Last night's presidential debate at Christian institution Belmont University in Nashville, TN, was notable for President Donald Trump calmly lying and being an asshole for the whole thing. Sure, he wasn't a bellowing shit-blower like he was in the first debate, where he desperately tried and failed through sheer belligerent motherfuckery to provoke Democratic nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden into a pique of confusion and alleged dementia. But just because you speak calmly when you lie and act assholish doesn't mean you're not still a lying asshole. Hannibal Lecter may sound erudite and even-tempered, but he's still gonna gut you.
And it would be easy to write another goddamn post about Trump's inhumanity towards suffering people. I mean, c'mon, he treats the number of people dead and sick from coronavirus as if its sole purpose is to fuck with his poll numbers and prove his happy talk about "rounding the corner" on it to be bullshit. On top of that, he mocked Biden for saying he cares about average Americans; Trump dismissed the 545 migrant children who may never be reunited with the parents they were ripped from by touting how nice they have it: "They are so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that were so clean;" and he said that only "low I.Q." asylum-seekers came back for their hearings, as if following the law was only for the stupid. It was truly, truly psychopathic.
And it would be easy to write another goddamn post about how Trump lies with the kind of enthusiastic glee of a masturbating bonobo and point out all the lies, big and small. Or to write about how he seemed to think that everyone in the country gobbles Breitbart jizz like his eager mouth when, truly, most of the viewers must have listened to him talk about Hunter Biden and payoffs from China to Joe Biden and laptops and emails and thought, "What the fuck is this?" Or about how Trump's racism was on clear display with examples like him saying he hadn't heard of Black Lives Matter until he heard an incendiary anti-cop chant (that BLM leaders immediately put a stop to) and that discredits them?
All of that is out there for ready exploitation and lots more jizz jokes.
Instead, lemme talk about Biden and what he did in what was a much sharper debate performance. Honestly, Biden's gotten stronger as the campaign has worn on, so whatever the hell he's doing in his basement, as Trump and conservative media get off on saying, seems to be working. He wiped out notions about him being a pitiful old man with cognitive decline (yes, he's still 77 and all of us when we get older forget names and shit. Jesus, just yesterday I forgot the name of a close friend when talking about him), and he wiped the floor with Trump on so many things.
Take, for instance, on the simple issue of compassion. Biden not only did his usual speaking to the camera to speak to average Americans watching (which is theatrical, of course, but no more so than Trump's fake "I'm not a politician" schtick), but he offered an understanding of so many different kinds of American pain. "The fact of the matter is, there is institutional racism in America. And we have always said, we’ve never lived up to it, that we hold these truths to be self-evident, all men and women are created equal," Biden said after talking about what Black parents and their kids have to go through when it comes to dealing with cops. Biden also found sympathy for people who live near polluting chemical and oil plants, saying that he lived near them when he was a teen in Delaware and "That’s why so many people in my state were dying and getting cancer."
But more importantly than anything else, Biden demonstrated clearly that he just simply gets what is most prominent on Americans' minds: how savagely fucked the nation has been by both COVID-19 and Trump's response to it. He talked about the constant flow of false promises and bullshit hopes from Trump: "The fact is that when we knew it was coming, when it hit, what happened? What did the President say? He said, 'Don’t worry. It’s going to go away. It’ll be gone by Easter. Don’t worry. Warm weather. Don’t worry'...even today, he thinks we are in control. We’re about to lose 200,000 more people." And Biden laid out quite clearly everything that needs to be done, the funding that schools and businesses will need, the reliance on science when it comes to potential shutdowns, and more. All of sudden, in the midst of one of the worst pandemics in human history, a potential American leader said to the current one, "Yeah, you can have a fuckin' plan, numbnuts." Instead, Trump keeps bumblefucking us into the dark winter ahead that he denies will happen.
Biden also just had some great lines last night. There was the Abraham Lincoln line and flatly saying about Trump, "He doesn’t understand this" about those poor people living in areas dangerous to their health and "We’re going to choose science over fiction." While Biden may not be as far left as we want him on health care yet, it was genuinely bold and progressive of him to state what is obvious on handling climate change: Oil is done and we need to transition out of it and into cleaner sources, where there will be a fuck-ton of jobs. Challenged by Trump on it in his bullying way with "That's a big statement," Biden didn't back down. "It is a big statement," he said. "Because the oil industry pollutes, significantly...it has to be replaced by renewable energy over time, over time, and I’d stopped giving to the oil industry, I’d stop giving them federal subsidies." As the man said, this is a big fucking deal, and you're gonna hear about this the rest of the campaign from Trump, as if Biden isn't absolutely right about oil.
Ultimately, Biden won because Trump played every fucking card he had - the supposed scandal (that was debunked by the Wall Street Journal today), that Biden's a puppet to Sanders or "AOC plus three" (which is such a fucking dumb phrase), that he,Trump, did everything he could on COVID, that Biden would tank the economy that's already tanked - and Biden just swept them off the table. He didn't even play the game of attacking Trump's family, which he could have done so simply as Trump attacked his.
Biden seemed like the goddamn president last night. And, holy fuck, it would be nice to have one again.
