Every Democrat in America Should be Livid

Biden bombed in the debate in precisely the way some of us predicted he would

U.S. President Joe Biden (R) and Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump participate in the CNN Presidential Debate at the CNN Studios on June 27, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Sorry, no audio for this post. I’m finishing it at 12:45am, Friday morning, and my family is asleep in a quiet house.

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I didn’t go into Thursday night planning to write a late-night post immediately following the CNN debate. But with the consensus in the commentariat pretty much unanimous, waiting until mid-morning Friday to publish something seems ill-advised. So here it goes: Like just about everyone else, I think Joe Biden performed disastrously—far worse than I feared he would.

And recall that I first warned that Democrats were “sleepwalking toward disaster with Joe Biden” last September. I repeated that argument in February of this year, both here and at The Atlantic. Yet the debate was still a shock. Biden might have been a decent president up until now—I think the record is mixed—but he was a muddle-headed old man on Thursday night. He confirmed every worry I expressed in those earlier essays—and every insinuation the right, including Donald Trump, has made about him being too diminished to serve another term.