The narrative surrounding Thursday’s first presidential debate has understandably focused on what Joe Biden needs to do. Biden is, by most accounts, trailing in both national polls and key swing states. He is losing the election. And he is losing because voters have serious doubts about his capacity to lead the country: He needs to convince voters that he has the stamina to steer the nation as an octogenarian.
The focus is on Biden’s performance because he’s losing. But it also reflects that he is, unlike his opponent, a normal politician, someone who calibrates his performance based on the expectations and necessities of the moment. Biden may be capable of that, and he may not. The Biden who practically single-handedly shifted the momentum in the 2012 presidential race by rinsing Paul Ryan in a vice presidential debate has not been seen in some time—he may very well be gone for good. But, whatever his considerable limitations, Biden has an ace up his sleeve: His opponent on Thursday is Donald Trump.
Trump is the front-runner, for reasons that are simultaneously difficult and easy to understand. It is hard to understand how voters have forgotten just how turbulent his presidency was and just how ill equipped he was for the job. But it is somewhat easier to understand when you consider that the electorate is still exhausted from that turbulence—and from the pandemic that began during Trump’s presidency. From the summer of 2015 until January 2021 there were daily, often hourly, reminders that the man running the United States may very well be a crazy person. Those have largely ceased in recent years. The country wants to move on, even if Trump will not quite let them.
If Trump were an ordinary politician, his expectations for Thursday’s debate would be self-evident: Don’t do anything stupid. He is leading in the race. He is leading in the states he needs to return to the White House. All he needs to do is to project a general sense of calm and control—contrasting with the man, only four years his senior, who he regularly depicts as senile—and he can continue to coast along. He has benefited, and will likely continue to benefit for some time, from a fractured media environment—and from an electorate that seems, well, over all of this.
One explanation for the lack of punditry about Trump’s performance, however, is that it doesn’t matter. Trump does whatever Trump wants to do—he doesn’t change. He doesn’t calibrate. He will be vile and extreme and racist. He is incompetent and chaotic and weird. He will remind voters, again and again, of the many qualities they dislike about him.
Trump’s rise is understood in some corners as a reflection of newfound discipline. This is true to an extent. Trump’s campaign is currently populated by veterans who have managed internal disputes and avoided leaks—a far cry from the 2016 and 2020 installments. There has been little of the turbulence and shake-ups that one associates with Trump. “Everybody is mature enough that they want the president to win,” a Trump 2020 veteran told Vanity Fair earlier this year. “The thinking is, let’s be organized, let’s get him in.”
Sure! It’s clear that the people around Trump are more disciplined than they have been in previous campaigns. But Trump is not only still Trump, he’s arguably much worse.
He has already telegraphed that he plans to spend much of the debate describing a Boschian hellscape in which undocumented immigrants and migrants are running rampant, maiming and killing. He will undoubtedly make absurd claims about the 2020 election—which he lost—and his recent conviction on 34 felony counts relating to a hush-money payment that may have affected the outcome of the 2016 election. It will be a festival of grievance. And many of Trump’s complaints will be inscrutable to most Americans. He will undoubtedly spend more time talking about arcane and obscure issues relating to Donald Trump than he will about the impact inflation has had on Americans.
Trump is winning in part because Americans are tuning him out and in part because the press has focused less on covering him with the level of minutia and detail that they did between 2015 and 2021. But Thursday’s debate will be a wake-up call, a reminder of who Donald Trump really is.
Joe Biden may perform well, and he might not. He will likely be, as he has been for much of his presidency, somewhere in the middle. But Donald Trump will show up to the debate and do Donald Trump things. His performance in the debate will be many voters’ first major reminder of what his presidency was like. That may very well be enough for Biden, even if he cannot answer questions about his age.
