Trump Aces Biden in First Presidential Debate June 27

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

If anyone out there cares about the future of American democracy and believes that Donald Trump’s return to the White House will be the death blow against it, the first debate between former President Trump and incumbent president Joe Biden in Georgia, as telecast on CNN June 27, 2024, was a disaster. Especially in the first 10 minutes – which usually in these face-offs are what everyone remembers and on which they base their opinions – Trump wiped the floor with Biden.

A lot of Democrats were no doubt hoping that Trump would get lost in his own petty grievances and fatally embarrass himself with the sorts of bizarre stories about electric boats and sharks he’s been telling at his rallies lately. No such luck. Trump came out strong, disciplined and determined. His unquestioned skills as a salesman and promoter were on full display as he glibly told lie after lie with an air of utter sincerity. Trump gave a virtuoso performance as a con artist at the top of his game.

As for Biden, his fabled stutter – which I don’t remember being this much in evidence during the two previous debates with Trump in 2020 – undermined him and lent credence to the Republican argument that Biden is too infirm, too incoherent and simply too old to be President. Though Trump is just three years younger than Biden, he projected an air of vigor and strength, while Biden by comparison looked like a decrepit old man waiting for his pudding cup at the nursing home.

To his credit, Biden’s performance did get stronger – at least at times – as the evening progressed. But all too much of the debate was a case of he-said, he-said as Trump and Biden called each other liars and threw out un-fact-checkable statistics. Both appealed to real or fictional supporters and each called the other the worst President in American history. At one point Biden quoted Trump as saying people who joined the U.S. military were “suckers” and “losers” – and Trump said there were 19 other people with him at the event that could say he never said it. Biden said there was at least one person, a four-star general, who said he did say it, and Trump said he’d fired the man for making up that story about him.

If there’s one group that decisively lost in this so-called “debate,” it’s the voters pollsters have rather oddly labeled the “double haters” – the people who strongly disapprove of both Biden and Trump and deeply resent that those are the choices America’s increasingly dysfunctional political system has given them. Nothing either Trump or Biden said at the June 27 debate is going to give the “double haters” any reason at all for preferring one over the other. Their performances will just reinforce many Americans’ disgust over the sorry choice they’ve been given for who our next national leader will be.

This year’s election is not the first time a current President and a former President have run against each other. That happened not only in 1892, when former President Grover Cleveland ran against the man who’d unseated him in the Electoral College, Benjamin Harrison, and won. It also happened in 1912, when former President Theodore Roosevelt tried to regain the Republican nomination against his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and when he failed he started his own Progressive Party. Both lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Taft’s term was such a disaster that in his re-election bid, in a country that since the Civil War has had just two major parties, he placed third.

But the June 27 debate was historically unique in other ways. It’s the first time a major-party Presidential candidates’ debate has occurred before either party has had its nominating convention. It’s also the first time in which both candidates have been affected by felony convictions – his own in Trump’s case, his son Hunter in Biden’s – and of course both Trump and Biden tried to use that against each other and hinted at darker, deeper crimes that have so far gone unpunished and unadjudicated.

The most impressive part of Trump’s performance was how relentlessly he stayed “on message” in blaming virtually all of America’s problems on immigrants. Trump repeated over and over and over again that Biden had opened America’s borders and let in 18 million or more “illegals,” many of them murderers and rapists. What’s more, he also said over and over that these “illegals” are destroying Social Security and Medicare, as well as taking jobs away from American citizens, including people of color.

Trump boasted throughout the evening that he’s doing far better among Black and Latino voters than any Republican since the two big parties switched their positions on civil rights in the 1960’s – which is true. He said that’s because U.S.-born Blacks and Latinos resent having to compete for jobs with immigrants – a warning I got from a Mexican-American friend of mine in 2016. He told me there were a lot of Latinos who were going to vote for Trump because they thought “illegal” immigrants were a threat to their jobs – and Trump has been playing those fears like a great violinist plays a Stradivarius.

“Lying is second nature to him,” Tony Schwartz, the actual author of Trump’s alleged “autobiography” The Art of the Deal, told New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer in an interview published July 18, 2016 – when the possibility that Trump could be President still seemed little more than a fantasy. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” One of Trump’s many political superpowers is that he’s not only able to convince himself that his stories are true, he’s able to convince tens of millions of American voters that his stories are true.

When I read that article, I immediately thought of George Orwell’s novel 1984 and in particular his concept of doublethink. It’s impossible, I think, to understand both the sheer scale, scope and audacity of Trump’s lying and the reason he’s been so successful at it without understanding Orwell’s idea of doublethink, which he explained as follows:

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. …

“[T]he essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

Donald Trump is, as Orwell would have said, a doubleplusgood doublethinker. In a contest with someone who lies so shamelessly – who, as I’ve previously said about Trump, is supremely uninterested in whether anything he says is “true” in the sense of objective reality, but who uses words merely as tools to accomplish whatever he wants at any given moment – someone like Joe Biden, with all his old-fashioned (oldthinkful, as Orwell would have called them) notions that there is such a thing as objective reality and a political leader has an obligation to base his or her decisions on it, is a sitting duck.

A lot of nonsense has been spilled over whether or not Donald Trump actually believes in his heart of hearts that he really won the 2020 Presidential election and it was “stolen” from him. It matters in the increasingly unlikely event that Trump is ever put on trial for fomenting the attempts of his supporters to block Congress from certifying the election results on January 6, 2021, but because Trump is such a doubleplusgood doublethinker, he believes both that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he lost fair and square.

This question remains a minefield for him; when CNN co-moderator Dana Bash asked both candidates whether they would accept the results of the 2024 election, win or lose, Trump hedged and said, “If it’s a free and fair election,” when he’s spent a good part of the last four years claiming that 2020 wasn’t “free and fair.” Indeed, he made his refusal to accept defeat even clearer in 2016, when he debated Hillary Clinton and was asked if he’d accept the election results. “If I win,” he said.

MS-NBC host Lawrence O’Donnell is fond of quoting his former boss, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York), as saying, “Everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs, but not to their own set of facts.” That couldn’t be more wrong, especially in today’s political and media landscape. Just as America has two major political parties, a far-Right Republican Party and a center-Right Democratic Party, it also has two media parties. One is the party of the legacy media and broadcast networks, while the other is the party of Fox News and the myriad of ultra-Right-wing Web sites like Newsmax and One America News for people who think Fox is “too liberal” for them.

Both the inventor of the “Big Lie,” Joseph Goebbels (Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany), and its principal theorist, George Orwell, thought it could only work in a nation ruled on dictatorial or authoritarian principles. They assumed that in order to get away with telling big lies, the government had actively to suppress competing sources of information. Today, by contrast, just about every American self-selects their own media sources to reinforce their own perceptions about reality and learn only those “facts” – real or not – that support it.

That’s the real reason behind the virtually unshakable support for Donald Trump among almost half of the American electorate. Trump’s core base of support has heard so often about the “Biden crime family” that they believe Biden is the most corrupt President in American history and Trump will be their savior from Biden’s corruption. They’ve also heard his lies about immigrants so often they really believe that America’s very integrity as a country is at stake. Asked on June 27 just how he would carry out the mass deportations of millions of undocumented American immigrants he has promised, Trump dodged the question and instead spewed out more hate propaganda about them. Trump made it clear he feels about immigrants the way Adolf Hitler felt about Jews.

Throughout the June 27 debate, Trump made claim after claim that is defied by reality. He said that Biden’s weakness has led the rest of the world to disrespect America. Whenever actual foreign leaders speak to the media about Trump, it’s to say they fear his return to power and their respect for America actually declined during his Presidency. Trump claimed, as he has all along, that both the criminal and civil cases against him were a deliberate attempt to “weaponize” the justice system against him masterminded by Biden, who knows he can’t beat Trump in a fair fight (even though he already did in 2020!) and is therefore mobilizing the full resources of the federal government to destroy him. Trump also boasted – and he’s totally correct about this one – that the criminal and civil prosecutions against him have only mobilized his base and increased his odds of winning in 2024.

Trump is also a master of what psychologists call “projection” – condemning others for doing the things he’s actually doing or planning to do. He promised on June 27 to prosecute the members of the House Select Committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 riot and hinted he’d go after both Hunter Biden and Joe Biden himself if he returns to the White House. One of the most remarkable interviews Trump gave during his first term as President was one he did with radical-Right talk show host Larry O’Connor on WMAL-FM November 2, 2017 in which he lamented that he couldn’t weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies:

“[T]he saddest thing is, because I’m the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated by it. … [A]s a President, you are not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something, and at some point maybe we’re going to all have it out.”

After watching the June 27 debate – and starting to write this immediately after it ended, rather than let the cable-news talking heads tell me what I’d just seen – I’m more scared than ever that Donald Trump is going to return to the White House on January 20, 2025 after winning a free and fair election. Though Biden got in a few good licks, and the two candidates got into a bizarre argument over (of all things!) their golf games, for the most part it was Trump’s show. And it was Trump’s show partly because he maintained his discipline, but mainly because he projected utter sincerity even while he was lying his head off. Trump seemed fully in command of himself and his presentation, while Biden stuttered in more ways than one.