Trump-Biden debate uninspiring

With the latest RealClearPolitics polling average showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden by a bare 0.9 per cent nationally, and 538 Interactives having Mr Biden ahead by a whisker for the first time this year, the stakes for the 81-year-old White House incumbent and his 78-year-old challenger in Friday’s first election debate could not be greater. For both, the overwhelming priority will be to demonstrate an assured capacity to provide the leadership over the next four years that America and the free world need desperately at a time of deepening global crisis.

Sadly, the prospects of them doing so look bleak. Instead, US voters are confronted by the grim reality of a choice between two deeply flawed and unsuitable candidates. What is being seen – and will likely be on display in the debate – is the depressing spectacle, as leading Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker wrote, of “the first (US presidential) contest in which those close to the two main protagonists know only too well more reasons to doubt the fitness of their man for the office than do the voters at large”. As Washington correspondent Adam Creighton reports on Friday, it may be enough for Mr Biden, who has been hunkered down at Camp David for a week prepping for the debate, to claim a win if he manages to get through the 90 minutes speaking in mainly coherent sentences.

Amid polls that have tightened significantly since his conviction by a New York court on hush money payments, Mr Trump faces no less a challenge as a plausible candidate for the leadership of America and the free world. Voters, as The Wall Street Journal concluded, simply “don’t trust his character and they dislike his Fight Club persona”. Polls show Mr Trump is about as personally unpopular as Mr Biden. That feeds into what will likely be the incumbent’s main debating tactic on Friday – goading Mr Trump by focusing on the January 6, 2021 riot, whether the 2020 election was stolen, and the former president’s unprecedented position as a convicted criminal running for the White House. Such is the depressingly low bar ahead of Friday’s debate. Nothing better underlines the troubling choice American voters face or is more telling of the despair confronting even many of Washington’s closest allies as they contemplate the aftermath of the November 5 poll and the need for strength and coherence within the Western alliance in dealing with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Mr Trump may be leading in the seven crucial swing states that will likely decide the election – Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania – all of which Mr Biden won narrowly in 2020 with the exception of North Carolina. But his lead in each is no more than the margin of error. Since Mr Trump’s conviction, swing voters have been moving back to Mr Biden.

Despite the closeness of the race, the disheartening reality that remains is of an unenviable choice between two men who should not be on the ticket – two men who can give no guarantees that they will be in a fit, coherent state to be in the Oval Office in four years, when Mr Biden will be 85 and Mr Trump 82. Friday’s debate provides an opportunity for Mr Biden to show he really is the “sharp as a tack, smart as a whip, fresh as a daisy” leader his starry-eyed supporters claim him to be, while for Mr Trump it will be no less an opportunity to show his deep character flaws are not such that they make him unelectable. Both scenarios confound actuality. Both men are weighed down by horrendous baggage and controversy that should have ruled them out of the race.

Neither should be on the ballot to lead the world’s most powerful nation. America deserves better than Mr Biden and Mr Trump. So does the free world, which looks to Washington for strong leadership. Only Putin and Mr Xi, and their acolytes in fellow rogue states Iran and North Korea, are likely to be watching Friday’s first debate with any relish.