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What was the worst moment? Perhaps when one especially rambling sentence of Joe Biden’s ended in a mumbled, confused declaration that “We finally beat Medicare”, as if he were the enemy of the very public service Democrats cherish and defend. Maybe it was when the president was not talking, but the camera showed him staring vacantly into space, his mouth slack and open? Or was it when he was talking, and out came a thin, reedy whisper of a voice, one that could not command the viewer’s attention, even when the words themselves made good sense?For anyone who cares about the future of the United States and therefore, thanks to that country’s unmatched power, the future of the world, it was agonising to watch. You found yourself glancing ever more frequently at the clock, desperate for it to end, if only on humanitarian grounds: it seemed cruel to put a man of visible frailty through such an ordeal.In that sense, the first – and, given what happened, probably last – TV debate between the current and former president confirmed the worst fears many Biden supporters have long harboured over his capacity to take on and defeat Donald Trump. For more than 90 excruciating minutes, every late-night gag about Biden’s age, every unkindly cut TikTok video depicting him as doddery and semi-senile, became real. There was no spinning it, despite White House efforts to blame a cold. Joe Biden delivered the worst presidential debate performance ever.Expectations were rock bottom: all he had to do was turn up and show some vigour, reassure people that his marbles were all present and correct, and it would have been enough. The bar could scarcely have been lower. But Joe Biden could not clear it.And if the debate confirmed Biden’s limitations, it also served as a reminder of why those limitations matter. For one thing, Trump’s entire framing of this race is strong v weak: he offers himself as a strongman, against an opponent too feeble to lead and protect the US in an increasingly dangerous world. Purely at the physical level of what people could see and hear on their TV screens, the Atlanta debate reinforced Trump’s frame.But, no less important, Biden’s inability to deliver clear, intelligible statements meant Donald Trump’s lies went unchallenged. And there were so many, lie after lie after lie. Trump claimed Democrats favoured abortion at nine months, even if that meant killing babies after birth. He claimed the real culprit for the 6 January storming of Capitol Hill was not him, but Democratic former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. He claimed it was he who had lowered the cost of insulin, when it was Biden who did that.There were dozens more in that vein, an unceasing firehose of lies. But because CNN had made the baffling decision to have the hosts do nothing but read out scripted questions – never challenging any statement made by the candidates – it was left to Biden to hit back in real time. And he couldn’t do it. The post-match factcheckers stayed up into the early hours, attempting to set the record straight. But by then it was too late.In that sense, the debate was the 2024 campaign in microcosm. Trump is a liar, convicted felon and would-be dictator who plotted to overturn a free and fair election so he could cling to power, but he is set to return to the Oval Office because his opponent is too weak to stop him. As the former Obama administration official Van Jones put it after the debate, this is a contest of “an old man against a conman” – but the weakness of the former is allowing the latter to prevail.The simple fact that Trump spoke loudly and clearly and with, by his standards, relative self-discipline, coupled with the lack of interrogation from the moderators, granted him a plausibility he should have been denied. He is a failed coup leader, nationalist-populist menace and racist who would suck up to the world’s autocrats and throw Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s wolves: he should be allowed nowhere near power. But because he was up against a man who could scarcely complete a sentence, he was presented as a legitimate option for the world’s highest office.The expectation must now be that, if he faces Biden on 5 November, Trump will win. He was ahead in all of the battleground states even before the debate and there is now no clear further chance for a reset. Thursday night’s head-to-head was supposed to be that moment. Indeed, that is why the White House opted to have the debate so unusually early: to allay fears about the president’s age and to reframe the race not as a referendum on Biden, but as a choice. That gambit doubly failed, making a bad problem much worse.So what now? Unfortunately, there is no letters-to-Graham-Brady mechanism in US politics, no equivalent to Westminster’s short, sharp defenestrations. Some imagine the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama having a quiet word, but Biden is a proud and stubborn man who feels he was passed over too long, including by those two. Perhaps Democratic leaders in the House and Senate could do it: given Biden’s decades-long attachment to Congress, he might listen to warnings that “down-ballot” candidates could suffer if he stays at the top of the ticket.But ultimately this will have to be his decision. He won his party’s primaries earlier this year, all but unopposed; the Democratic party’s nomination is his, unless he gives it up. Some say the only person who could ever persuade him to do that is his wife, Jill. But after the debate, she loudly congratulated her husband, albeit in a manner that reinforced the sense of a man well past his prime. “Joe, you did such a great job!” she said. “You answered every question! You knew all the facts!”Even those Democrats who concede Thursday was a calamity worry that a change now is fraught with risk. Biden could make way for his vice-president, but Kamala Harris is even less popular than he is – and Trump would relish mining the rich seams of sexism and racism that would open up. The party could throw it open to a contest fought out at its convention in August among the deep bench of next-generation Democratic talent – the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, her California counterpart, Gavin Newsom, and others – but that could be messy, bitter and rushed. None of the contenders has been tested under national lights, and Democrats would be turning their fire on each other when they need to be aiming at Trump.One thing Democrats agree on: Joe Biden is a good and decent man who has been an unexpectedly consequential president. But communicating is a key part of governing, and Biden has all but lost that ability. For the past year or so, Democrats have crossed their fingers and hoped the evidence taking shape before their eyes might fade, not least because any other course of action entailed great risk. After this disaster of a debate, they can no longer deny that inaction, too, is a risk – and, given the perils of a second Trump presidency, surely the much graver one.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

Who could have foreseen that the scariest thing about the presidential debate on Thursday night wouldn’t be the lies, the bombast or the threats to democracy, but the spectacle of Trump’s slightly wolfish restraint. Heading into the encounter, Democrats felt the kind of anxiety more usually endured before watching a child perform, with that same crushing sense of raw emotions. That Trump barely mocked Biden, or went after his age or his son, seemed less rehearsed than a shrewd response to what all of us were seeing: a president so compromised that all Trump had to do was grin, lean back and let the optics work for him.And still, despite the evidence, it feels wanton to say this. Biden, whose voice was hoarse from a cold, rushed his delivery, fought to find words and stumbled in a style not entirely new to him. The difference on Thursday night was one of degree. “Oh my God” was the general consensus, texted around the country, when the debate opened in Atlanta. While Trump’s remarks were predictably ludicrous, full of lies and inflated claims, nothing he said could distract from the image of Biden saying sensible things in a manner so crepuscular that the entire event jumped from politics to tragedy. It made me think of a line from Rilke: “It had almost hurt to see.”This was the near-universal response among Democrats on Friday morning. Spoken with slightly too much relish and accompanied by a lot of “we’re doomed” hand-waving, it drew attention once again to everything that’s wrong with political discourse. There was Trump, claiming, crazily, that in Democratic states something he called “abortion after birth” was endorsed, while Biden soberly listed his achievements in job creation, managing inflation and proposals to better tax those paid more than $400,000. The president pushed back against Trump’s lies as best he could, unaided by the two CNN moderators who, scandalously, were far more corpse-like in their affect than the president. It didn’t matter. The gut response of everyone watching was not “here are two men, one vastly superior to the other”. It was simple shock at how Biden has aged.There was anger here, too. A point widely made on social media on Thursday night was that this is what a race for the most powerful job in the world looks like when people won’t vote for a woman. Two elderly men, in various states of impairment, addressing each other as “this guy”, squabbling over who has the better golf handicap and accusing each other of being sore losers. It was like one of those bad 90s satires involving Warren Beatty, in which the joke is too broad to land. Trump thinned his lips, repeated the phrase “kill the baby”, and accused Biden of running the worst administration in history, to which Biden, correctly but uselessly, in effect responded “no, you are”.And still there was worse to come. For me, the hardest parts of the 90 minutes were the brief flashes of Biden as he once was, full of easy charm and conviction. It was clear that the president was operating in a mode less professional than personal; that his unfiltered state was, on occasion, less strategic than the result of some other, inhibition-suppressing dynamic. But in those moments of pure, visceral response to Trump’s awfulness, Biden seemed like a stand-in for all of us.Several times, one saw Biden look across at Trump with pure, unmoderated hatred. “He didn’t do a damn thing,” he said in reference to Trump and 6 January. “Such a whiner, he is,” said Biden, the odd syntax removing the remarks from the context of a presidential debate to what felt like an honest and off-camera response. “Something snapped in you when you lost,” he said and it was an extraordinary moment, watching a man present Trump with a flat truth about himself. When Biden cracked a huge smile in response to the audaciousness of yet another Trump lie, the pathos was almost unbearable. There he was, fully himself for a moment, the man we recognise as a capable and charismatic leader.Trump, in these moments of confrontation, pursed his lips and smiled thinly. You could almost see the machinery of his personality working, the split-second flare of his wounded narcissism, followed immediately by denial and attack. By the end of the debate, while Democrats started talking, pointlessly, about replacing Biden on the ticket, the only consolation was in the broken political system itself. These debates don’t move the needle. They exist in the absence of any better ideas on how to engage the electorate. Americans are so polarised that no one is changing their minds. If Biden’s performance was terrible, one could self-soothe with the observation that it hardly matters at this stage; which is, of course, the most terrifying conclusion of all.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More