I don't know what was wrong with Joe Biden. It's hard to imagine that they ever would have asked for a debate if this was the way he is normally. We've seen him recently holding press conferences and giving speeches and he seemed to be fine. They said he had a cold so maybe he really was on drugs — Nyquil or Mucinex or something that made him seem so shaky and frail. Whatever it was, it was a terrible debate for him and if he does stay in the race (which is almost certain in my opinion) the campaign is going to have a lot of work to do to dig out of the hole that was dug last night. The media smells blood and they are circling like a bunch of starved piranhas.
. . . For some odd reason, moderator Jake Tapper told Trump in the beginning that he didn't need to answer the questions and that he could use the time however he wanted. Trump ran with that, essentially giving a rally speech whenever he had the floor and was unresponsive to the vast majority of the questions. He made faces and insulted Biden to his face, at one point calling him a criminal and a Manchurian candidate. If anyone had said 10 years ago that this would happen at a presidential debate they would have been laughed out of the room.
After the debate when most of the country had turned off cable news or gone to bed, CNN aired its fact check. And it's a doozy:
It sure would have been good if even some of that epic litany of lies could have been checked while people were still watching. The decision to have the moderators sit like a couple of potted plants woodenly asking questions about child care while Trump responded with irrelevant lies was inexplicable. Why did they even bother to ask questions at all? They could have just run the timer and let the candidates talk for two minutes each about anything they wanted. It probably would have been more enlightening.
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To run a debate with Trump and without live fact checking was just plain stupid. You know he's just going to run his rehearsed talking points without so much as trying to answer even mildly uncomfortable questions. They not only let him get away with serial lying, they basically laid the groundwork so he could get away with it.
Fact checks after the fact never reach the people that need to see them.
Why billionaire John Malone’s shadow looms over CNN
most folks aren't aware that CNN went from subtle billionaire propaganda to outright billionaire propaganda within the last few years
2 major problems with that. Good luck getting him to agree to a debate with fact checking. Even when he is blatantly lying, he's just going to accuse the fact checkers of bias, and force his supporters to distance themselves from reality more than they are already.
The best defence is to ignore it, and focus on the issues that people care about. The best thing Biden can do is present a strong coherent front, and pretend like trump isn't even there at all.
It was Biden's job to call out Trump's lies, not the moderators' job, but he was nowhere near competent enough to do that. See how Trump called out Biden's incoherence, highlighting the issue to everybody ("yeah you beat medicare to death", "I didn't understand the end of that sentence, and I don't think he does either", etc)
'Calling out lies' isn't fact-checking - at best it would have turned into a 'your word against mine, who will people believe' mudslinging contest. Fact-checking puts the onus on the person telling the lie to correct it - 'this is false and here is a source that says so'.