Joe Biden and his team wanted this unusually early, June 27 debate on CNN because the president is trailing the former president in the polls. 50 million viewers in the United States watched POTUS implode on live TV.
As for Donald Trump, he was, is and will remain a serial liar. After the debate, CNN identified over 30 false claims, misrepresentations, exaggerations and outright lies made by the former president. He is lying when his lips are moving.
The only silver lining was the debate format. Only one of the two candidates was allowed to speak at a time, the microphone of the other was switched one. This meant that viewers could fully hear what the candidates were saying. For Democrats, this fired back because everyone could fully realize that Joe Biden was lost without a teleprompter.
Shortly after the debate, Vice President Kamala Harris said on TV: «Yes there was a slow start [by Biden], but it was a strong finish.» In reality, the president could not even properly deliver his closing statement — a few sentences he must have prepared and reheasered many times.
After the debate, one could see and hear Jill Biden take her husband by the hand and tell him like a six-year-old: “You did a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!”
The leading Democrats and potential alternatives to Joe Biden have engaged in Mikado politics: Whoever moves first is politically dead. Only the media and the public have come to the obvious conclusion: The first 2024 presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump showed that the Democrat is unfit to lead the United States, let alone the Free World.
A CNN debate flash poll published shortly after the duel confirmed the impression: 67% said that Trump had won the debate, only 33% saw Joe Biden as the winner. The Democrat looked mostly lost and fragile, whereas the Republican could project power. The lies do not hurt Donald Trump too much because he is a mix of a TV celebrity (The Apprentice) and a (MAGA) cult leader to whom all is forgiven by his followers.
Not only independent voters remain worried. The two leading parties in the United States — with its 330 million people — have been unable to find two young, dynamic and competent politicians to replace Biden and Trump as their presidential candidates.
A look at the 100 United States Senators is not much more encouraging. On average, they are 67 years old. The renewal of American politics is overdue. On the other hand, the French did not fare much better with the young President Macron and his even younger Prime Minister Attal, maybe soon replaced by an even younger new Prime Minister Bardella (28!) from the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National), but that’s another story.
In the United States, this time, maybe a young, competent third party or independent candidate with strong financial backing would have had a chance. But Joe Biden (*Nov. 20, 1942) and Donald Trump (*June 14, 1946) face the independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. aka RFK Jr. (*Jan. 17, 1954) as the strongest “alternative”. As a member of the famous Kennedy family and a former Democrat (until 2023), JFK’s nephew takes away votes from the Democrat Joe Biden, as a notorious conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist, he takes away votes from the MAGA Republican Donald Trump. It remains to be seen who of the two major candidates will suffer more from the presence of another loose cannon in the race. For independent and major party voters in search of a fresh face, he does not represent a credible alternative.
Some 70% of Americans have repeatedly said that they don’t want to see a Biden vs. Trump rematch. Trump’s former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley had tried to run against Trump on that powerful punchline. She never had a chance because the Republican Party has been transformed into the MAGA cult movement. When Nikki Haley ended her campaign after her Super Tuesday debacle in March, she said that Donald Trump would have to “earn” the support of her voters. Although the former president subsequently never made a single step towards the Nikki Haley primary voters, she said on May 22 that she would vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election. It is one thing not to vote for Biden but another thing to de facto endorse Trump. With that announcement, Nikki Haley lost her credibility.
After she had left the Republican primaries, she still managed to win 10% to 20% in several states because her name remained on the ballots. This is proof that there remains a minority within the GOP unwilling to vote for Trump. The Biden campaign never tried to tap into that potential. To win over a vote from a Trump voter is a double win.
Donald Trump is not THAT strong. His competitors — including Joe Biden — are weak. In addition, prosecutors and judges have not done their job. Donald Trump should be behind bars, of either a prison or a mental institution. He openly tried to stay in the White House although he had lost the 2020 presidential election. He refused to concede, incited a mob to storm the Capitol on January 6, urged Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the Biden-Harris victory, he called the (fellow Republican) Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021 and asked him to find additional 11,780 votes in Georgia so he would win the state. There was and is enough evidence to send Trump to jail.
Already in April and May 2020, during the pandemic, Donald Trump had encouraged “re-open” protests in states led by Democrats. He had alled for protesters to “liberate” Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia from coronavirus measures. He had encouraged the storm of the Michigan State Capitol building. In retrospect, it looks like the rehearsal of the January 6th insurrection.
Back to the current situation. What counts in the end in the 2024 presidential election are the few swing states. And there, for months, Trump has been consistently ahead of Biden in the polls. For instance in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer Siena College poll of April 28 to May 9, 2024 Trump was ahead in five of six swing states: Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Joe Biden only led among registered voters in one battleground state: Wisconsin.
Rightly or not, voters are concerned about inflation (including energy prices) and immigration. The Biden administration did not create, but increase the mess at the Mexican border. Mortgage rates have become a problem for many home owners. The U.S. federal budget deficit was 6.3% in fiscal year 2023, far too high in times of low unemployment (May 2024: unemployment rate 3.7%) and reasonable growth of 1.4% in the first quarter of 2024. Inflation year-on-year from May 2023 until May 2024 reached 3.3%. That cannot be called hyper-inflation but, for poor people who are already hurting, it is a problem.
The United States surely have to invest in the failing infrastructure. That’s why Congress managed to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill. However, some of the overall over-spending is not wise. The deficit is out of control in good times, the overall debt is approaching a critical level. The Republicans should of course shut up because, under Trump, in 2019, BEFORE the pandemic, the monthly deficit had reached record highs.
There is one Biden disaster almost nobody is talking about anymore: Biden handed Afghanistan over to the Taliban. The fact that Donald Trump had initiated the withdrawal and would most likely not have handled the whole affair any better does not matter. Biden was in office and handled it poorly, comparable only to the disastrous United States troop withdrawal from Vietnam. This sent shockwaves around the globe to U.S. allies and potential allies. Already Obama had pursued a disastrous foreign policy, e.g. in Syria, Iraq, Libya and regarding Putin’s Russia in Ukraine, to mention just a few blunders. Joe Biden watched the military coup in Niger, with U.S. troops in a military base in the country not helping the democratically elected President Bazoum. That is of course a “detail” nobody is talking about in the United States.
Democrats have to wake up. The United States and the Free World cannot afford another Trump presidency. More than once, Donald Trump has shown a worrying sympathy for dictators around the globe, a disdain for democracy, the rule of law and the free press as well a women and their rights.
Democrats hope of course that the end of Roe vs. Wade, the attack by Trump and the hard-right members of the Supreme Court on abortion rights can mobilize women around the United States. That is half of the electorate.
Nevertheless, Democrats need someone who can articulate what is wrong with Trump and his policies. Joe Biden has always been prone to gaffes. But in recent months, his slips of tongue have become frequent to the point that any reasonable observer can only conclude that the president is no longer fit for office.
Regarding Joe Biden’s poor debate performance on June 27, some Democrats came forward with the ridiculous excuse that the president had a cold. The president has a cold and, on such a day, the Free World has no longer a leader?
On June 29, 2024 the American left-wing think tank Data for Progress published poll results showing that 53% of all likely voters were more concerned about Joe Biden’s age and physical and mental health, while only 42% said they were mostly concerned about Trump’s criminal charges and threats to democracy. Among Democrats, only 21% think that Biden’s age is the main concern, among independents/third party voters that rate goes up to 55%, among Republicans it’s 86%. Among Democrats, 77% worry most about Trump’s criminal charges and threats against democracy. Among independents and third party voters, it’s the main concern for 36% (9% don’t know), among Republicans, only 9% worry most about Trump’s criminal charges and threats against democracy.
Although, according to the same source, Kamala Harris does not do better against Donald Trump than Joe Biden (45% vs. 48%) among all likely voters, 39% of likely Democratic voters think that the current vice president should replace the current president as the Democratic nominee, should Biden drop out, far ahead of the California Governor Gavin Newsom with 18% support, Pete Buttigieg with 10% and many others in the single-digit range.
Kamala Harris has remained an extremely dull vice president. Joe Biden and his team have not offered her much space to shine. She got the difficult task to solve the Mexican border crisis. Joe Biden had ignored the task until 2024 when his team realized that it had become a key issue in the 2024 election. They negociated a deal with Republicans which, at the last minute, got killed by Donald Trump — because it would have eliminated a key line of attack against Joe Biden and the Democrats.
A look at the Data for Progress poll regarding the rating of Biden, Trump and Harris shows that they all have 44% favorable rating by all likely voters. 55% say they have an unfaborable view of Trump, 54% have an unfavorable view of Biden, 51% have an unfavorable view of Harris.
The conclusion remains that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are unfit for office for various reasons. Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Gretchen Whitmer and other Democrats have not yet had the time to emerge. And time is running out.
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Official portrait of President Joe Biden, March 3, 2021. (U.S. Navy photo courtesy of the White House by Adam Schultz).
Article added on July 2, 2024 at 14:51 German time.
