I was at the Biden debate. It was like the gaslighting Olympics
As we stand in the CNN spin room after the debate, I just think: this is it. The end of Biden. The end of it all. It’s not every day you watch a living president die.
It is close to midnight in Atlanta, Georgia – 95 per cent humidity and as hot as hell. A small, wild-eyed man is being pushed up against a wall in the bowels of a sports stadium. He looks as if he is drowning in a swamp. “I love Joe Biden,” he wails at one point. “He is a good man.” He is “a good man who works hard, versus someone who wants to destroy democracy”. We have a “great candidate”, he insists, who will “debate again”.
The man pauses. “Yes, maybe the president’s voice was a little scratchy.”
At which point the dam breaks.
People are asking him to resign, everyone roars. This is what you’re saying after you’ve seen his performance? The president looked like a burns victim. He couldn’t walk; he couldn’t answer questions. He squabbled over his golf handicap ("He can’t hit a ball 50 yards,” scoffed Donald Trump). You wouldn’t do this to your father, let alone your grandfather. It’s barbaric. Cruel.
Yet Robert Garcia, the “first out gay immigrant to be elected to Congress”, one of Biden’s “surrogates” – a strange, teat-sucking, very American term for the reps who spin after a debate – doesn’t pause.
“We’re 100 per cent behind Joe Biden,” he tells us.
It is incredible. Perhaps – perhaps? Why am I even writing this? It won’t happen – by the time this article is published, the great glittering Democratic artifice will have slightly faltered. Perhaps the party will have recognised its titanic folly. Perhaps even Ozymandias’s pocket PR, Garcia, will have stopped repeating the hairy bromides handed out by faceless apparatchiks.
But now, in the moment, as we all stand in the CNN spin room, a red-carpet-like crater/comms black site, teeth bared, phones flashing, snapping and packed in like battery crocodiles, I just think: this is it. The end of Biden. The end of it all. It’s not every day you watch a living president die.
It hadn’t really seemed any of this could happen when we slowly made our way to the McCamish Pavilion, a bland arena opposite the debate hall, earlier on Thursday. To say CNN controlled this event is to severely understate what an airless and glacial experience it was. There was such tight security that the plan was to essentially funnel the president and Trump into the building, like two expensive, balding hamsters up a hoover, while 800 members of the world’s press mill ("even more than when Atlanta did the Olympics!"), discussing the debate’s suffocating terms: muted mikes, no interrupting, no press inside, no audience.
How is this even television?
As for the atmosphere in the spin room, well: no hint of an iceberg yet. The only ice I can see is Gavin Newsom’s galloping teeth. The governor of California, touted by many as Biden’s successor, has the skittish, gelled air of a Derby winner. He appears by my desk, giving interviews: tall and Hollywood attractive with an undercurrent of pure Kennedy filth.
He’s optimistic about the debate, he says, as is Cedric Richmond, Biden’s campaign co-chairman, who tells people: “I expect him to be like at the State of the Union – vibrant, witty.”
“Vibrant, witty.” Later, Democrats will be physically dragged down to the spin room and all but executed.
Down on the carpet, the Trump surrogates are fanning out, giving pre-match interviews. Their campaign is slick, tight, breathlessly cynical: all of them, even Trump’s possible VP pick, the black congressman Byron Donalds – 20 stone of weaponised Floridian, a man who recently said it was an “empirical fact” things were better during the Jim Crow era – are dressed like candidates from The Apprentice.
Corey Lewandowski, the thin, rat-like spin doctor who was fired by Trump in 2016, tells us the whole thing will be about “messaging the double haters”. The “double haters” are voters who hate both Trump and Biden. He seems to think they are bad news, but already I love them – who are these incredible discerning true patriots? Perhaps they should be running America.
On the television screens CNN is now quietening, stopping the punditry and the interminable tours of the ugly debate set, which gleams like cold toothpaste. Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, a weird kind of dog mom and dad – her in titanium white – will take it in turns to introduce the show, the rules, the candidates, and read out questions from cards. Whereupon Joe Biden walks out on set. For me, at this moment, it is already over.
Fragile, stick-like, with a nodding, Jack O’Lantern head, Biden is, fatally, trying to appear spry. I’d noticed it earlier when he was greeting supporters outside the Hyatt Regency: he’d do jaunty little jogs that only emphasised his extreme frailty. What kind of monster advises an 81-year-old man, “Try a jaunty jog – the voters will love it"? You cannot see him making it to the end of the program, let alone November.
And then the errors begin.
He mistakes “century” and “decade”; says “15,000” when he means 15 million. There are “a thousand trillionaires in the country – I mean billionaires”, he gabbles. He can’t begin to do the numbers; moreover, there are coughs and pauses, he trails off, he struggles, even, to screw up his face, which fills the screen, boggling, catlike and weird.
At one point Trump says: “I really don’t know what he said there at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he does either.” It sums the whole thing up. In the spin room there is a horrified pin-drop silence. It says everything about the catastrophe level that Trump saying the sentence, “I did not sleep with a porn star”, is barely the night’s tenth most interesting headline.
As television it is awful: an unremitting lard-like kabuki in which we must stare at these two scaly, unlovely, diseased-looking creatures in HD close-up; no break, hardly any movement, no lyricism, few panning shots to relieve the horrible, bog-tile split screen.
Hunched over, square-shouldered, trout pout: Trump looks like a Fife dinner lady. Two old men shouting angry tweets at each other for 90 minutes: is this what western democracy is now?
Trump, by the way, doesn’t really have to do anything. Most probably he thinks he’s acing it, but he’s at best a six out of ten: detached, eccentric, shallow. There’s the occasional Trumpism: the “incredible” dog, for example, that he had found to solve the opioid crisis. Imagine, too, debating abortion and saying a person’s approach should be “follow your heart”. And then saying your opponent is “willing to rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill it”. This is just nonsense, memes as words, but Biden barely has the capacity to notice it.
About halfway through the debate a briefing is handed down from the Democrats: it’s OK – Biden has a cold. A cold – like Frank Sinatra? As someone in the Biden press pool tells me later, after the president is seen escaping to a local Waffle House: “Biden did not have a cold then.”
This debate is the gaslighting Olympics: the natural culmination of nearly a decade-long orgy of briefing, lying, spinning, misdirection; a war of fake words. For years now we’ve been told it’s Trump who is the liar – and indeed he is: he tells at least 30 lies during the debate – but tonight (Sunday) it’s the Democrats who are fibbing themselves out of the White House.
In the following few minutes, hours, days, there will commence an incredible thrashing, fight-to-the-death effort to claw back the campaign, involving even the most senior figures, like Barack Obama ("bad debate nights happen"). To watch it happening, live, in the spin room is like watching a convulsing hydra: just as soon as one truth is told, five people pop up to discredit it. What do you mean he’s gaga? He’s a good man. Why is no one fact-checking Trump? Why can’t you see who’s on the right side here? As for Biden’s illness, it’s solid lies and doublespeak, like Leonid Brezhnev boasting he’s strong and healthy even after his strokes. The Kremlin would be impressed.
A minute after the debate finishes, the cry goes up: “The surrogates are coming out.” It’s not Biden’s people, though, but Trump’s, who immediately flood the spin room. A panzer attack of gleeful frat-boy VP contenders: Donalds, Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance. “What the American people saw was a decisive victory for Donald Trump,” booms Donalds. Ramaswamy repeats versions of what he said earlier: “Everybody understands that Joe Biden is not fully there upstairs … Donald Trump is the president of peace.”
Of Biden’s people there is zero sign. We wait ten, fifteen minutes – where are they? Suddenly there’s a commotion over the other side of the room. The surrogates are too frightened to face the press individually, so they’re all clustering together in a kind of suicide knot at one end.
“Nothing changed today,” screams Newsom, Theresa May-style. He’s barely visible amid the crackling cameras, reporters, microphones surging towards him – all I can see is the radium teeth. Later he will actually tell a news anchor: “On the substance, he won the debate.” Trump “talking down our democracy – that was alarming. For me, it was daylight and darkness.” What are these people thinking? On and on it goes, the frantic spinning, moving ever further from daylight into darkness, wave upon wave of Republican surrogates appearing like replicants, as if from nowhere, such as Matt Gaetz, a congressman from Florida, who looks like some kind of Stranger Things escaped supermodel/werewolf experiment.
He denounces Biden’s “waterfall of words”, only to then be interviewed by a child who, in one of the odder sights of the evening, is roaming the spin room, complete with mic and camera guy.
The iron-muscled Lara Trump, who is married to Trump’s son Eric, makes a sensational appearance and is mobbed as she pushes her way to one of the small, overhanging, cuckoo-clock-like TV cubby holes that line the (lol) red carpet. I hear another Trump VP candidate, Doug Burgum, who looks like the dad from Schitt’s Creek, howling: “The ayatollah is watching this!” I’ve never laughed so hard.
Where now for American politics? What I witnessed puts the small matter of the total collapse of our Tory party in the shade. Much anger is heaped on Jill Biden, the first lady, who finishes by leading the president off the stage like a child, later telling him at a rally that he “answered all the questions!” like a good doggie. Why are they just blaming her, though? Isn’t the problem everybody?
The following morning the line is still: “Nothing changed.” Biden attends a rally where he describes himself as an “old man”, and the clamour rises, The New York Times demanding he step down. Where will it end? Not where anyone wants it. You can only hope that, as they say, Biden doesn’t have a clue what’s happening.
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