Pun Salad

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— Team Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaleyHQ) June 28, 2024

So I didn't watch the debate last night. I explicitly said I wasn't predicting the outcome.

But privately I expected the usual partisan spinners to trot out their prefabricated intelligence-insulting talking points afterward, and overall not much changing.

Wrong as usual. Feel free to click over to Election Betting Odds and see how quickly Biden's odds of winning cratered, starting roughly at 9pm Eastern time last night.

• Hey kids, what time is it? Noah Smith says it's Time to think about a second Trump term.

  It’s difficult to overstate how bad Joe Biden looked in the first presidential debate. He stumbled over his answers, sounded confused, and sometimes even forgot what he was saying halfway through. On the biggest and most important stage, Biden just couldn’t perform. It was easily the most disastrous debate performance I have ever seen.

  Which is not to say Trump did well; against an alert, well-spoken opponent, he would have come off very badly. He seemed manic and incoherent; his answers to questions resembled unhinged rants, skipping from topic to topic and full of obvious falsehoods. He is obviously going mentally downhill in his old age as well — just not as much as Biden.

  Personally, I still strongly endorse Biden over Trump. A President half-incapacitated by old age, but with competent appointees, is still preferable to a President who denies election results, encourages coup attempts against his own country, and encourages enemy empires to conquer U.S. allies. But I doubt most Americans will agree with me on this. Even before this disastrous debate, Biden was chronically behind in the polls, and Trump was favored to win in the election forecasts. Biden needed a very solid debate performance to turn things around, and he got the exact opposite of that.

• But should Biden drop out? Nate Silver opines on that burning question, and concludes: Yes, Joe Biden should drop out

  I’m not really in a mood to critique Trump’s debate performance, which was stronger than I’d expected but also included lots of wild, rambling tangents that only seemed coherent in comparison to Biden. Trump never won a post-debate poll in any of his three debates against Hillary Clinton or his two against Biden in 2020. But he absolutely crushed Biden, 67-33, in CNN’s poll of debate-watchers. How bad do you have to screw up to lose a debate by 34 points to Donald Trump in a country as divided as this one? And yes, these polls historically do have some predictive power in anticipating movement in the horse race, especially with a result as lopsided as this one.

  Really, I thought we'd be 25th Amendment territory long before now. I wonder if Kamala is making discreet queries of the rest of the cabinet?

• To a pulp. Christian Britschgi was impressed by one bit of Presidential incoherence: At the Presidential Debate, Biden Says He 'Beat Medicare'. (To be fair, Britschgi also remarks on Trump's "comparatively cogent lies".)

  At tonight's presidential debate, President Joe Biden made the shocking claim that under his administration, "We finally beat Medicare."

  It's a remarkable statement from a Democratic president. One would assume Biden would want to tout his preservation of entitlement programs—given that neither party (and particularly not the Democratic party) wants to seriously tackle entitlement reform.

  Instead, here is the president saying he finally "beat" the largest entitlement program of them all. Odd.

  The best explanation for Biden's remarks is that it was a passing gaffe. In fact, later in the debate, he attacked former President Donald Trump for wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security.

  That's not a particularly compelling explanation because that gaffe came at the tail end of a Biden answer that went from mildly cogent to utterly incoherent.

  But Trump… well, here's the bottom line:

  Libertarians, and friends of small government generally, have no champion among the two major party candidates. Given this sad reality, the best they can hope is for the candidates to at least check each other's most outrageous lies and evasions.

  […]

  In other words, you would hope that the two-party system would at least contain some productive competition between the two parties realistically competing to control a bloated, out-of-control federal government.

  What we saw tonight at CNN's debate confirms that the two-party system can't fulfill this task, even when the cameras are rolling.

• "Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes." Eric Boehm got a chuckle from this bit: Trump Blames Biden for Never Removing the Tariffs Trump Imposed.

  President Joe Biden had more than three years to roll back former President Donald Trump's tariffs that are driving up prices for consumers and businesses.

  He did not, even though Biden had made clear during the last campaign that he knew Americans were bearing the cost of those trade policies. Instead, Biden chose to pander to unionized workers in the Rust Belt and peddle an economically nonsensical message that in many ways echoed the one Trump had implemented. Biden has even hiked some of the tariffs Trump initially implemented on imports from China.

  During Thursday night's debate in Atlanta, those chickens came home to roost—as Biden was attacked by Trump both for keeping those tariffs in place and for the consequences of those policies. He did not do a good job of defending himself.

  This makes me glad I didn't watch the debate. I could very well have damaged the TV by throwing something heavy at it.

• Ah, yes. That's the world I was looking for. And that word is "debacle". The NR editors judge: The Biden Debate Debacle.

  Democrats cannot say they weren’t warned. Joe Biden’s age has never been a secret. He shows it every time he appears in public. We warned them ourselves. Back in February, we wrote that Biden should have withdrawn from the race last year — and still owed it to the country to do so. That reality ought to be clear even to his admirers after a debate in which his chief opponent was not Donald Trump but his own frailty.

  Biden sounded weak, wheezy, decrepit, and overwhelmed. His best moments came when he got indignant, but even then, his mantra of “the idea!” got almost as old as he sounded.

  It was an unspinnably bad performance. The people who claim that Biden is consistently sharp and vigorous behind the scenes always strained credulity. They should now be ignored or mocked.

  If Biden’s performance had not been so halting and weak, Trump’s own ramblings and flights from reality — on tariffs, on January 6, on deficit spending — might have cost him. But Trump was himself more disciplined than he had been during the 2020 debates, making relatively focused defenses of his record and attacks on Biden’s. He drew blood from Biden on late-term abortion and on Afghanistan.

  Biden’s senescence wasn’t the only dismaying thing about the debate. Neither candidate explained what he intends to do with power the next four years. Both were lost at sea when confronted with questions about the nation’s finances. They were livelier comparing golf handicaps. Bad as all of that is, though, the immediate problem is that we have a president who does not appear to be up to the job today, let alone for the next four and a half years.

  Democrats can scarcely hide their sense of panic and dread. They have only themselves to blame.

  Don't bother to click over, that's the whole thing. I'd only add that Republicans deserve a fair share of blame for… well, see above.