The first television duel was an unworthy exchange of blows

Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the first moderated debate on September 29.

Kevin Dietsch / Imago

“This is so un-presidential!” – unworthy of a president. The comment came from the visibly exasperated Joe Biden on Tuesday night in the first televised matchup between the US presidential candidates of the election year. It was a reaction to the fact that Donald Trump ignored all previously agreed rules, constantly interrupted Biden, and also rubbed his son’s drug problem under his nose. But the accusation of being “non-presidential” is not something that can impress Trump in any way. Rather, the word could be on your flag. On the other hand, Biden’s response – “Shut up, man” – wasn’t exactly dignified either.

Presidential Speech Stream

Unfortunately, for the audience, the fact is that Biden’s throw-in pretty much sums up the 90 minutes of the first of three planned duels between Trump and Biden. Trump talked incessantly about everything that got in his way. If Fox News anchor Chris Wallace occasionally managed to remind Trump that his campaign team had previously approved the rules on mutual respect and that the president should therefore abide by them, it was only a moment before Trump spoke again. . Until this program, Wallace was a man with an excellent reputation as an interviewer and facilitator. But he was also ultimately powerless in the face of the constant and conscious violation of Trump’s rules. To silence Trump, he could only have interrupted the exercise. He didn’t want that, so Trump kept talking. And Biden groaned in resignation: “Keep on barking!”

No one should be under the illusion that Trump was carried away by nervousness and temperament. Obviously, the bulldozer’s tactic was planned. The president faces headwinds. The polls are worse than four years ago, when he landed a surprise coup and narrowly won the election against his favorite Hillary Clinton.

The death toll from Covid 19 continues to rise past the dismal 200,000 mark, still in steps of several hundred per day. There is no indication that the United States can control the spread of the virus. The economy is suffering, millions of Americans are or will be unemployed, in part because of Trump’s failure to fight the epidemic. Mass media from the New York Times to The Atlantic publish embarrassing revelations about his tax payments and attitude toward fallen soldiers, and even the emphatically conservative opinion section of the Wall Street Journal wonders if Trump has a strategy for his reelection . to have.

Yes, it certainly has one. But content-related disputes over specific political goals are not part of it. Rather, Trump’s campaign team is essentially pursuing a dual strategy toward Biden. On the one hand, he is portrayed as a spent senile disoriented person who can barely utter a clear sentence. On the other hand, this makes it easier to portray him as a puppet loosely clinging to the strings of his party’s radical left. Only then can “Team Trump” hang up the mask with the ugly grin of socialism on this proven moderate politician.

It is known that Biden sometimes relapses into an old speech disability under stress. And stress was obviously the means Trump wanted to use Tuesday night to annoy Biden and ridicule himself. He repeatedly achieved the first, but not really the second. But the occasion turned out to be, without a doubt, the worst television “debate” since this form of confrontation became a major element of the American election campaign in the 1960s.

Trump’s tactic managed countless times to distract Biden and prevent him from explaining his positions in detail. Instead, the former vice president often shook his head in disbelief, doubted, and sought help from the moderator. Biden also tried to evade the directed provocation with virtually no glance at Trump and often by raising his hand in defense, as if he could ward off the avalanche of speeches from the president.

But Biden had a secret weapon at the ready, which had obviously been rehearsed beforehand. He turned several times directly to the camera, actually the audience, and indicated that he gave them much more weight than his adversary. This trick was particularly effective after a personal attack on his son Hunter, who was struggling with a drug problem. It’s not about his family or the president’s, Biden told the audience: “It’s about his family, the American people.”

More than two-thirds were angry

After the duel, there was an immediate call among Democrats for Biden to reject the other two planned debates. However, his campaign team waved and stressed that the former vice president would keep his promise of three games. This suggests that Biden’s team is not unhappy with their candidate’s performance. Quick polls representative of various outlets gave him an advantage when asked who had won now. This did not prevent the official White House spokesperson from broadcasting contrary results, which the organizers admitted to have been completely arbitrary.

In reality, the episode only confirms that you can organize any desired results in “spontaneous” polls on Twitter.

The representative survey of the television company CBS was somewhat more illuminating. Eighty-three percent of those surveyed said the tone of the “debate” was negative and more than two-thirds thought they were upset. Only 17 percent thought they could have gotten useful information from the performance. At least a third found the matter amusing; many of them were Trump supporters.