Debate of depravity

Column: First Trump-Biden match is a debate of depravity, revealing just how far America has sunk

By CHRIS JONES

“My son. My son. My son,” cried Joe Biden.

This stunning moment of despair at the first presidential debate, if that’s the right word, followed some momentary confusion, or feigned confusion, on the part of the current President of the United States Donald J. Trump.

Were we talking about Hunter Biden, arguably a fair political target, given his previous role as a lobbyist, or Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46 and surely is not a fair target at all when you are debating his father, for the good Lord’s sake? At least, not in a nation that considers itself civilized. You know, decorous. Compassionate. Human. Tolerant.

Biden had intended to use his late son, Beau, as an illustration of his support for the military. He ended up shouting his name as if this elderly and clearly decent man was pleading for American democracy itself.

It was a moment enough to turn your stomach in a debate that mostly demanded that Americans look away, lest we get dragged down to the level of calling those in our most elevated offices clowns, or telling them to just shut up, man, shut up, just shut up.

What we had here was a chaotic, detestable and disastrous debate, a debacle so depressing as to seem fictional, taking place in a year with some 200,000 Americans lying dead from COVID-19.

Two hundred thousand Americans dead! Millions more untethered by economic losses! Is it not at least imaginable that, given such a backdrop of death, even sharply oppositional political opponents might have been able to debate health care, or economic policy, or taxation, or whatever the heck, with a modicum of respect for what the people they claim to serve have just suffered? Strike that. Are currently suffering. How did we get so far down this Trumpian rabbit hole that the question never seriously came up?

“(This) will raise a lot of questions about the future of presidential debates between these two candidates,” said Wolf Blitzer at the end of the night on CNN.

The future of debates, Wolf? The future of debates?

To hell and back with debates. This wasn’t the Harvard Union. How about saying that Tuesday, Sept. 29 raised a lot of questions about the soul of a nation that clearly is coming apart at the seams?

Debates? Charming idea, but no longer possible in the America we have wrought. Demonstrably.

At what other presidential debate in the history of the union have American ever heard the person sitting in that office use the phrase “stupid bastards"? Teachers, good luck explaining that one to your kids in Zoom school tomorrow.

Yet instead of suspending normal hostilities, as utterly demanded by the extraordinary circumstances, the debate did more to raise the national blood pressure than ingesting six Quarter Pounders with shaved onions, mayonnaise and extra cheese. This thing was nearly unbearable to watch. No other presidential debate, ever, has been so personally painful, or made one feel one’s mortality more.

Certainly, it is possible to note Trump’s remarkable skills at the form, honed from his years on reality television: the way he first cocks his head, then moves in close to the microphone, then waits for just the right pause in his opponent’s delivery to find a tiny space in the air, allowing him to lower his voice, ingest the microphone seemingly half way down his throat and utter an intimate, supremely well chosen, sotto voce counter-commentary as brief as it is immediately devastating. He couldn’t circle Biden as he did Hillary Clinton four years ago. But he merely adapted to new conditions. No politician has ever been as good at this and, four years later, the creaking machinery of debating as we have known it still has found no way to counteract Trump’s skill.

If you admire disrupters, you might, for a second, have given the president his due. No one knows how to deal with him. Still. And what none of the elites on the left want to admit is that they also don’t know how to talk to the white working classes like Trump does. Still. And he’s never better than when cornered on all sides.

But to give this man his due, you had to be willing to, oh, you know, temporarily suspended all levels of human decency, to see all political discourse as a zero-sum game, an existential battle of will completely removed from any surrounding context outside of the debate room in Cleveland or wherever we were. Who even cared? It felt more like the waiting room to hell that appears in Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit.”

In other words, proffering those kudos meant you had to descend down a staircase up which it is very difficult to climb back. Biden did indeed take that walk at moments — he must have felt like he had no choice — telling Trump to “stop yapping” and calling him the “worst president America has ever had.” He tried to talk to the viewers at home, not his opponent, by staring out front, but Trump, a gifted improvisor when fueled by 93-octane pique, learned how to counter that tired old dodge years ago. Biden talks to groups; Trump whistles to individuals, singing the tune of the counter-narrative, understanding that his world view means he always has two debate opponents, the other one being the moderator, in this case a dazed and ramrodded Chris Wallace.

Some supporters might think that is not fair on Trump. But actually, it plays to his immense strengths: he sucks up all the psychic energy, all the time, all the attention, all the commentariat, critical as that august body surely thinks it is being, even as it adds to the mythology of the leader of those who understand what it is to feel disrespected.

Trump is, of course, doing what he always has done. No one in the chattering or Twittering classes knows how to stop him. Still.

It’s remarkable and it would be just so very compelling if we all weren’t trying to mourn the dead and right our lives.