Only one word can appropriately sum up the scene across the political landscape during and immediately following President Biden and former President Donald Trump’s first debate.
Panic.
“Right now, as we speak, there is a deep, wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party,” reported CNN’s John King moments after the faceoff ended.
Biden “wasn’t capable of doing any better than he did,” declared Chris Wallace.
“The person we saw tonight, the president we saw tonight on that stage: Is that how he is every day?” Anderson Cooper asked Vice President Kamala Harris.
On MSNBC, the Fates — Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid — played with Biden’s political thread.
“He needed to settle Democrats,” said Reid. “He did the opposite of that. He made them more panicked.”
The panic made its way into print, too.
Under the headline “A Fumbling Performance, and a Panicking Party,” The New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote, “Democrats who have defended the president for months” spent Thursday night trading “frenzied phone calls and text messages within minutes of the start of the debate.”
The Times’ Tom Friedman, a personal friend of the president, said he had wept while watching Biden struggle and called on him to step aside.
Not long after he did, the Gray Lady’s editorial board called for the same.
“Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention, or dies,” an adviser to Democratic donors told Politico. “Otherwise we are f–king dead.”
As late as Friday afternoon, the panic showed no signs of abating.
David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaigns. nodded along as one of his conservative CNN colleagues compared Biden’s re-election effort to the Titanic. “I think this is something he [Biden] needs to consider and those around him need to consider: What does he want his legacy to be?” added Axelrod. “He did save the country back in 2020 from Trump, and we saw what happened in the aftermath that underscored how important that was.”
“If he then becomes a vehicle by which a very unpopular Donald Trump, who, by the way, did not do particularly well last night, becomes president again, what does that do to his legacy?”
On debate night, every American across the country who had the displeasure of watching the two major-party candidates take the stage knew the truth and, whether with words or expressions, acknowledged it.
Joe Biden is no longer capable of carrying out his duties as president, should resign his office immediately and must drop out of the 2024 presidential race.
Everyone knew it, yet now some pretend we didn’t.
Biden and his team hurriedly acted to make it clear he would not go down quietly. And instead of doing the right thing for the country — and the wise thing for their political coalition — party elders followed his lead.
“Bad debate nights happen,” declared Obama in a pivotal Friday afternoon statement. “But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”
Following his old boss’ cue, Axelrod reversed course Saturday. “Reality check: @Joe Biden is the nominee of the Democratic Party,” he declared, “that issue is settled.”
“Joe isn’t just the right person for the job. He’s the only person for the job,” First Lady Jill Biden told donors at a weekend fundraiser.
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski opened Monday’s show with a 15-minute monologue so over the top it would have made the North Korean writers of Kim family lore blush. “For me, Joe Biden is still the man for this moment,” she gushed.
This attempt to reconstruct the public’s confidence in Biden’s ability to serve will fail miserably.
Because however bad one might remember the president’s performance being, rest assured it was worse. After he left the stage Thursday, the first lady congratulated her husband by assuring him, “You answered all the questions!”
If only that were true.
Yes, his walk out to the podium was pained, and yes, his speech pattern was “halting,” but his struggles were not all cosmetic. Time after time, he demonstrated a complete inability to comprehend questions or formulate answers that even bordered on coherent.
Asked about the national debt, he transformed into former Speaker Paul Ryan and boasted, “We finally beat Medicare.”
Asked about abortion, he complained Trump had attended the funeral of a young woman murdered by an illegal immigrant and started describing a “ridiculous” epidemic of rape between “in-laws” and “brothers and sisters.”
And in his closing statement, Biden delivered a rambling monologue that touched on insulin, the COVID-19 pandemic, child care and, of all things, lead pipes.
But perhaps even more potent than the performance itself was the reaction to it across America.
It wasn’t “bedwetting,” as Team Biden now insists, it was a horrifying, collective realization the president is no longer fit to serve.
Everyone knew it last Thursday night — and everybody still knows it now.
NEWS CREDIT
