It’s appropriate that 81-year-old President Joe Biden prepared for the first presidential debate as if it were the heady ’80s, while former President Donald Trump, just 78, got ready as if it were the laid-back ’70s.
In the relaxed 1970s, you didn’t want to appear to be trying too hard. It was fashionable to appear relaxed and to succeed seemingly effortlessly. Trump has had a few policy discussions with his team, but he hasn’t bothered to hold mock debates or have his advisers ask him tough questions so he could practice quick-witted answers. He’s not afraid of being caught off guard and acts as if success will come naturally to him.
He told the Washington Examiner Byron York said that debating is “more about attitude than anything else” and said that since he already knew his subject, there was no need for him to study for it in the days leading up to the big event.
Days? Biden has been cramming for a week. That makes him look like a man of the 1980s, a decade when the desired demeanor had nothing to do with the casual cool of the 1970s. Instead, it was considered important to look like you were working hard, with full commitment, with all your heart, straining every nerve in tireless effort from morning to night. In the ’80s, top executives considered buying two jackets to go with their business suits, leaving one on their desk overnight so people would think they had left work for just a moment, rather than calling it a day.
This is how Biden has prepared for the debate in Atlanta. Since his two trips to Europe this month, interrupted only briefly for a disastrous fundraiser in Hollywood, he has been holed up with the campaign team and obsessing over details. The president has entered a kind of “pardah,” focused entirely on how to perform well against Trump. In his case, that may mean nothing more than avoiding egregious moments that draw voters’ attention to his rapidly declining mental and physical abilities.
Biden must allay voters’ concerns about whether he can lead the country for another four years before he turns 86. Since January 2021, they’ve seen him stumble and stumble more and more, and it’s sure to get worse. Some of us thought Biden had it all figured out before the 2020 Democratic primaries and assumed that voters who saw behind the buffed-up and jazzed-up facade would deny him the nomination. We were wrong. But can he defy grandfather time again?
Trump’s goal in the debate is quite different. Although he is less than four years younger than Biden and is also showing signs of age, he is still full of energy. His challenge is indeed to show that he can control that energy, curb his combative energy and channel it into productive lines of argument.
At his prime-time debates on television, he won’t be speaking to his loyal supporters, who love his parody of “Sleepy Joe” and cheer when he suggests the president will pump himself full of drugs to get through the grueling 90 minutes of rhetorical arguments. His most important audience will be independent voters, especially in swing states, whom Trump can win over by drawing their attention to how much worse off they are under Biden than they were four years ago when he was in the Oval Office.
But they will not be convinced when they turn on their TV and find that the Orange Ogre back They will once again be forced to think about his uncontrolled temper instead of the issues they care about. If he wastes his time ranting about the rigged or “stolen” election, voters will tune out and Biden will win.
In other words, Trump will win if he can direct the debate toward Biden’s terrible policies rather than his own. To do that, he has to do something he almost never does: direct the attention to someone other than himself.
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He has shown considerable discipline of late, and it’s worth betting that his will to win, which is the first step in his revenge for the 2020 defeat, will curb the boiling anger inside him and reduce it to a simmer. He managed to do that in the second debate of 2020, avoiding the constant interruptions that made him look like an idiot in the first. But by then it was too late. The first debate is always more important than the ones that follow.
For Trump, the standoff in Atlanta is, oddly enough, a second chance to make a first impression. Most debates don’t radically change the course of presidential elections. But Trump must stop the slow loss of support he has suffered since his conviction in the hush money trial last month. This debate could be the pivotal point of the entire election.
