By Obsessing Over TV Visuals Rather Than Listening to Words, Voters Just Got Conned By Donald Trump—Again

This report analyzes what President Biden actually said at the debate, rather than how he looked saying it. What we see in doing so—in focusing on how to govern rather than how to perform—is stunning.

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Introduction

There’s a reason Donald Trump slathers on cheap Swiss bronzer daily—often missing key spots on his face, most commonly around his ears—and why he allows a bizarre hair confection to sit atop his head which (semi-regularly-applied neon yellow hair dye excepted) takes hours daily to arrange and keep arranged, time some feel might be better spent on substantive matters.

There’s a reason Trump wears an absurdly long red tie every day that makes him look clownish; it’s intended to cover his gut, which is the same reason the onetime leader of the free world is the only world leader known to tape down his tie with Scotch tape: the alternative would be revealing his belly. And that belly would of course belie the many doctored medical reports—some written, incredibly, by Trump himself—that he has foisted on the American voting population as supposed proof of his robust health.

While all of America watched Joe Biden running shirtless on a beach or biking with friends, the morbidly obese Trump was driving illegally on golf-course fairways to avoid carrying his clubs, or strategizing with a soon-to-be-stiffed-on-tip caddy over how to ignore his many drives into the woods and give himself yet another secret mulligan. While Biden was racing up and down steps at events to the point that his penchant for doing so became a meme, Trump was holding onto the arm of a soldier like a British grand dame to walk down a wheelchair-accessible ramp at West Point.

Biden got perfect bills of health from real doctors while Trump used sycophants with borderline medical degrees to deceive Americans about both his height and his weight, producing medical reports that read like North Korean hagiographies and that no one took seriously. And why did Trump do all this, at the risk of being called a “fat liar” by any leftist willing to wade into the sort of rhetorical mud MAGAs throw with such ease online? Simple: Mr. Trump did these things because he believes Americans are obsessed with image and care little about substance or truth. And you know what? He’s right.

He certainly knows this is the case with major media, which is why a debate stage is a natural habitat for him. Major-media debates in this century are about optics, not substance, and American media not only has no problem with that state of affairs but actively encourages it. Good optics means good ratings; wonkish policy chats do not.

But Trump hasn’t merely been inexplicably effective at hiding his height and weight and belly and balding and paleness from American voters using means so grotesquely low-tech you’d think they came off the back of a cereal box, he’s also been extremely effective at exploiting others’ physical limitations to make himself more appealing.

From physically shoving world leaders at major conferences—yes, really—to mocking a disabled reporter, from manhandling women in public throughout the 1980s and 1990s (it’s not hard to find these videos online, and in many of them he is alongside his good friend Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased child sex-trafficker) to doing what he did to President Biden at the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle in Atlanta: using a rhetorical trick well-known to charlatans the world over as the “Gish gallop” to stymie an opponent who’s a lifelong stutterer.

In the Gish gallop, a talented career con man vomits up so many lies, half-truths, and hyperbolic inanities per second that it’s impossible for any listener to unpack and/or deconstruct them in a reasonable time. Under circumstances in which the listener has only a set period to respond to the sociopathic rant they’ve just heard—and certainly under circumstances in which their microphone is cut off while the con man does his little dance—coherently responding to what’s been said becomes all but impossible.

Which is why President Biden’s debate performance on Thursday was considerably better than most realize, if you read the transcript of what actually happened that night.

Put aside the fact that President Biden looked and moved like a man exactly his age in Atlanta, which is hardly a surprise to anyone who’s even in their forties (after forty, life is a series of recurring aches and pains for many, and candidly this president is in better physical shape than most in his age demographic). Put aside the fact that if one has a cold, as the president did, and is stuffed up, as the president was, one is likely to breathe through one’s mouth—which makes a still shot or even a brief video of anyone so encumbered very likely to portray them as a mouth-breather. Put aside the look of almost comic disbelief that was on President Biden’s face on Thursday night as Trump, a lifelong con man, perfectly performed the vile, insidious Gish gallop right in front of him. Most of us haven’t been in close proximity to a terrifyingly consistent malignant narcissistic sociopath in our lives—I only have because I used to be a public defender—so to see the Gish gallop live is usually capable of producing at least a bit of gaping.

But instead of all that, how about we consider, for a moment, the actual business of being the President of the United States—a job whose currency is words. Words of contract, words of public reassurance, words of command, words of diplomacy, words of strategy-making. It’s universally agreed-upon by nonpartisan historians that Joe Biden has been a well above-average president (he currently ranks #14), just as much as these same historians agree that Donald Trump was one of America’s worst presidents.

The reason for President Biden’s evident success as a world leader is clearly because of his public and private words.

And we must add, here, too, that in global diplomacy and/or domestic policy-making, one’s words only have power if they are true—which of course instantly disqualifies from the role of President of the United States a lifelong pathological liar like Trump.

Fortunately for America and the world, Joe Biden is an honest man. He’s an honest man even despite the now-half-decade Gish gallop that Donald Trump has employed to try to recast him, sans any evidence, as somehow “crooked.” In fact, America has as little doubt about Trump being actually crooked—at least if we’re speaking of indie and Democratic voters—as it does about the fact that his attempts to look far younger and fitter than he is beclown him. And therefore, by extension, the United States as a global superpower.

So it’s with all this in mind that we must look at the transcript of a presidential debate whose memory American major media has already sullied beyond recognition. How? By treating Donald Trump’s Gish gallop as a foregone conclusion unworthy of much unpacking, even as it parades the televisual performance of President Biden before us as a major national emergency that’s indisputably deserving of wall-to-wall coverage.

What Proof does here is call major media’s bluff. If CNN pundits are going to say (as they did Thursday night) that President Biden may be near death—rather than just suffering from a cold that he’s now over—and therefore America should “pray” for him; if they’re going to submit (as they did Thursday night) that VP Kamala Harris may be running the free world right now to cover for the utter mental incapacitation of her running mate; if they’re going to submit (as they did Thursday night) that all the Democratic politicians who have told America that, as to his mind, Joe Biden is as fit as a fiddle must now “apologize to America for hiding the truth” because of how the president looked on Thursday, it is incumbent upon those of us in journalism who still believe in the profession as a noble calling rather than a money-making scheme to look at the actual words that came from President Biden’s mouth on Thursday in Georgia.

What President Biden Actually Said

Proof has already opined at length on how little major-media coverage of the debate has covered substance rather than style; thus far it appears there’s been nine minutes of “style” debate for every one minute of consideration of “substance”—a frankly scary disparity when one considers the state of the world these days, and the need for a U.S. leader who leads well (as President Biden thus far has) whether or not they look good doing so.

{Note: I’m putting aside, here, that many of us would say that Joe Biden appears to the naked eye to be much healthier than Trump does, and that if Trump appeared in public without his bronzer, hair dye, combover, and long tie we’d likely deem him to be approaching death’s door.}

Media ignoring substance has led to Donald Trump getting a pass for using the word “Palestinian” as a slur at the debate; accidentally revealing that he knew in advance that his ally Vladimir Putin was going to invade Europe a second time in 2022; falsely stating that the COVID-19 pandemic ended in January 2021, despite the fact that over a million Americans died of the disease after that date; inventing from whole cloth a farcically melodramatic confession by Nancy Pelosi to being “wholly responsible” for January 6; not only accusing the sitting President of the United States of crimes but implying that if he (Trump) wins in November he will try to prosecute Biden for those crimes, without ever articulating any misconduct by the man he’s fantasizing about imprisoning; and in general telling so many lies per second that the CNN fact check of his rambling took over an hour for CNN to prepare, took several minutes to present on-air, and yet still managed to capture only half of the vile lies he told to U.S. voters.

Meanwhile, President Biden’s words got the very same treatment—that is, they were ignored—though with far more disastrous results, as it was the president and not his MAGA rival who was in control of his words on Thursday, one painful moment of Biden losing his train of thought (something many of us do in private and would do far more were we on camera) notwithstanding. It will surprise no one that this painful moment was the only episode during the debate major media had much interest in with respect to what President Biden was saying (or, as the case may be, not saying).

So let us remedy that. Let us see how utterly clear, concise, coherent, and compelling President Biden was on Thursday in Atlanta when you simply read him in his own words.

Here’s the full transcript from CNN, and below are Biden’s portions of it, edited only to remove some very occasional stuttering by Biden—as he has had that condition since he was a child, and it has nothing to do with his age, intelligence, or competence.

{Note: All numbers, quotations, and proper nouns are bolded in the debate transcript below, as are moments of emphasis by the speaker.}

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On Inflation: Biden Answer

You have to take a look at what I was left when I became president—what Mr. Trump left me.

We had an economy that was in freefall. The pandemic [was] so badly handled, many people were dying. All he said was, it’s not that serious. Just inject a little bleach in your arm. It’d be all right.

The economy collapsed. There were no jobs. Unemployment rate rose to 15%. It was terrible.

And so, what we had to do is try to put things back together again. That’s exactly what we began to do. We created 15,000 new jobs. We brought on—[we are] in a position where we have 800,000 new manufacturing jobs.

But there’s more to be done. There’s more to be done. Working class people are still in trouble.

I come from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I come from a household where the kitchen table—if things weren’t able to be met during the month [it] was a problem: the price of eggs, the price of gas, the price of housing, the price of a whole range of things.

That’s why I’m working so hard to make sure I deal with those problems. And we’re going to make sure that we reduce the price of housing. We’re going to make sure we build two million new units. We’re going to make sure we cap rents, so corporate greed can’t take over.

The combination of what I was left, and then corporate greed, are the reason why we’re in this problem right now.

In addition to that, we’re in a situation where if you had—[if you] take a look at all that was done in his administration, he didn’t do much at all. By the time he left, there’s things [that] had been in chaos. There was literally chaos.

And so, we put things back together. We created, as I said, those jobs. We made sure we had a situation where we now—we [have] brought down the price of prescription drugs, which is a major issue for many people, to $15 for an insulin shot, as opposed to $400. No senior has to pay more than $200 for any drug. All the drugs they {inaudible} beginning next year.

And the situation is making—and we’re going to make that available to everybody, to all Americans. So we’re working to bring down the prices around the kitchen table. And that’s what we’re going to get done.

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On Inflation: Biden Rebuttal to Trump

Well, look, “the greatest economy in the world”—he’s the only one who thinks that, I think. I don’t know anybody else who thinks it was great. [That] he had “the greatest economy in the world.”

And, you know, the fact of the matter is that we found ourselves in a situation where his economy—he rewarded the wealthy.

He had the largest tax cut in American history: $2 trillion.

He raised the deficit larger than any president has in any one term.

He’s the only president other than Herbert Hoover who has lost more jobs than he had when he began, since Herbert Hoover.

{He scoffs.} The idea that he “did something that was significant.”

And the military? You know, when he was president, they were still killing people in Afghanistan. He didn’t do anything about that.

When he was president, we still found ourselves in a position where you had a notion that we were this safe country. [But] the truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any—this decade—[who] doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did.

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On the National Debt: Biden Rebuttal to Trump Answer

He had the largest national debt of any president [in a] four-year period, number one.

Number two, he got a $2 trillion tax cut [that] benefited the very wealthy.

What I’m going to do is fix the taxes.

For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America—I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2% in taxes. If they just paid 24% or 25%, either one of those numbers, they would have raised $500 million—billion dollars, I should say—in a ten-year period.

We’d be able to wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do—childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID—excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with.

Look, if we finally beat Medicare— {NB: he is cut off here by the moderators, due to being out of allotted speaking time}.

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On the Overturning of Roe v. Wade: Biden Rebuttal to Trump Answer

{Biden, turning to Trump}: It’s been a terrible thing, what you’ve done. The fact is that the vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe when it was decided. Supported Roe. And I was—this idea that “they were all against it” is just ridiculous.

And this is the guy who says the states should be able to have it [the abortion question]. We’re in a state [Georgia] where in six weeks you don’t even know whether you’re pregnant or not, but you cannot see a doctor and have him decide on what your circumstances are, whether you need help.

The idea that states are able to do this is a little like saying, “We’re going to turn civil rights back to the states, let each state have a different rule.”

Look, there’s so many young women who have been—including a young woman who just was murdered and he went to the funeral; the idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in and… well, we’re going to talk about that—but here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters, it’s just ridiculous.

And they [the victims] can do nothing about it. And they [the states] try to arrest them when they cross state lines [for an abortion].

Abortion Continued: Biden Rebuttal to Trump Rebuttal

I supported Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters [of legal protection for abortion]: first time [period] is between a woman and a doctor; second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation; the third time is between the doctor—I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state.

The idea that the politicians—that the Founders wanted the politicians to be the ones making decisions about a woman’s health is ridiculous.

That’s the last—no politician should be making that decision. A doctor should be making those decisions. That’s how it should be run. That’s what you’re going to do.

And if I’m elected, I’m going to restore Roe v. Wade.

{Trump interjects to falsely claim Democrats support killing babies after birth.}

He’s lying. That’s simply not true. Roe v. Wade does not provide for that. That’s not the circumstance. Only when the woman’s life is in danger, she’s going to die, that’s the only circumstance in which that can happen. But we are not for late-term abortion—period.

Period. Period.

For 51 years, that was the law. Fifty-one years, constitutional scholarship said it was the right way to go. Fifty-one years. And it was taken away because this guy put very conservative members on the Supreme Court.

[He] takes credit for taking it away.

What’s he going to do? What’s he going to do, in fact, if the MAGA Republicans—if he gets elected and the MAGA Republicans control the Congress and they pass a universal ban on abortion, period, across the board at six weeks or seven or eight or ten weeks? Something very, very conservative? Is he going to sign that bill?

I’ll veto it. He’ll sign it.

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The Southern Border: Biden Answer

We worked very hard to get a bipartisan agreement that not only changed all of that [the problems at the border referenced in the question to Biden].

It made sure that we are in a situation where you had no circumstance where they [migrants] could come across the border with the number of border police there are now.

We significantly increased the number of asylum officers. Significantly.

By the way, the Border Patrol endorsed me—endorsed my position.

In addition to that, we found ourselves in a situation where, when he was president, he was taking—separating babies from their mothers, putting them in cages, making sure the families were separated. That’s not the right way to go.

What I’ve done—since I’ve changed the law, what’s happened? I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally.

It’s better than when he left office.

And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the—the total initiative [passed] relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.

{Bizarrely, Trump responds to this last sentence by saying he couldn’t understand it.}

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The Southern Border: Biden Rebuttal to Trump Rebuttal

The only terrorist who has done anything [after] crossing the border is one who came along and killed three in [during] his administration.

An al-Qaida person in [during] his administration killed three American soldiers, killed three American soldiers. That’s the only terrorist that’s there.

I’m not saying no terrorist ever got through [the border]. But the idea they [other nations] are emptying their prisons, [or] we’re welcoming these people, that’s simply not true. There’s no data to support what he said.

Once again, he’s exaggerating. He’s lying.

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On Trump Attacking Our Troops: Biden Rebuttal to Trump’s Lie About Supporting American Troops and Never Having Called Them “Losers and Suckers”

Every single thing he said is a lie, every single one.

For example, veterans are a hell of a lot better off since I passed the PACT Act. One million of them now have insurance, and their families have it. And their families have it. Because what happened [to the soldier], whether [it] was Agent Orange or “burn pits”, they’re all [soldiers and their families] being covered now.

And he opposed—his group—opposed that.

We’re also in a situation where we have great respect for veterans. My son spent a year in Iraq living next to one of those burn pits. Came back with Stage 4 glioblastoma.

I was recently in France for “D-Day”, and I spoke to all—about those heroes that died. I went to the World War II cemetery—World War I cemetery—he refused to go to. He was standing with his four-star general, and he told him, he said, “I don’t want to go in there, because they’re a bunch of losers and suckers.”

My son was not a loser. He was not a sucker. {To Trump}: You’re the sucker. You’re the loser.

Biden Response to Unprompted Trump Rant About the World Being More Dangerous Under the Biden Administration

I’ve never heard so much malarkey in my whole life.

Look, the fact of the matter is that we’re in a situation where—let’s take the last point [he made] first. Iran attacked American troops: killed, caused brain damage for a number of these troops, and he did nothing about it. Recently—when he was president, they [Iran] attacked [us]. He said they [the U.S. soldiers injured] are just having headaches. That’s all it is. We didn’t do a thing when the attack took place, number one.

Number two, we got over 100,000 Americans and others out of Afghanistan during that airlift.

Number three, we found ourselves in a situation where, if you take a look at what Trump did in Ukraine, he’s—this guy told Ukraine; told Trump {NB: Biden meant to say “Putin,” here}—“Do whatever you want. Do whatever you want.” And that’s exactly what Trump did to Putin, encouraged him. “Do whatever you want.” And [Putin] went in.

And listen to what [Trump] said when [Putin] went in: [Putin] was “going to take Kyiv in five days”, remember? Because it’s part of the old Soviet Union. That’s what [Putin] wanted to re-establish [in] Kyiv. And he, in fact, didn’t do it at all. He didn’t—wasn’t able to get it done.

And they’ve lost over—they’ve lost thousands and thousands of troops. 500,000 troops.

{Trump promises to end the war in Ukraine instantly if elected, but also promises to stop funding Ukraine—suggesting he’d end the war by forcing Ukraine’s surrender.}

The fact is that Putin is a war criminal. He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: he wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet Empire.

Not just a piece—he wants all of Ukraine. That’s what he wants.

And then do you think he’ll stop there? Do you think he’ll stop when he—if he takes Ukraine?

What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries?

And so, if you want a war, you ought to find out what he [Trump] is going to do.

Because if, in fact, he does what he says and walks away—by the way, all that money we give Ukraine, and weapons, we make here in the United States. We give them the weapons, not the money, at this point. And our NATO allies have produced as much funding for Ukraine as we have. That’s why it’s—that’s why we [NATO] are strong.

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The Israel-Gaza War: Biden Answer

Number one, everyone from the United Nations Security Council straight through to the G7 to the Israelis and [Benjamin] Netanyahu himself have endorsed the plan I put forward—endorsed the plan I put forward—which has three stages to it.

The first stage is “trade the hostages for a ceasefire.”

Second phase is a “ceasefire with additional conditions.”

The third phase is “the end of the war.”

The only one who wants the war to continue is Hamas, number one. They’re the only ones standing out[side Biden’s peace deal]. We’re still pushing hard from—to get them to accept [it].

In the meantime, what’s happened in Israel? We’re finally—the only thing I’ve denied Israel was 2,000-pound bombs. They don’t work very well in populated areas. They kill a lot of innocent people.

We are providing Israel with all the weapons they need, and when they need them.

And by the way, I’m the guy that organized the world against Iran when they had a full-blown kind of ballistic missile attack on Israel. No one was hurt. No—one Israeli was accidentally killed. And it stopped. We saved Israel.

We are the biggest producer of support for Israel than [of] anyone in the world. And so, there are two different things:

Hamas cannot be allowed to be continued. We continue to send our experts and our intelligence people to [see] how they can get Hamas like we did Bin Laden. You don’t have to do it [with American troops]. And by the way, they’ve been greatly weakened, Hamas, greatly weakened. And they should be. They should be eliminated.

But [second], you got to be careful for what [purpose] you use these certain weapons among population centers.

{Trump says Israel should be allowed to do whatever it wants in Gaza, after lying about whether the U.S. or Europe has provided more money to the Ukrainians.}

I’ve never heard so much foolishness.

This is a guy who wants to get out of NATO. {Turns to Trump}: You’re going to stay in NATO, or you’re going to pull out of NATO?

The idea that we have—our strength lies in our alliances as well. It may be a big ocean, but we’re—we have to be able to avoid a war in Europe, a major war in Europe. What happens if, in fact, you have Putin continue to go into NATO [territory]? We have an Article Five Agreement: “[an] attack on one is [an] attack on all.” You want to start the nuclear war he [Trump] keeps talking about, go ahead—let Putin go in and control Ukraine, and then move on to Poland and other places. See what happens then.

He has no idea what the hell he’s talking about.

And by the way, I got fifty other nations around the world to support Ukraine, including Japan and South Korea, because they understand that this kind of dislocation has a serious threat to the whole world peace.

No major war in Europe has ever been able to be contained just to Europe.

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January 6: Biden Rebuttal

Look, he encouraged those folks to go up on Capitol Hill [on January 6], number one.

I sat in that dining room off the Oval Office—he {Biden corrects himself} sat there for three hours, three hours, watching, being begged by his vice president and a number of his colleagues and Republicans as well to do something, to call for a stop, to end it.

Instead, he talked [and] they’ve talked about these people being patriots, and great patrons of America. In fact, he says he’ll now forgive them for what they’ve done. They’ve been convicted. He says he wants to commute their sentences and say that? No.

He went to every single court in the nation [to overturn the election]. I don’t know how many cases, scores of cases, including the Supreme Court, and they said, “No, no, this guy is responsible for doing what is being—[for what] was done.”

He didn’t do a damn thing [to stop January 6]. And these people should be in jail. And they should be the ones who are being held accountable. And he wants to let them all out. And now he says if he loses again, such a whiner that he is, that there could be a “bloodbath.”

{Trump here interjects a wall of lies, from falsely saying he called the National Guard into Minneapolis—the city’s Democratic mayor did that—to falsely saying numerous American cities were fully destroyed in 2020, from falsely accusing the bipartisan House January 6 Committee of destroying evidence regarding January 6 that is in fact online for free right now to implying that Biden himself is a criminal.}

{Looking at Trump}: The only person on this stage that is a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now.

And the fact of the matter is, what he’s telling you is simply not true.

The fact is that there was no effort on his part to stop what was going on up on Capitol Hill.

And all those people, every one of those who were convicted, deserves to be convicted. The idea that they didn’t kill somebody—just went in and broke down doors, broke the windows, occupied offices, turned over desks, turned them over, statues… the idea that those people are “patriots”? Come on.

When I asked him, [in] the first of two debates we had—debates we had the first time around [in 2020]—I said, “Will you denounce the Proud Boys?” He said, “No, I’ll tell them to stand by.” The idea he’s refusing—{turns to Trump} will you denounce these guys? Will you denounce the people we’re talking about now? Will you denounce the people who attacked that Capitol? What are you going to do?

{Asked about his 34 felony convictions, Trump rants about Biden being a criminal.}

The idea that I did anything wrong relative to what you’re talking about [in Ukraine or at the southern border] is outrageous.

It’s simply a lie, number one.

Number two, the idea that you have a right to seek “retribution” against any American just because you’re a president is wrong—is simply wrong. No president’s ever spoken like that before. No president in our history has spoken like that before.

Number three: the crimes that you’re still charged with! And think of all the civil penalties you have! How many billions of dollars do you owe in civil penalties for molesting a woman in public, for doing a whole range of things, of having sex with a porn star on th[at] night—and while your wife was pregnant?

I mean, what are you talking about? You have the morals of an alley cat.

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Biden on Whether Trump Voters Are Voting Against Democracy

The more they know about what he’s done? Yes. The more they know about what he’s done.

And there’s a lot more coming.

He’s got a lot of cases around the road coming around. He’s got a whole range of issues he has to face. I don’t know what the juries will do, but I do know he has a real problem.

And so the fact that—could you ever think you’re hearing any president say that? “I’m going to seek retribution?” Do you ever hear any president say that he thought it might be a good idea?

What got me involved to run in the first place after my son had died [was] I decided—because of Iraq, I said, I wasn’t going to run again. Until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas [and] torches and singing the same antisemitic bile they sang when—back in Germany.

And what did—and the young woman got killed [in Charlottesville]. I spoke to the mother. And she—they [media]—asked him, they said, “Well, what do you think of those people, the ones who tried to stop it and the ones who said, ‘I think there’s fine people on both sides?’”

What American president would ever say Nazis coming out of fields, carrying torches, singing the same antisemitic bile [as in the 1930s], carrying swastikas, were “fine people”?

This is a guy who says, “Hitler’s done some good things.” I’d like to know what they are, the good things Hitler’s done. That’s what he said. This guy has no sense of American democracy.

{Trump falsely says Biden didn’t launch a run for POTUS because of Charlottesville.}

It happened. All you have to do is listen to what was said at the time.

And the idea that somehow that’s the only reason I ran? I ran because I was worried a guy like this guy can get elected.

If he thought they were good people coming out of that forest—carrying those woods, carrying those torches—then he didn’t deserve to be president, didn’t deserve to be president at all.

And the idea that he’s talking about all of this being fabricated? We saw it with our own eyes. We saw what happened on January 6. We saw the people breaking through the windows. We saw people occupying there. His own vice president—look, there’s a reason why 40 of his 44 top cabinet officers refused to endorse him this time. His vice president hasn’t endorsed him this time.

So why? Why? They know him well. They serve[d] with him. Why are they not endorsing him?

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Conclusion

I’ve stopped here because the above text includes about half the debate, including the portion of the debate—the first 10 minutes—when President Biden clearly performed poorest. I could continue showing text from the debate, but it would likely exhaust most readers, and it candidly would reflect even stronger debating from the president.

And the point is already made.

Above we see President Biden doing innumerable things that anyone who’s mentally incapacitated can’t do: repeatedly providing facts and figures; remembering dates; making lists; recalling and responding to points made by one’s debating opponent; rebutting false claims; expressing his own values and his opponent’s lack of values; speaking admirably of the values of the nation he hopes to lead for four more years.

But here’s what is missing above: Trump’s words.

They’re missing in part because every syllable Trump uttered at the debate was a lie—a proven lie—and giving space to the rantings of a malignant narcissistic sociopath is not something I want to do at Proof. But I will note that it’s instantly disqualifying, in any debate from CNN to middle school, to lie. If you know even the first thing about debating, you know that providing false information, or using false claims to make a point, or lapsing into hyperbole, or tossing out character attacks without any evidence behind them whatsoever, are all disqualifiers in a debate. Your opponent might do a worse job than you do on this score or any other, but if you do these things you cannot be declared a debate’s legitimate “winner.”

Yet by leaving out Trump’s words, here, I’ve deprived you of seeing the one thing that both Trump and Biden do only in part because they’re both approximately eighty years old: they on occasion start sentences one way, then change their mind about how they want to express themselves and start their sentence anew. Here are some examples of Trump doing on Thursday what you’ve already seen President Biden do several times, above:

• “It was the worst—probably the worst administration in history.”

• “What’s happened to our country in the last four years is not to be believed. Foreign countries—I’m friends with a lot of people. They cannot believe what happened to the United States of America.”

• “And if you look at this whole question that you’re asking, a complex, but not really complex—51 years ago, you had Roe v. Wade, and everybody wanted to get it back to the states, everybody, without exception.”

• “Like Ronald Reagan, I believe in the [abortion] exceptions. I am a person that believes. And frankly, I think it’s important to believe in the exceptions. Some people—you have to follow your heart. Some people don’t believe in that.”

• “We have a border that’s the most dangerous place anywhere in the world—considered the most dangerous place anywhere in the world.”

• “As far as the abortion’s concerned, it is now back with the states. The states are voting and in many cases, they—it’s, frankly, a very liberal decision. In many cases, it’s the opposite.”

• “Look, we had the safest border in the history of our country. The border—all he had to do was leave it.”

• “We had, by far, the highest, and now it’s down in less than half because he’s done—all these great things that we did—and I think he did it just because I approved it, which is crazy.”

• “And think of this, who would say—I’m at a cemetery, or I’m talking about our veterans, because nobody’s taken better care—I’m so glad this came up, and he brought it up. There’s nobody that’s taken better care of our soldiers than I have.”

Does Trump repeatedly changing tack in mid-sentence mean he’s senile? No, and in fact it may not even be much attributable to his advanced age and pretty obviously deteriorating physical health. It may simply be a function of trying to debate a wide range of topics in real time at a nationally and internationally broadcast debate. Under such circumstances all of us would lose our train of thought at least once, or decide to take back a thing we’d been planning to say because either (a) we thought better of it, or (b) we suddenly found that we want to take our argument in a wholly new direction.

But this much can be said with certainty: Biden was more coherent at the debate by far, as not only did Trump tell many lies per minute but his lies were incomprehensible.

Trump made claims that not only didn’t comport with the facts or reality or common sense, but that even directly contradicted one another, his own past statements, the questions being asked of him in the moment, and even—in several cases—what he’d presumably just heard his political opponent say in real time. His lies were not well-told ones, or “tight” ones, they were wild haymakers intended to cause confusion among those listening at home, the moderators in the studio, and of course, most of all, the politician then tasked with responding to all of them as they were uttered.

And respond to them President Biden did.

Beyond making almost no factual misstatements during the debate—CNN struggled its way to finding a meager handful—the President of the United States never strayed from the topics he was being asked about, met with some sort of response almost all lies told by Trump, and gave a credible and coherent response on every topic at hand.

He also had a weak voice from a cold, a stutter he has had since childhood, a look of rank disbelief on his face—which is exactly what the Gish gallop aims to provoke—and a slow walking speed that’s perfectly consistent with a man his age. And how did U.S. major media respond? By saying he must be close to death. By asking Americans to pray for him. By calling his debate performance—which you can read above for yourself—potentially disqualifying. But is that what you see in the words above? A man at death’s door? A man with dementia? A man who can’t continue to do the job he’s been doing so well thus far that nonpartisan historians rank him as one of the Top 15 presidents in all of American history? I would be stunned if that’s what you see in the words that appear above, as I taught Rhetoric & Composition at three “R1” public flagship universities from 2007 to 2022—University of Wisconsin, University of Iowa, and University of New Hampshire—and I see no sign of any grave malady in this text.

What I see are the words of an old man with a cold who’s being gaslit by the worst prevaricator in the history of American politics. I see a man with sufficient command of facts, history, policy, and his own sense of his (and America’s) values to continue to be one of the most admirable—and, not for nothing, also most successful, policy-wise—presidents of my lifetime. As for his opponent, putting aside Trump’s clownish visage, the words produced by his bronzered mouth utterly preclude any person of conscience from electing him to any office of public trust, high or low.

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