The first Joe-Don presidential debate tells us more about the state of the US than the next POTUS

Really? As in, seriously, really? These are the top two contenders for a job that, with rapidly enhanced irony, is still described as ‘leader of the free world’?

For many -- especially those unburdened from having to play the American voter’s part of having thrown up Joe Biden and Donald Trump as the only two dishes on the November US presidential election buffet menu -- it’s not so much a reflection on the two candidates themselves, as much as on 2024 America itself. Sure, a 90-min televised debate is hardly a decider of capability or electoral popularity (or the lack thereof). But it sure is a representative trailer of the moving picture already playing in theatres not near China, Russia or West Asia.

CNN, hosting the Biden-Trump show, had taken special precautions not to make Thursday night’s first presidential debate turn into a ‘MAGA bhakts vs Trump-haters’ slugfest. Like in the good old Covid restriction days, there was no live audience (or canned cheers or boos), making it a relatively sedated, sedative affair. Also, by muting the mic after each participant’s allotted time per issue – a request from the Biden team – Trump wasn’t able to butt in and tear away. This, ironically, led to the Orange One actually coming across as a far less potent agent of chaos than his credentials state.

Viewers were, indeed, spared yet another display of ‘polarised America’. But instead, they were privy to full-blown ‘fractured US’ puckering its very chapped lips from behind two lecterns.

This was the first time a POTUS and an XPOTUS were trading shots -- at one point, golfing shots. ‘I’m happy to play golf with you if you carry your own bag,’ 81-yr-old Biden said to 78-yr-old Trump. ‘Think you can do it?’

But a TV debate like this overturns the old WYSIWYG jungle proverb. Instead, it was WYGIWYS – What You Got Is What You Saw. America having to choose between two has-beens running on spare fossil-fuel.


From the very start, Biden looked as if he had been pulled out of bed for his great-grandson’s convocation ceremony -- eyes darting, speech sliding, swaying from an incredulous look to a smirk. And that rasp. Ex-Delaware Senator Biden became Senator Palpatine straight out of The Phantom Menace from the Star Wars franchise. He could well have been a hologram, with a hood covering most of his face, scraping out the words, ‘Viceroy, I don’t want this stunted slime in my sight again.’

If CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash were less chatty than ChatGPT, that was the plan. With these two meeting for the first time since the 2020 presidential debates, resentment between incumbent and challenger could be felt in front of viewing screens even before the issues-as-meat were tossed into the two cages.

With his usual style of not being held hostage to silly things like facts, Trump kept riffing on three-chords: How Joe Biden/ Was the worst president/ This country has ever had.’ Not the most sophisticated of conclusions aimed at a president who he was accusing of destroying the economy and demolishing the country’s border – harbingers of the end of the American civilisation. But he was blowing his own Trump as usual. Nothing surprising there.

Stonewalling questions on his policy to tackle the West Asia and Ukraine crises, not to mention whether he would accept the results of the November election, Trump was literally all over the place. Dodging direct answers more than once, his responses came as side punches: ‘[Biden’s] become like a Palestinian… a very bad Palestinian. A weak one,’ Putin was pretty much invited to invade Ukraine by Biden. And that he would certainly accept the November verdict – if the election was fair. Even though Trump has already insisted all over his campaign trail that ‘Democrats will cheat’. And yet, even with Trump all over the place, it was Biden who seemed literally out of place.

Frankly, the way the two responded on issues in their scruffy, boomer battle – Biden accusing Trump of having sex with a porn star and Trump channelling his inner Bill Clinton with the meme-worthy response, ‘I didn’t have sex with a porn star’ -- doesn’t matter one jot. Sticking points from the debate were the novel name-callings – a challenge, considering the two have been exchanging sweet-nothings for a while now. Don called Joe a ‘Manchurian candidate’ in Beijing’s pay (even as Chinese social media commentators responded to Trump’s showing as that of a ‘nation-builder’ – China being the nation). Joe called Don a ‘whiner’, adding, ‘Something snapped in you last time you lost.’

In all the 90 minutes of low burn and slow TV, we witnessed one meandering man with almost four years of presidency under his rapidly loosening belt, responding to a fabricating man with four years of presidency under his unbuckled and brandishing belt. It can be safely said that Trump supporters came away more chuffed by their restrained Man in the Studio than Biden supporters with their strained Older Man at Sea.

And it can be said even more safely that America, if it does retain its geopolitical and economic dominance, it will do so despite the next occupant of the Oval Office, not because of him.