The friends of President Joe Biden must have been lying to us.
Never mind that he walks like an old man just inching his way home after major surgery, they told us – his mind is still as sharp as someone in the prime of life.
Did that look like someone in the prime of life last week, 90 minutes which will live in national remorse?
No.
The Biden-Trump presidential debate ended shortly after 10:30 p.m. If the Democrats weren’t scouring the landscape for a new candidate by 10:35, then they’re deluding themselves.
You can love Joe Biden for his decency, his hard work, his devotion to America, and his half-century of political accomplishment. But, if we’re honest about it, we saw Donald Trump in his typical bullying, overbearing, obfuscating mode, and waited for Biden to call his bluff.
And the president of the United States seemed utterly incapable.
From the moment Biden appeared on camera, coughing and hoarse and his voice barely above a whisper, with the palest, pastiest presidential-debate makeup job since Richard Nixon 64 years ago, he looked confused, overwhelmed, closing his eyes as though rummaging through the back channels of his brain for information stored there since his last prep, which he’d already misplaced.
Ten minutes into the debate, I started getting text messages from Biden backers, declaring the end of the world. The texting and the telephone calls didn’t stop until I went to sleep.
But who could sleep?
At one point, Biden mumbled a few vaguely indecipherable words about immigration, and Trump, barely waiting for a question, snapped, “I don’t know what he said. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
You could pass this off as typical Trumpian hyperbole – there was plenty of that Thursday night – but he was right. Between Biden’s inability to enunciate very clearly as he moves deeper into his 80s, and his raspy voice and his near-monotone delivery, there were plenty of moments when we wondered what he was saying.
Or failing to say.
How do you give a pass to a man like Trump who’s been convicted of 34 felonies, who’s had to pay millions on sex-related charges, who attempted to overthrow the government – and you let him off the hook?
Why didn’t Joe Biden say, “Donald, I’m running for president to serve America, and everybody knows you’re running to keep yourself out of prison”?
Why did nobody – not Biden, and not the two CNN stiffs posing as moderators — fail to press Trump on the national security documents he swiped from the White House and tried to hide? Why didn’t they ask him about the phone call everybody heard him make to try to overthrow the vote in Georgia?
When they finally asked Trump if he would accept whatever the results will be in the 2024 election, why didn’t Biden say, “Never mind 2024? Donald, why do you keep saying you won in 2020? Every court and every official re-count say that’s not true – and yet you keep saying it, and you’ve created this bitter division in the country because of your lying.”
Why didn’t they ask him if he still believed he won that election – and let the whole country watch him try to weasel his way past four years of lying to us.
Instead, we had these wild Trumpian statements about illegal immigrants living in luxury hotels while “our veterans are dying in the streets.” This, from the same guy who called soldiers “losers” and “suckers,” and then denied it last night, even though the remark was exposed by the four-star general who heard him say it.
We’re still waiting for a coherent Trump response on the Jan. 6, 2020 insurrection he led. Or a coherent response to a question about climate change. Trump’s response was to play for time with quick sound-bite platitudes about police, about economics, about Sen. Tim Scott, about Black people, about immigration.
It led to one of Biden’s rare moments where he seemed fully awake. “I don’t know where the hell he’s been,” he said of Trump. “He hasn’t done a thing for the environment.”
But then he went back to wandering. Asked about the issue on everyone’s mind – that he’d be 86 at the end of a second term – Biden answered with a prepared line about once being the youngest man in the U.S. Senate.
And then he lost his way. He wandered into remarks about jobs and computer chips and never found his way back to the old-age issue.
When they got to closing remarks, Biden stumbled and mumbled. Trump closed with more craziness. “We’re living in hell,” he claimed. “The whole country is exploding.”
For the record, I just checked outside. Nope, not a sign of explosions, not a sign of hell.
Unless you’re a Democrat, that is, wondering how to tell Joe Biden the truth: if he wants to save America, he’s got to step aside now.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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