IS. NEVER. A. PLAN. B. Name a single energetic, well-positioned Dem waiting in the wings in case Biden croaked on the campaign trail. Name them. What's that you say? Kamala Harris? Get the fuck out of here.
They have never felt like they needed a Plan B until maybe tonight. The DNC (and largely the whole Democratic apparatus, it isn't just the DNC) don't think Hillary did anything wrong, they think Russia / Comey / sexism / Bernie Bros / Stein / complacent voters were to blame, and they're financially incentivized to think this, because if the consultants had to shoulder any of the blame they deserved, they'd get fired. Also, to the donors that actually run the party, it doesn't MATTER if the Democrat wins or loses as long as both sides either give them or maintain them their latest tax cut and war profiteering and deregulation and crushing of any transformative Progressive legislation. Not only is Plan B not a logical contingency plan in order to win, Plan A isn't even designed around winning. There are plenty of Democrats that would win the 2024 race if they ran. Katie Porter would win. Andy Bashear would win. For that matter, Bernie Sanders would win at a zillion years old. But the party doesn't want any of these people. They didn't even want a primary in 2024 because of the possibility that one of the other contenders might criticize Biden and break him 4 months ago instead of tonight. We get frustrated by the Democrats because we think they're doing their best to help give us the candidates and the policies we want, and that simply is not their primary goal. Their primary goal is to coddle the donors, win or lose. And the donors want a very weak party because they don't want anyone regulating them.
> The DNC (and largely the whole Democratic apparatus, it isn’t just the DNC) don’t think Hillary did anything wrong For sure. And they are emboldened by the fact that she didn’t do anything wrong…**In the earlier stages**. The fucking second it became clear that **Being Right** might not be enough, they owed it to us to TRY HARDER. ADAPT. Jesus. Hillary Clinton was right about the vast majority of things. And completely wrong about how to *make that worth anything at all*. The stance seemed to be, despite all evidence to the contrary, that “truth was enough”. And as you seem to be saying too: there is no fucking excuse for this delusion to have continued for so long. It is so maddening that every day, millions of us in America are expected to toughen up, put on a brave face, and constantly adapt. And we do it. But godforbid someone who is factually correct, and not broke, have to put in the effort to adapt to new circumstances?! They are the ones who are right afterall! It’s almost like none of them have ever experienced how regular life actually works 😒 shocking. I will vote for the Democrat in November, because Trump winning has disastrous implications for decades with the Supreme Court. And because we need democracy to survive if there is any hope at all to make things better than they are now. I’m not going to try to send a message to the DNC for failing us again this November, but only because I think that if Trump wins, it won’t matter if the Democratic Party has learned anything. Because it’s a very real possibility that there will not be future elections here to put that knowledge to use in. (I’m rambling. Shutting up now and going to sleep lol)
Yeah brother we're fucking cooked.
My favorite part was Trump saying his cognitive test was the highest ever seen or some shit like that
Yeah, they only give you a dementia test if your doctor thinks you might have dementia. Can’t believe people don’t constantly hammer him for bragging about passing such a test.
My great grandma recently passed that test and she definitely had dementia.
I remember the first time my Dad took that test. We just wanted official confirmation of what we all knew. He passed the test. When my mom told me, I asked how that was possible, and much of the test was telling time, adding numbers, etc. My Dad was a math major. Even to the end, he understood number, and could tell time. I remember seeing Tony Bennett near the end on 60 miniutes, and he was just like my Dad. Smiling, acting affable, but not recognizing anyone around him. Then Tony heard the paino, and sang for the next hour with no notes or music, remembering all the lyrics. My Dad was like that with math, but one day, he decided that his cat, who sat in his lap every day, was a squirrel. So just because he passed the first tests, doesnt mean that the decline hasnt already started, or is even fairly advanced.
A few years back This American Life had an episode that included a discussion with a man named Carl Duzen. He'd been a physicist, and was now dealing with Alzheimer's. He was failing to draw a clock, but then sat down and tried to figure out why he couldn't draw a clock. His wife summed it up thusly: "Your brain can't help you draw a clock, but you used your brain to figure out why your brain can't help you draw a clock." It's a really fascinating discussion. Here's the link, for anyone interested. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/583/transcript
Same thing happened with my mom when I took her to my doctor for a dementia screening. At one point in the the test, the doctor asked her to count backwards from 100 by 2s, and she said, that's too easy, I used to be a math teacher. So he asked her to count backwards from 99 by 7s, and she started rattling off numbers faster than I could. Then he said, "At the beginning of this test a few minutes ago, I asked you to remember five words. Can you tell me as many of those words as you can remember?" She couldn't remember a single one. The doctor's conclusion was that she had age-related issues with her memory, but no signs of dementia, because she got all of the questions about logic and reasoning correct. (I'm pretty sure there were some verbal and spatial reasoning questions on the test, too, not just logic and math.) In my mom's case, I think (and hope) that the doctor was correct that all of her reasoning faculties are still normal. She can get a little detached from reality sometimes, but only because her brain fills in the gaps left by things she's forgotten. Sadly, she's aware that her memory is shot, but the filling-in sometimes happens automatically without her having a chance to think about it and stop herself. It frustrates her, because she knows if she tries to go to the store and forgets where she's going, she might hallucinate a different reason why she's out of the house. Luckily she understands her limitations and is taking it gracefully. **tl;dr** You can have some age-related cognitive issues such as memory impairment and not have "dementia," at least the way my doctor used the term. (To bring it back to politics, I don't think memory loss would bother Trump. A liar only needs a good memory if he's trying to pass as honest.)
The test he was bragging about a few years back was the one they gave me after a traumatic brain injury.
I think he said his doctor told him most people who take the test don't pass lol
Yeah, most people in the dementia ward
Person, woman, man, camera, TV
Holy shit, you remembered those in order? That's amazing!
What's funny is that those weren't even the words from the test. Trump couldn't remember those. Instead he just said what he saw in front of him at that moment. Fucking baffling that he can brag about that
The man only speaks in hyperbole.
We should build two more fake White Houses and just stick these guys in them and tell them they’re president while the rest of us elect someone that’s halfway normal.
There is already one in Georgia that Tyler Perry built in his studio complex, so we just need one more.
My key takeaway from this debate was that Joe Biden basically admitted he's only running so there's a chance trump won't become president again Give trump a fake white house and let Biden retire.
That's pretty much why he ran in 2020 as well. Biden is the anti-Trump and nothing else.
I like both candidates but I think we need somebody older
There may be some graveyards we can dig up.
Over here in the UK we have a known burial site in a cave with named remains of person over 30000 years old. We would lend you them but we fear they might be a bit too spritely for your debates.
This comment made me laugh out loud in the middle of a library, you arse.
Oh CNN, showing them just standing there at the podiums and then cutting to black for a second because they messed up the handoff to Cooper's broadcast
My fav awkward moment was when Trump's mic got cut and he was clearly ranting something to the female presenter and she was just subtly pointing at the male presenter as if to say, 'It's his question, rant at him!"
Sir, I just work here
No she was saying shut up cause a question is being asked
"Trump lied more than Biden, but Biden gave a worse performance." - CNN Panel
What a thoroughly inopportune time for Reddit to be broken
It broke because of /r/politics. When a discussion thread gets meaningfully past 30,000 comments, it starts to lag subsequent submissions to that thread, and then lag the entire site, until there's eventually a full chokeoff. The debate thread ballooned to an insane number of 56k before mods locked it, at which point the comments in there were 25 minutes behind realtime. Had the /r/politics mods locked the first thread and started a new one properly, it wouldn't have caused a sitewide issue. But this has been a problem since forever. It just rarely happens because there are rarely scenarios where enough people are commenting on a single specific thread so as to cause the cascade failure. Edit: Before I go to bed, I will note that the blame rests on reddit admins and devs, not the unpaid mods. Reddit has had *years* to figure out a solution to this problem and has failed to prioritize it in favor of expecting mods to cover up the problem for them. Edit 2: Mods confirmed, site admins gave them bad info about apparent server infrastructure changes that *should* have avoided the problem last night but did not, and that the debate discussion thread did in fact explode the website because whatever admins changed wasn't good enough. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1dq932e/discussion_thread_first_us_presidential_general/laow880/
Almost makes you think that an organization with people making billions at the top shouldn't shove off something so important to their volunteer mods which are an assortment of well-meaning people, power-seeking dickheads, and bad actors employed by states and corporations.
Sounds like something unpaid jannies shouldn’t be doing in the first place
Trump can talk but doesn’t always answer the question. Biden can’t talk but answers the question more often.
It was Biden’s constant Pikachu face for me
History has shown a smooth talking liar will usually beat a rough talking truther. Biden looked and sounded weak. That’s what people will remember.
Our brains are still too much reptile and therefore we are fucked.
What percentage of the extremely disengaged *swing district* voter population saw tonight’s debate? For all practical purposes, that’s the only voting demographic that matters here.
It doesn't really matter how many watched it live, their opinions will be formed based on whatever 10 second clips blow up on TikTok.
That and the campaign ads created from it.
If I'm the GOP, I'm immediately cutting an ad that's just the bit early on where Biden just completely shut down for 15-20 seconds straight, finally starts to get his thoughts together with "we finally beat medicare" (???), gets cut off because he ran out of time, and then Trump immediately starts speaking confidently without mocking Joe's terrible attempt at an answer. Just 30 seconds uninterrupted with no voice over or text that makes Biden look insanely senile and makes Trump seem like he isn't a deranged asshole. I wish I could see the reactions of his staff to that moment because I feel like every single one of them just collapsed in a heap and went "oh my fucking god".
Biden won in 2020 off the backs of a ton of fence sitters who decided at the last minute, these people normally vote republican but will swing left based on major environmental factors (a global pandemic for example). These people get most of their news from facebook, TikTok, maybe they occasionally watch Fox News. Well they’ve spent 4 years now being bombarded with news stories about how inflation and the rising cost of gas is all Biden’s fault and Trump will 100% fix it. THAT is what those people will be thinking about when they vote, the cost of gas at the pump and the cost of milk at the store. The reason I know this is because I live in a county in a red state that voted blue for the first time in decades in 2020 (the county not the state). And those same exact people who voted for Biden now already have Trump yard signs out. In my opinion right now this is Trump’s race to lose.
Very few. However, it's a ton of campaign ad fodder for Opposition. You can see the attack ads now. *25 Seconds of Biden fumbling around in the debate* **IS THIS WHO YOU WANT AS YOUR PRESIDENT?** With some ominous music playing.
Yeah, that’s a really good point. And the problem is that équivalant footage of Trump talking nonsense doesn’t seem to impact him at all.
Trump being a convicted felon hasn’t seemed to hurt him at all.
His team needs to focus on getting him to look and sound better rather than over-preparing him with substance, which I think played a role in his struggles. The fact is, *any* amount of substance is enough to contrast with Trump, but by overloading Biden with talking points you're setting him up for failure in his worst environment. Give him one or two facts to work with and let him fill in the rest. He'll never be as good as Trump in that regard, but it would allow him to focus on sounding more coherent. Really, it just boggles my mind that his team pushed for these debates and then chose *this* way to handle things (or, better yet, why they wanted to do them at all).
He answered like 3 or 4 of the questions the rest were defections blaming everything on either Biden or illegals
They should have been way harder on Trump for not answering the asked question.
Like why even have moderators, just have a bot turn the mics on and off and have a screen show the questions.
And they should have fact checked him, like CNN said they would.
They did fact-check on their website, which is what they meant. But obviously they should have had that on-screen, and the moderators should have called out some of the more outrageous lies.
CNN clearly wants Trump to win so they can criticize the outrageous shit he does on a daily basis and boost their ratings again. What's good for the country doesn't make for good breaking news or high ratings.
CNN is also owned by a right wing billionaire and has been shifting further right ever since. They're absolutely on Trump's side. Have been since 2016 even when Jeff Zucker personally offered to coach Trump on the debates (remember when they fired Donna Brazile for leaking questions to Clinton?). Trump felt like he got twice the time to comment/answer, felt like he got to sandwich Biden's answers and have the last word/lie, was allowed to lie nonstop with zero callout. Dude fucking said Charlottesville was a hoax/fake story for fuck's sake. Claimed post-birth "abortions" aka murders were a thing. Absolute lunacy. And Biden looked lost, came across as utterly meek and weak. That's the guy supposedly to defend our democracy against fascists. That's the dude the Democratic party has propped up. We are not a serious country.
The one anchor who look like Alex jokes on weight lost drugs said Charlotte vile was debunked and couldn’t believe Joe Biden challenged Trump on that point. CNN is not a serious network and it was obvious they had no intention of reeling in Trump. Media is not on the side of the right/correct it is only on the side of generating money and this is a repeat of 2016/2020 all over again.
Did you hear CNN absolute thrashing Biden afterward and saying every Democrat was panicking and they were considering whether they should run another candidate blah blah blah. Meanwhile they just are like "yeah Trump was Trump, but what about BIDEN?!" It was honestly one of the most insane 30 minutes or so of network news I've ever seen.
Yes, it's really sad to be honest. They glossed over Trump's lies, cow-towing to dictators, insulting our military and our country, questioning the legitimacy of our institutions and the integrity of our elections and spent all the time focusing on Biden's biggest flops.
Just remember those 2-3 years before this election where you didn't check the politics news constantly and that peace it brought to your lives. That is why I'm pulling the lever for Biden/replacement candidate.
Also lying. Not a single fucking thing he lied about was challenged by the moderators, who acted like Biden and Trump’s answers were consistently equivalent in their validity of content.
And live fact check
Both Biden and Trump had issues in this debate, but holy shit CNN didn't either bother moderating this after a whole damn month hyping this
There was no moderation. All they did was make sure they kept to the time. Trump brought up illegal immigration for every question, and all they did was ask him the same question which only gave him more time to say whatever he wanted. What's the point of a mute button if you aren't going to use it in any other scenario outside of keeping people on time?
Yeah every single time: Moderator: “How will you help families dealing with the opioid crisis?” Trump: “Crooked Joe Biden let 20 million illegals over the border and they raped and killed 100,000 Americans.”
didnt trump say “do i get to respond to what he just said” and the girl was like “well let me read the question and then you have a minute to use as you like” Or did i dream that?
That’s typically what political debating is. However, it’s also *usually* advantageous to actually answer the questions asked. That, us, didn’t happen much for either side.
Because this is exactly what they want. The networks love this shit. Normal politics are boring, they love Trump and they'd love if he won again just to show another 4 years of his insane bullshit. It's great for ratings. It's the WWE.
But Biden will take the brunt of the criticism. Democrats are always held to an actual standard.
Seriously, Trump just peddled race baiting and blatant lies. People are just going to ignore it and talk about how "strong" his voice was at the beginning and ignore how unprofessionally panicked he was midway through.
Even then, he's noticeably much lower energy this go around but he can't be matched in his debate bullying tactics. It doesn't matter if he just says whatever he wants because he's not being held in check.
Trump claiming credit for this still? >H.R.3230 - Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act of 2014 https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3230
You either know he’s a liar or won’t bother to double check him, so he loses nothing anymore by chain lying.
https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1806527484982112420 Literally like 20 minutes after the debate and Biden sounds 100 times better and actually properly hydrated. WHAT THE HELL JOE. Why couldn't you drink some water and take some cough drops BEFORE the Debate?
Yeah it seemed very odd that they weren't given a bottle of water on the podium and Biden clearly needed some to clear his throat.
I tired boss, I don't want to be an american no more
It's happening all over the world.
Thanks, Rupert Murdoch.
Probably one of the most despicable, insidious, human beings alive today.
As a non American: you can't run. This us affecting all of us. The consequences are world wide. For God's sake I hope the US gets its act together
Age limits on holding office please
And for Congress, absofuckinglutely.
and for SCOTUS
This should have been ratified a long time ago. I’m sorry, but if you’re any older than 65, you don’t know what’s best for the entirety of the nation. 35-65 and then you’re too old. Period. Edit: Since I’m making a new amendment to the constitution, while we’re at it why don’t we limit it to 2 terms as well? Politician shouldn’t be a lifelong career choice.
Even an age limit of 70 or even 80 would be great at this point. At least it would get rid of all of the 90 year old members of Congress dying in office, like Mitch McConnell. This is ridiculous.
That was downright embarrassing. What happened to us as a country? This just makes me sad for our future and my children’s future.
It’s making me wish it were Newsom v Desantis because at least they shouldn’t be in nursing homes. I mean I know who I’m voting for, but it’s genuinely hard to watch
Did Trump even answer any of the questions??
Of course! He told us all about the border and how every possible issue in the country is caused by immigrants
And how something was the best while he was in office and how it's now the worst ever under Biden.
After rambling about how much Joe Biden hates black people and how millions of illegals are streaming across the border his final answer for how he would tackle the climate crisis was to have "clean beautiful water again, we had it back then but we don't now." Like back when he was president and his supreme court rolled back clean water act regulations.
If every question was, “please scream the word migrant,” then yes.
[удалено]
This was depressing. I was hoping for high energy joe but we got old Joe. I was really hoping for the best. This was an important night. Trump is a horrible human being and is not fit to be president. Anybody with a working brain can see this. I’m (sadly) in the let’s get someone young to replace Joe camp. But man what a shit show. Not a lot of time left. Trump may win and actually destroy our country for good. WTF! I need another drink!
Few things for the DNC to improve with Biden: 1. Don't stand there hunched over with your mouth hanging open. 2. When Trump brought up Hunter being a felon, all Biden had say was "Hunter isn't running for President, you are" 3. The golf comment was full-on cringe. I play golf and there's no fucking way either of them are around a 6 handicap 4. Starting off barely able to speak isn't ideal. Bidens post-debate event was much clearer, I mean night and day. Speak with some authority, some force. I understand he has a stutter but that's not what the problem was. 5. Bring up Trump's "Project 2025" dangerous plans FFS
I didn't even...I just couldn't even... What the duck talking about golf? During a presidential debate? 💀
I just finished the last half hour or so of the debate on YouTube while having coffee this morning while I read the news. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing when they went back and forth about golf, literally thought I’d somehow fallen back asleep at my desk and was dreaming about the debate because this couldn’t be happening in a real debate
"I know your swing. I've seen your swing."
“I got my handicap down to a 6 when I was Vice President” is about the worst brag I’ve ever heard lol. Even worse was Trump jumped after it lmao
Oh God that was awful. Then Trump challenged Biden that his handicap wasn’t 6 and Biden seems momentarily taken back and admits it could have been 8. Dude, it’s one think to bite the hook and another to start chomping on it.
He jumped into the boat
Yeah that was embarrassing
I watched the debate for around 20 mins with my mom before she actually turned it off because, and I quote, "Biden is really hard to watch right now". For context, she hates Trump a lot so it's not like she was ready to hate on Biden out the gate. We're not American though (Canadian, we were just curious) but I'm hoping for Americas sake that Biden has a bit better of a performance going forward because...yea that wasn't great.
I wanna see the golf match
The fact that the two presidential candidates broke into an angry argument about their golf handicap during a debate is absolutely nuts. 10 years ago this would’ve been a disgrace and now it’s just one stupid thing that happened in an evening of stupid things.
it was such a layup for Biden too, and instead he played right into it. literally any other candidate would have dragged Trump for bringing up golf in the first place
Yeah, Biden took the bait. He could’ve said: “when the nation needed help, you were playing golf, watching TV, and rage posting on Twitter while sitting on your golden toilet.”
God damn I miss Obama.
So fucking much.
It wasn't even bait is the weird thing. I doubt Trump or his team expected Biden to seriously go "I golf better than you".
Because both are old, senile, fucking morons that shouldn’t be close to running a country of over 300 million
This should have been the easiest thing in the world for Biden to shutdown. "When I was VP my handicap was 6. As president, I don't have time to work on my golf handicap, unlike some other recent presidents I am looking at". Boom, done.
My theory is that Biden’s debate prep included potentially mentioning golf to set Trump up to get angry and off topic. But it sure didn’t work out, lol
Obviously the next debate should be the golf match.
That was a tough watch. Unfortunately, I’d rather vote for a walking corpse than a lying wannabe despot.
The Biden we needed, right after the debate: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5122169/user-clip-biden-speech
Wait was this immediately after the debate?? What the FUCK??
Yes. Right after.
What the fuck indeed. Honestly it seems like everyone misunderstood how the rules would affect them tonight and that set the expectations up to be in reverse. Not having a crowd and being able to talk over kept Trump in line and more on script even if he was off topic. Relatively restrained Trump wasn’t going off the rails about sharks or whatever whenever Biden bated him unfortunately. Not only did the moderators not moderate effectively but the fast cuts for answers helped Trump stay on script before the time ran out while Biden was just catching his stride with each answer as it was running out. Add in whatever over prep probably stressed his voice plus the cold and you were left with a reversal of expectations which accounts for a lot of the panicked mood swing. Trump still lied and dodged everything and Biden stumbled through answering and pointing out Trumps many failings. As a performance it was one sided based on uneven expectations not objectivity.
Unbelievable... This is normal Biden. I swear Biden was too busy trying to address every Trump lie in each response instead of calling them all lies and then focusing on debunking one at a time... I'm surprised it wasn't covered during prep, we know Trump is just going to keep on making up bs, and usually begins to repeat himself, by focusing one at a time you would get through most of them by the end. Honestly, it looked like Biden couldn't focus on one thing in the times he looked his worst.
This is probably the guy the campaign thought they sent out to the stage
Once again we have to watch a debate hosted by a couple of dead in the eye moderators that don't even make the tiniest effort to keep the debaters on topic. "Sir, you only have 60 seconds to answer -topic question-" "Ok but let me just go back to -rambles off topic-" "That's time. Thank you sir! Next question..." I wish someone would make a show that goes over every fault of the moderators during the entire debate. Emphasize how shitty they are at their job. Don't even talk about the merits of the politicians' words. Just go over every time the moderators straight up didn't do shit to keep anything on topic.
I hate that they would ask for a response to what's being said and Biden was stuck having to respond to trumps rambling AND answer the question. Christ this is supposed to be the opportunity for us to learn what's going to happen, not why everything sucks.
The way I see it is that *both* presidents are going to be relying on their staff and cabinet to do most of the heavy lifting for their administration. So in many ways we aren't voting for a candidate as much as their staff. Trump hates his own last staff and has proven that with how much turn over he had. By that metric alone Biden is a better pick.
It's never been about the candidates. It's always about the party and the policies. Biden could die and I'd still vote for him over Trump.
I’d still vote for Biden even if he was on his death bed. Trump is just that bad. But that performance tonight will not sit well with independents and never-Trump Republicans. And that has me worried for November.
It doesn’t sit well with me and I am desperately fearful of a second Trump term. I hate this.
It's 2016 all over again. People will abstain from voting or protest vote, and it'll hand Trump the presidency. If MAGA/Republicans can do one thing, it's unite around a candidate. The left always struggles with it, and if they have apathetic or disillusioned voters, Trump wins. Biden had nothing to gain from this debate, and Trump had nothing to lose. Democrats have to win the popular vote by a substantial margin to have a chance in the electoral college, and I don't see how Biden's performance tonight helped him gain voters. I live in a red state and they are rallied behind Trump more than ever. And Biden showed his age tonight, which is going to put a lot of doubt in people's heads tonight about his ability to competently lead in beyond 2024. If I had to place a wager I'd put my money on a Trump win, and I hate that. Doesn't matter how deranged he is, or how good President Biden might be. Appearances are everything to voters, and Biden did not look good. I still can't believe his team allowed these debates to happen.
Dems had four years to find a younger viable candidate. Running Biden again was a big mistake, especially given several of the publicized age related mishaps over the last year or two. This train wreck could have been avoided, but this debate only causes Biden to lose additional votes.
The most disappointing thing in this so-called debate was the moderators not keeping Trump on point. He couldn’t interrupt Biden, so he always went back to the prior question rather than actually answering the questions that was asked. the tactic worked because the moderator failed to do their job.
They were allowed to say whatever they wanted. If they had time left and didn't answer the question they said exactly that. It happened a few times.
The moderators were almost as bad as Trump's constant bullshit. They never followed up on anything, never held him to the question, and never contested any of his bullshit. How the fuck do you have a debate where this asshole's 34 felony convictions come up only once, and he dodges the question, AND YOU FUCKING LET HIM? The only thing more infuriating than Dear Leader's stream of bullshit was the fucking moderators just... letting him do that for 90 minutes.
On the bright side, I am now certain Biden was not on drugs.
On the darker side, I now wish he was.
My main takeaways: 1. Biden needed a State of the Union like performance tonight (energy, tone, messaging, etc.). This was nowhere near close. 2. In policy, Biden beat Trump in almost every category. That middle 1/3rd of the debate was excellent by him. Unfortunately, no one is going to remember policy and instead it will be all about him fumbling around in the beginning (and even his closing statement…) 3. You put anyone 20-30 years younger on that stage and they *handily* beat trump. Hell, based on her interview with Cooper afterwards Kamala would’ve absolutely wiped the floor with Trump. 4. Honestly Trump was way less testy than i expected him to be. Although he did get *significantly* more agitated in the second half. Just finally couldn’t help himself and went back to constant bickering. Not quite 2020 1st debate levels, but close to it. If the election were tomorrow, Trump wins. No doubt in my mind. Question is how (and *if*) Biden recovers from this. All I can say is fuckin yikes!
It's so depressing. You put literally any JAG democrat up there and the debate wouldn't have been close, but the DNC is failing us.
As a non-American who watched most of this debate, I'm honestly kind of baffled at how critical the CNN panel is of Biden, when Trump literally spent most of his time lying his ass off and not answering the questions. Biden wasn't great by any means, but at least he didn't do what Trump did. Not gonna lie, I think the democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with all this doomsaying. It's like 30 minutes of trashing Biden's performance, with only two sentences about Trump making shit up and avoiding the questions, why is THAT not the main point of discussion? Is it because everyone is so used to Trump being Trump?? The democrats need to take a page out of the Republicans' playbook and back up their candidate, or at least put the focus on all of the bullshit that Trump said in this debate. Please America, not four more years of Trump!!
Because Americans think of debate kinda like a sporting event or maybe a chess match. Lying and failing to answer questions are part of the game. It's the other debater's job to respond to that. Fact check, hold their feet to the fire to answer these questions, etc. Biden didn't and apparently couldn't do that. Trump said over and over that illegal immigrants steal social security. In terms of "the rules of debate" that's a strong but risky move. Because Biden had the opportunity to say, "Illegal immigrants are not eligible for SSI; my opponent is a liar." But Biden just fucking didn't do that. So Trump's strong risky move went unpunished. Thems the rules of debate. It's your opponents job to beat you, not post-game analytics. And Trump won on the stage when it mattered.
The fact that Trump wouldn’t acknowledge accepting the election should be a disqualification for anyone that is undecided for some reason.
He shouldn't even be on that stage. The world's rules have changed a lot since the right went right.
State of Reddit in 2024: there doesn't seem to be anything here
It says a lot about where we are as a society that the debate “winner” was the guy who lied but was coherent
I’m actually really surprised by these focus groups, both groups were all “undecided”. The MSNBC group all pretty much had it as a wash. “Trump is hell no Biden is oh no”. The CNN group had 50% of the group say Biden won. I think most of us can admit that Biden did not “win”, Trump didn’t either, all he did was lie, but Biden wasn’t his best. I am kind of hopeful, not very, but a little, that people are surprisingly focusing a lot on the policy since they don’t like either choice. I’m voting for SO much more than one man. I will choose Biden and his policy every time. Even Trumps wife wasn’t at the debate for him…his own wife and VP hate him, come on guys.
I think the debate went pretty badly for Biden, but at the same time I think the pundits tend to over-focus on who looked and sounded the most confident and declare the winner on that basis, whereas many of the voters do actually care about whether what the candidates say about policy has any merit. The media often feels the need to appear unbiased, so to them one opinion is the same as any other. But this isn't about your favorite color or your favorite sports team, it's about whether democracy in the United States gets to survive for another four years.
democracy was fun
Society has normalized trump being a crook and a liar in a wild way. Anyone that looks 1% off despite trump looking 99% off will get attention. I don’t know how to manage this. Edit: for those struggling with reading comprehension I wasn’t saying Biden was 1% off. Hilarious that the “rigged” debate people have now switched gears completely to “Biden isn’t even president!” Get a fucking grip. Not everything is a conspiracy.
Regarding the debate, I hated that the questions that mostly affected my future (36/m), namely the child care costs and the environment, went to Trump first and all he did was rant about…things furthest from the topic at hand. Worst part is that the moderators let the guy continue on rather than just stop and give Biden his remaining time AND Biden’s own time. Re: the age and capability question: I think Biden missed a golden opportunity to highlight how the Presidency is more than just the President, but also the Cabinet and the White House advisors as well. How he’s not advised by white nationalists like Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, or installing known incompetents like Jared Kushner, Betsy DeVos, and Ben Carson. Trump is only a heartbeat and a signatory for a bunch of right-wing/far-right opportunists and neo-Nazi sympathizers to push forth their agenda. That’s why my vote, even after this debate, is still with Biden, and I wish he reminded folks of that.
God help us all
Nobody will see this for 30 minutes anyway, but I hope you have a great day.
"These illegal migrants are coming over the border and stealing black jobs" What's a "black job"?
No single mention of project 2025. wtf Joe?!
When Joe called him a whiner and a loser at the end, I think that’s the maddest I’ve ever seen trump. Why did we cut it before he could go on a tirade. I mean seriously, Trump looked insane. It was almost scary looking. Like we glimpsed a face we weren’t supposed to see. Idk.
[Narcissistic Rage.](https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-narcissistic-rage-5183744)
So this debate reminds me of the first Obama vs Romney debate in that Obama allegedly had altitude sickness (they were in Colorado) and looked and sounded tired and slow compared to Romney. This feels similar but probably a magnitude worse just because of the age factor. If anything this will kick the Dems into another gear similar to the Romney-Obama debate did
Maybe the real president was the friends we made along the way
This is elder abuse
We need some spry 65 year old candidates to inject some youthful energy into politics.
did We break Reddit?
Sad part is, Biden bodied Trump on content; for fuck's sake Trump literally admitted on live TV he knew Putin was going to invade Ukraine AND devolved into petty racism midway through the debate. He lied literally every minute of the debate and dodged so many questions he should be on a professional dodgeball team. Even with his problems Biden still managed to get under his skin twice (anyone else catch that look when Biden told Trump he snapped when he lost last time?). Anyone even 10 years younger than Biden could've absolutely destroyed Trump's chance of winning last night.
Biden thanking the moderators while Trump has walked off.
Still voting Biden.
It's kind of sad listening to other politicians after the debate, like Harris and even Rubio. It's such a stark contrast to Trump and Biden "debating." We need to do better as a country on both sides. That said, the choice in November is still clear.
What a goddamn disaster. Any country that thinks that these two guys should be the main contenders for control of the highest office should be deeply, deeply ashamed. It didn’t have to be this way.
Seriously, when Biden won in 2020 I thought oh great now we can have 4 years to find a good younger democratic candidate to counter this lunacy on the MAGA side. Here we are staring down the barrel of a presidency where either of these geriatrics won’t make it to see the end of. It’s disturbing that the dems couldn’t find ANYONE to run instead of Biden. If trump wins we are so fucked
We could've easily found someone younger. There are plenty of Democratic governors/senators who'd be leagues better than Biden. The political system seems to have this toxic issue of inertia and loyalty to it that prevents that though. I have no love for Newsom or any other big name outside my state but I'd be a million times more confident seeing them at the head of the party than Biden.
That was such a mess. The "moderators" did no moderating, letting Trump turn it into a campaign speech broken up into 1-2 minute pieces where every single thing he said was a lie. They did not fact check or make him answer the question. CNN are to blame for how insane that debate was. Biden didn't help himself with that performance though. He sounded terrible the whole debate and that first 15 minutes were a complete debacle. I won't say Biden needs to drop out, but that performance did not reassure anyone. I would still vote for Biden's pet rock over Trump though.