By Frank Bruni
Everybody talks about Joe Biden as the old jalopy in this presidential race, but Thursday night in Nashville, Tennessee, it was Donald Trump who seemed to be running on fumes.
I don’t mean physically: He had his full repertoire of facial expressions (cocky, kooky, menacing, martyred) and the usual grating bray. I mean metaphorically. I mean politically.
He’s almost certainly reaching the end of the road. And the second (and last) onstage matchup of him and Biden tidily illustrated why. While he needed to put on a show different from the farce that he has performed over this wretched year, he has nothing new — nothing more — in him.
While he needed to part company with his foul temper, that’s the only weather available to him. His calmness during the first third or so of the debate inevitably gave way to the usual excitability. He was back to his characteristic grandiosity, his customary falsehoods, his mocking, his taunting.
“We can’t lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe does,” he pouted. “He has this thing about living in a basement.”
He described Biden’s children as “a vacuum cleaner sucking up money” from sketchy foreign sources. He told Biden, “Don’t give me the stuff about how you’re this innocent baby.” Both statements perfectly exemplified Trump’s habit of assigning his opponents caricatures that apply more aptly to him.
And the self-pity. Oh, the self-pity. Trump bellyached about how the IRS treated him, about how Robert Mueller treated him, about the messes supposedly bequeathed to him by President Barack Obama, about his general tragic unappreciated lot in life. Trump has taught America and Americans that there’s always someone else to blame. That lesson hasn’t bettered us a bit.
Enough already. Enough of his terrible example. Enough of his toxic campaign. Enough of the ambient ugliness in America. As Election Day draws nearer and Trump’s opportunity to recast and redeem himself shrinks, he just offers up more noise, more nastiness.
And it has cost us, dearly. That was evident in the coverage of the debate, much of which remarked on how relatively restrained and substantive it was. Relative to the previous debate, sure, but that was pure bedlam. Trump still flung fantastical accusations, still trafficked in extravagant lies and still interrupted, at least when his microphone wasn’t muted. That this was deemed to be in the neighbourhood of normal just proves how thoroughly he has lowered our expectations and debased the presidency.
For most of the evening, Biden shook his head in disbelief, smiled the way you do at an incorrigible toddler, and counted down the minutes until it was all over.
He actually looked long and hard at his watch. In a different debate with a saner opponent, that gesture might have been fatal. In this one, it was merely relatable. I, too, couldn’t wait for the night to end. And I’m betting that an overwhelming majority of Americans felt the same way.
Trump came into the evening in miserable shape, the odds against his reelection growing longer with each daily snit. His economy has tanked, his base has shrunk, his attempts to vilify Biden have failed, and his downplaying of the coronavirus has been undercut by his own infection with it and its rampage through the White House.
The debate itself presented a tough, even impossible, task. On the one hand, Trump had to rattle Biden, because the way to catch up to a front-runner is to halt his stride, and Trump was hardly going to do that with politeness and affirmations.
But he couldn’t repeat his disastrous turn in their previous encounter, when he wasn’t so much fierce as feral. To repair the damage, he had to exhibit at least a whisper of decorum and the faintest murmurings of a heart.
Those goals were in tension, though several prominent Republicans noted that Trump had a model for how to behave: Mike Pence, who was alternately zealous and Zen in his vice-presidential debate with Kamala Harris.
But Trump lacks the humility to take cues from anyone. And nudging the nutty monarch of Mar-a-Loco to emulate the Hoosier snoozer is like asking a honey badger to morph into a three-toed sloth. It goes against the very nature of the beast.
He pursued an odd strategy, built on pure delusion and dependent on voters’ complete amnesia.
He painted Biden, not himself, as an ethical abomination whose career in government was devoted to personal enrichment. He essentially cast Biden as the incumbent, speaking as if Biden had exited the vice presidency all of 60 seconds ago, and clung to the claim that he, the leader of the world’s richest and most powerful country for nearly four years now, was the ultimate outsider.
“It’s all talk, no action, with these politicians,” Trump said at one point.
These politicians? Mr President, please allow me to introduce you to the profession that you now inhabit. You’re awful at it, and there’s a death toll of more than 220,000 Americans confirming that. But it is your occupation, God save the rest of us.
As for Trump’s delusions, they flared brightest when he likened himself — for the umpteenth time — to Abraham Lincoln and when he confidently predicted that Republicans would regain the House majority. Republicans will be lucky to hold on to their Senate majority. And all the rosy soothsaying in the world won’t change that, any more than Trump’s promise about the coronavirus (“We’re rounding the turn; we’re rounding the corner; it’s going away”) will be magically fulfilled.
I would love to be able to write that Biden, in contrast, was dazzling, but I live in a realm more truthful than Trump’s. Biden is never dazzling. On Thursday night he was frequently wobbly, failing to nail comebacks that should have been a cinch, and spoke more negatively of the oil and gas industry than he intended to, so that he was forced to try to clean up his remarks after the debate. Trump will probably spend the coming days telling workers in that industry that Biden is coming for their jobs.
But what I’ve come to appreciate about Biden is that he’s not claiming greatness, not the way Trump does with just about every breath. He’s claiming good intentions. If he wins, he may be the rare president who’s not convinced that he’s the smartest person in every room. That could actually help him get things done.
I nodded along with his final remarks, when he said, yet again, “What is on the ballot here is the character of this country: decency, honour, respect.” He’s right about that, and he’s the right person because of that.
“You know who I am; you know who he is,” Biden said earlier. “Look at us closely.” I don’t need to turn my eyes toward Trump anymore. I’ve seen all that I can take, and I’m long past ready for a different view.