It’s appropriate that President Joe Biden, 81, prepared for the first presidential debate as though it were the hopped-up ’80s, while former President Donald Trump, only 78, got ready as if it were the breezy ’70s.
In the laid-back 1970s, people didn’t want to seem to try too hard. The fashion was to look relaxed and achieve success apparently effortlessly. Trump has engaged in a few policy discussions with his team but hasn’t bothered with mock debates or had aides shoot tough questions at him so he can practice snappy rejoinders. He’s not worrying about being caught off guard, and he acts as though success will naturally come his way.
He told the Washington Examiner’s Byron York that debating is “an attitude more than anything else” and suggested that as he already knows his stuff, there’s been no need to cram for the big event in the days leading up to it.
Days? Biden has been cramming for a week. That’s what makes him look like a man of the 1980s, a decade when the desirable demeanor was nothing like the 1970s’ no-sweat cool. It was, instead, thought important to look like you were working hard, flat out, intensely engaged, straining every nerve from dawn till darkness in unstinting effort. The ’80s were when hotshots considered buying two jackets for their business suits to leave one at their desk overnight so people would think they’d left work for only a moment rather than knocking off to go home.
That’s the way Biden has gotten ready for the debate in Atlanta. He’s been holed up with campaign staff sweating details ever since his two jaunts to Europe this month, interrupted briefly for a calamitous fundraiser in Hollywood. The president has gone into purdah, focusing entirely on how to ensure a good performance toe-to-toe with Trump. In his case, this may mean nothing more than avoiding egregious senior moments that draw voter attention to his rapidly declining mental and physical abilities.
Biden must allay concerns in voters’ minds about his ability to lead the country for another four years until after he turns 86 years old. They’ve watched him stumble and bumble increasingly since January 2021, and it is certain to get worse. Some of us thought Biden was past it before the 2020 Democratic primaries and assumed voters, seeing through the lifted and pepped facade, would deny him the nomination. We were wrong. But can he defy Grandfather Time yet again?
Trump’s debate goal is altogether different. Although he is less than four years younger than Biden and has also shown signs of aging, he still has plenty of vigor. His challenge, indeed, is to demonstrate that he can control that vigor, restrain his combative energies, and channel them into productive lines of argument.
Debating on prime-time TV, he will not be talking to his adoring fan base, which loves his mockery of “Sleepy Joe” and hoots when he suggests the president will be jacked up on drugs to get him through the grueling 90 minutes of rhetorical conflict. His key audience will be independent voters, especially in swing states, who can be won over by Trump if he focuses their attention on how much worse off they are under Biden than they were four years ago when he was in the Oval Office.
But they won’t be won over if, when they switch on their televisions, they find the Orange Ogre is baaaack forcing them again to contemplate his ungoverned temperament rather than the issues they care about. If he squanders time riffing on the rigged or “stolen” election, voters will tune out and Biden will win.
In other words, Trump wins if he is able to make the debate about Biden’s awful policies and not about himself. Thus he must do something he almost never does, which is to focus attention on someone other than himself.
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He has been showing considerable discipline recently, and it is worth a bet that his itch to win, which is the first step in his revenge for 2020’s loss, will check the boiling fury inside him and reduce it to a simmer. He managed to do that in the second debate in 2020, to avoid the constant interruptions that had made him look a jerk in the first. But by then it was too late. The first debate is always more important than ones that come after.
For Trump, the Atlanta standoff is, weirdly, a second chance to make a first impression. Most debates don’t radically alter the trajectory of presidential races. But Trump needs to stanch the trickling leakage of support he has suffered since his conviction in last month’s hush money trial. This debate could be the hinge of the entire election.
