What the Debate Revealed

with John McWhorter

Presidential debates aren’t known as fonts of unvarnished truth-telling and factual accuracy. They’re opportunities for candidates to promote themselves, their agendas, and their accomplishments, should they happen to have any. The first (and perhaps only) 2024 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was rather ordinary—while Trump may have lied more frequently and with more élan than Biden, neither candidate was particularly reliable. As John says in the clip from our most recent episode, the debates are more akin to sport than they are to reasoned argument.

But if the candidates in a debate don’t speak the truth, the debate form can sometimes inadvertently reveal it. On that score, it delivered in a rather gruesome way. There was no hiding Biden’s frailty and confusion. The futile attempts by Democratic Party flacks to spin away his obvious decrepitude, partisan hacks’ insistence that we ignore our lying eyes and “vote blue no matter who,” Jill Biden’s infantilizing post-debate praise of her husband—none of that could forestall the impression that the Leader of the Free World was barely in possession of his faculties. Biden’s insistence in the days following that he simply had “a bad night” have only compounded the problem. If he truly believes that was just a blip, then he’s even more compromised than he seemed on stage.

If America is, as some seem to think, in a state of permanent decline, you couldn’t invent a better metaphor to express it than Biden’s debate performance. If it were written in a novel, I’d say it was a little on the nose. We look to our leaders, flawed as they inevitably are, to represent the best of us in the moments that matter most. No one can honestly say Biden did that. The question is whether we are capable—politically, as a nation—of more, or whether that performance reflects something about us we’d rather not face up to. The debate did reveal a truth. But was it a truth about Joe Biden or a truth about America?

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This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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GLENN LOURY: Did you watch the debate?

JOHN MCWHORTER: I did. In real time. I watched it. And I don't know. There's a part of me that always thinks that just because a person can't express something doesn't mean that they're not thinking it. I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. You can be inarticulate and brilliant. And so I was trying not to be superficial.

But the truth is, I think anybody could see that he's at a point where he fades in and out in general. Even if it is only a matter of expression, it's hard to imagine that wouldn't be a problem in somebody who's supposed to be leading the country. And more to the point, there's the downward trajectory. It's not going to get better, it's only going to get worse. I found it really unfortunate.

I'm not as angry as many people are about this. I can imagine what the motivations were. But it's clear that people close to him knew about this and thought that the rest of the country shouldn't know. And I was especially alarmed by just one quick vignette, which was Jill Biden and the way she talked to him directly afterward saying, “You answered all the questions.”

“You had all the facts.”

Yeah, like he was 17. And you get the feeling that's the way they interact all the time now. If that's the truth, he really shouldn't be running for president. What did you think?

Okay, so I was sitting with my lovely wife, LaJuan. We were a little on a delay. We were taping the event and had been doing something else and sat down a little bit after it started. So we didn't see it in exactly in real time, but it was almost a real-time experience.

I was astounded almost from the very first moment. I kept saying out loud, “Look at him! Look at him! His mouth is agape. His eyes seem to be staring off somewhere into the distance. Is he actually present?” And then when he had that fumble very early on, the one that ended in, “We finally beat Medicare” or words to that effect, but which was completely incoherent. He got lost halfway through it. Maybe he forgot what he was trying to say, I don't know.

I said, “Oh my God, can this really be happening?” I was absolutely stunned by that. It got a little bit better as it went along, but not much. Your man, your nemesis—Orange Man Bad—came off looking pretty cultured. He didn't look like an idiot and a baboon. He came off looking like the other guy in the debate who halfway had his shit together.

No, he lied. I agree. He said a lot of stuff, and he was demagogic. This is Trump. And you may be surprised to hear, John, that I said out loud to my lovely wife, “That's just sheer demagoguery. What is he saying?” This is Trump, ticking off the rapist and mentally ill people coming across the border etc., etc. If I were just a neutral observer trying to decide whether or not I liked Donald Trump, I'd come away not especially impressed by Donald Trump. But I was appalled by what I saw coming out of the president of the United States.

And I had two questions. Maybe these questions occurred to you. One is, how could they have covered this up? They must have known. People must have known, the people who were debate prepping him. In a way, they lied to us, and this was something of a concealed, scandalous fact that the public had every right to know but had to learn itself on debate night and couldn't rely either on the press or on people around the administration to tell us the truth about the president's condition. I thought that was scandalous.

But I also thought, who's actually running the country? If a back channel communication comes in from the Putin regime about how things might go forward more amicably or less less bellicosely, who be processing this? The reassurances that he's sharp as a tack, that he's on his game, that he's got 50 years of experience, that he's wise, the kind of pat reassurances that we get, didn't go far enough for me. I just had to wonder who's making these decisions, who's in charge, whose vision is guiding the ship of state?

And I don't know the answer to that question. Is it the Obama administration's third term? I don't know, but I was appalled.

There's a part of me that thought okay, the way he should communicate is by reading from a teleprompter, because he seems to usually be pretty good at that. But no, you need somebody who's there making decisions and they have to be able to do it, not just between 10:00 and 4:00, which is what we've been reading.

Although talk about normalization. Trump seemed quite vigorous, definitely. He is aging better than Biden. But he also sat up there and basically lied almost continuously during the whole time, almost continuously telling errant lies. And it's not that anybody lets him off the hook for it. But we're not nearly as appalled by that as we would have been in say 1990. And can you imagine Ronald Reagan up there telling one lie after another? It would have been unthinkable, whatever you thought of Ronald Reagan. Whereas with Trump, it's thought of as just more of his shtick.

And to be perfectly honest, the fact that there's this normalization of it ... or I'm going to go a place. The idea among some out there that my problem with Trump is an indication of Trump Derangement Syndrome and what we're talking about is just what that man did a week ago. I'm deranged for being absolutely horrified by that?

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It's not his morality. I'm not talking about that he had sex with somebody. I'm talking about that. I really think that, in a different universe, we would be thinking, my God, both of these things are absolute horror shows. But we have become used to somebody proposing himself as president or being president who never tells the truth. That says a lot about where we've come. But with the person who is president, yes, obviously there's a terrible problem.

People around him, I imagine, want to think more about his good days than the bad ones, but they're not seeing these things clearly. Suppose the world was about to end. Suppose we had some real decisions to make quickly with him like that. And at the G7, apparently all of those foreign leaders could see that something was wrong, and they were walking more slowly for him, guiding him, slowing conversations down.

That's alarming. We would be alarmed by that in any other country. If Berlusconi had gotten to that point, for example. And now here we are and this is our president. And then the other person contending for it is the gorilla.

What do you think our adversaries and enemies are making of that performance?

We're weak. Not everybody has read their Plato. We're weak. Strong is what wins, as a friend of mine was telling me just yesterday, in terms of what this shows the rest of the world. There's a weakness there to be taken advantage of. And Putin and Xi Jinping are not weak. Whatever they are, they're not weak. They're not faltering. They're not doddering. So this is as bad as having an idiot, i.e. Trump. It's unfortunate.

Is this not a sign of decadence, of a kind of decay? Is this not a preview of the decline and fall of the great American empire, the indispensable nation, the American century that was the twentieth century and it's been over for 24 years? Are we on a downward trajectory—“we” being the United States of America, the imperium from which we benefit, of which we are constituent residents? Is the twenty-first century going to be the Chinese century, like the twentieth century was the American century? I speculate.

It seems to me that actually there could be some relatively mundane fixes that could be done to avoid this. I would hate to say that this is not going to be an American century just because there's no more such thing as the smoke-filled room. And what really is going on with both of those candidates, why we're stuck with that is that there isn't the check on that kind of thing happening that there would have been before.

Say what you will about how barbaric things were in the 1920s, but nobody like that would have wound up in the position except by accident. And we have that problem now with both of the parties. I think we're really seeing a particular object lesson with these two. I think there could be an American century if we just had more of a block on transparently unqualified people becoming president of the United States.

What do you think? You've seen more of this than I have in terms of the decades that you've watched things happen. Isn't a lot of it just that there are no more checks on who can rise that high?

I don't know. I think the nominating processes are very different. This has been remarked upon. In the old days, the power brokers and internal political moguls exerted more influence. Now we have a democratic process, primaries, the delegates are won or lost at the ballot box, an open convention where anything can happen. And you go from ballot to ballot, trying to get somebody with a majority. That's just not the way it's done anymore.

I think a lot of untruths were enunciated in the debate. I agree that Trump was the author of many of them. But Biden was the author of some of them as well. And we call it lying. That seems to be the term of art these days. I'm inclined to think, though, that it's more like what Harry Frankfurt [identified], the philosopher at Princeton. The book is called On Bullshit. Do you know this little book?

I've heard of it, yeah.

It's an essay put out in book form, maybe 10,000 or 15,000 words in which he argues that there's something else besides people who say things that aren't true. Some of them are intentionally and knowingly saying a thing that they know to be untrue in order to manipulate and deceive. Others are simply making noises with their mouths that they think will be effective at whatever objective they're trying to accomplish. A complete and utter disregard for whether or not the things they're saying are true. Truth is just simply not a part of their calculus. They are about performing an affect and creating a mood and instigating and that sort of thing, not about communicating facts or even propagating falsehoods. They're simply indifferent to whether or not what they're saying is true.

It felt to me a little bit more like that. I'm just gonna say the thing that I think will get people's juices flowing, or that my opponent will find it difficult to respond to or that captured the moment somehow. If I use a number, I made that number up. I made that number up for effect, not because I have studied the statistical table and I remember the particular number, and that's the correct number.

So it's a sport. And frankly, I think that the whole idea of there being that kind of debate has become rather useless and silly. You're asked a question and you're supposed to answer it deftly within a certain small space of time. I'm not sure what the correspondence is between that and what it takes to run the country. If it were up to me, there wouldn't be that kind of debate anymore. There's so many ways now that technology allows that we can hear what candidates think, what their positions are, without it being this highly artificial contest where it becomes who can put it in a memorably snappy way.

That has nothing to do with why somebody was a good or a bad president. It's just a kind of sport. Which can be fun to watch, but no. And in this case, the whole thing meant that we could see in living color what has happened to Biden. But that was an unusual circumstance. The fact that the president has dementia, that's not a reason why we should keep this particular debate sport going.

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