Presidential Debates 2020

[Mike]

Text exchange earlier...

Me: Yeah. The media started off with this whole narrative of how the whole thing was so chaotic that nobody won. But in a follow-up poll of voters who watched the whole thing, the top words to describe Trump were things like "chaotic" and "unhinged", but Biden's top 3 were "presidential, calm, and better-than-expected". On top of that, Biden had a record-breaking night of fundraising--$25million by 8am.

My son: He's at least locked down the undecided Nazis and Proud Boys.

[Kyle]

Immediately after the Proud Boys statement, I looked at Jen and said, "That's the only thing anyone will talk about tomorrow." It was truly breathtaking.

[Mike]

It was a softball question. All he had to do was say, "Racism is bad. Extremist violence is bad." That's it. I guarantee they went over this in debate practice. A few simple words and he could have condemned racist violence without actually condemning actual groups. He clearly will never condemn anyone who supports him, no matter how repugnant, but he had options. He could have dog-whistled quieter.

He couldn't even do that.

[Phoebe]

But when you practice for the debate with a room full of white nationalists, they probably don't do a great job of prepping for that question... The fact that his "prepped" response was to ask for a specific name to be criticized is telling. Dang, if only they had gone with "neo-Nazi" he could have disavowed AND said the Demorats and Antifa are the real Nazis!

[Kyle]

Y’all know he refused to formally prep, right? His “prep” was to have aides, Christi and Giuliani pepper him randomly with questions and insults to see how he’d react. It reminds me of when I was 10 and wanted to prepare to be a ninja by asking Mike to try to secretly attack me when I was not ready for it. Needless to say, I’m not a ninja.

[akiva]

[Phoebe]

Not only that, but if he fails to be a ninja, it simply proves that Mike didn't attack him enough or well enough when they were young. Mike, you built this through your neglect of violence.

[Kyle]

[Phoebe]

Not too shabby!
The one good thing to come out of the current debacle is that we may be spared any other debates.
It appears that Trump and his team recklessly endangered everybody in the hall including Biden, and they cannot even rule out that they knew people were testing positive. You can't have a debate when the other side is both mendacious and dangerous, physically and literally. And thus the nation will be spared further shame on the world stage.

[DMDarcs]

I have this nagging concern that when Trump recovers from his illness, it will be used as an excuse for why debates didn't continue. I am NOT of the camp that believes that Trump's health concerns are part of an overarching lie to downplay COVID. I do think he will say he was well enough to continue debates, and any delays/cancellations in debates were pushed on him by the Democrats, the debate commission, or whomever. I believe that will also fire up the COVID deniers.

[FlameBlade]

I strongly believe that any future debates must be done virtually.

[Kyle]

The VP one will not. They are saying they will have the candidates 12 feet apart and require masks for everyone in attendance. Weak. Very weak.