Trump versus Biden: The end of a short era

Frankly, I had no intention of watching the Joe Biden-Donald Trump debate before the “nd” asked me to. But anyone who managed to turn on CNN early on Friday morning Central European time was at least able to follow an event that will probably go down in US political and media history. After the duel that lasted over two hours, it was clear that Joe Biden had little chance of being re-elected – actually that was clear after just a few minutes. The reason for this is very simple and has nothing to do with Donald Trump: Biden is obviously no longer in any condition to get through an election campaign, let alone hold a high state office.

The visibly frail president’s performance is a complete disaster from the moment Biden traipses onto the stage, slightly dazed and stuttering. Over the course of the evening he is unable to finish sentences and sometimes slips into incomprehensible content, desperately clinging to the same phrases and expressions. “The idea that…!” Biden hisses again and again, in what is probably genuine frustration at Trump’s attempts to put his time in office in a bad light.

During Trump’s remarks, which are sometimes peppered with selective self-praise and sometimes untruths, Biden stares in disbelief into the distance, at an imaginary referee somewhere in the vastness of the mostly empty CNN studio. But the presenters – Jake Tapper and Dana Bash – deliberately refuse to play this role. From a journalistic point of view, this is also clean; a US president should be able to defend himself argumentatively. Only Bash’s question as to whether, in Biden’s opinion, Trump voters would cast a vote “against American democracy” in November must be described as tendentious. A question about the ex-president’s understanding of democracy and whether Trump intends to protect the independence of the judiciary would have been more appropriate.

The appearance of the visibly frail president was a complete disaster.

Biden’s public image on stage was so poor that it didn’t really matter what he said – the way he did it obscured any substantive message. This means that Trump was able to spread his story calmly and unchallenged: “We created the greatest economy in the world,” is one of his core messages, “then the coronavirus got us.” The criminal proceedings against him are all politically motivated. This will convince many voters: there was full employment under both presidents, and there was only significant inflation under the Democratic incumbent. Biden tries to explain that the reasons for this are complex and that the alternative would have been mass unemployment after the pandemic, but his rhetorical skills are no longer sufficient.

Trump explains the chaotic world situation with the fact that Biden is “weak” and that America is no longer respected in the world – which may have seemed quite plausible given that the President has visibly aged, and not just physically. Trump is not necessarily a friend of peace and expressly defends the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani during his term in office. Instead of a ceasefire in Gaza, he would rather “let the Israeli government finish the job.”

When asked, Trump denied whether Russian President Vladimir Putin’s conditions for a ceasefire in Ukraine (cession of the territories currently controlled by Russia and Ukraine not joining NATO) were acceptable, but left it open as to how the conflict could be resolved might look like from his point of view. “This war should never have happened,” he said. A helpless incumbent has no choice but to let his wife’s hand lead him up the few steps from the stage with obvious difficulty, which rounds off the overall impression of the evening.

Whether the separation of powers and the multi-party system in the USA are in serious danger if Trump returns in the foreseeable future will depend on whether the Republicans win both chambers of Congress in November. If so, at least an attempt to consolidate one’s own power through authoritarian means cannot be ruled out. In the state apparatus, this would certainly trigger an unprecedented power struggle between civil servants and judges with different party lines – unknown territory for the US constitutional order, which already has democratic deficits in many places.

In any case, after this debate it is clear that the US left only has to deal with Biden as a person and political phenomenon in retrospect. Biden’s disastrous stance in the Gaza war was the catalyst for the final break between many forces on the radical left and the left-liberal wing of the Democratic Party. It will always overshadow Biden’s presidency.

This also had its positive sides. Biden’s industrial and climate policies can be viewed as groundbreaking; his Inflation Reduction Act is the reason why renewable energy and manufacturing are booming in the US.

Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, for which he was bashed in the media, was also brave and right – even if it was poorly planned in execution and therefore involved many unnecessary victims. As a respected, perhaps even popular president, Joe Biden could have handed over the reins of office to Vice President Kamala Harris. The fact that this step was not taken probably paved the way for Trump to return to the White House.