The debate between Trump and Biden was last week and was immediately assessed as a major loss for Biden. All the discussion has been about Biden's poor performance, his age and his cognitive infirmity. There has been very little discussion about Trump's performance.
That makes sense to a degree. However you might assess it, he was within normal bounds of expectations. The shock, to some, was just how outside of those bounds of expectations was Biden's performance. And not on the high side.
We are, a week later, still in the midst of the aftermath. Many in the legacy mainstream media, more in sorrow than anger, have already explicitly called for Biden to step down. There is much discussion of the fraught process in front of the Democrats if he does step down, and then, also, if he does not. The absence of any sort of credible national bench of talent is getting a fair amount of attention with attention focused on Newsom of California and Whitmer of Michigan (long shots) and even, in the zanier corners of the party, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The donor class and even some in the party in down ballot races are voicing concerns. It feels like maybe there might be a congealing around the view that Biden should step down. We'll see. There is also increasing discussion about 1) how this could have happened, 2) who in the administration and in the legacy media is responsible for having hidden Biden's condition, and, even, 3) to a very small degree - how concerned should we be given Biden's current condition and the fact that there are four more months to go. My sense is that everyone is sort of holding their breath and not wanting to discuss the need to replace Biden for 25th Amendment reasons not because of the political horse race.
What I have not seen is any discussion from Trump's perspective. In advance of the debate, there was a great deal of both criticism and concern from the right about his having accepted the Biden/CNN demands without any pushback. They wanted an early debate (in the campaign schedule) when people are not yet usually paying attention. They wanted no audience. They wanted the moderators to be dyed-in-the-wool Trump critics from CNN. They wanted to have control over Trump's microphone with the ability to switch him off. They controlled the positioning, the lighting, the stage craft, etc.
Everything was favorable to Biden and there was nothing advantageous to Trump and yet he still accepted. His critics, and many of his supporters, evinced great concern in articles and interviews. He was walking into the lion's den with no help or fallback save his own wit.
And, as it turns out, Biden's incapacity.
Was Trump just so confident that Biden was incapacitated? Did he just luck out because Biden unexpectedly had a bad night. I don't think so. Trump is a careful gambler and I suspect that he was neither foolhardy nor foolish.
He made an assessment and bet on it and his assessment turned out to be right. And now everyone is saying that which only observers on the right were saying before. That Biden is many months down a dark path that puts our nation at risk and certainly unsettles the presidential campaign. While people on the right were connecting the dots and pointing out the accelerating pattern of Biden's dysfunction, no one was willing to bet the farm. Trump was and did.
And it seems to have paid off significantly. There are still a long four and some months till November and many possible paths. Maybe Biden stepping down or forcibly being replaced might not be the electoral windfall that many think. Maybe there is a dark horse in the Democratic wings who can give Trump a run for his money. An actually better candidate.
Maybe. But I still think it worth pondering what we saw, which is a pattern in Trump's success. He had a contrarian interpretation (and or the courage to bet on that interpretation), he swung for the bleachers, he won hard. Seems to me worth thinking about.
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