A "Debate" That Reveals our Surreal Situation. Performance Matters More than Being a Criminal

Creeping authoritarianism and an addiction to strongman glamour are degrading our democracy. Performance on stage matters more than being a criminal.

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Lucid is about big-picture analysis, not breaking news, and these thoughts on the debate are written in that spirit. If you are pressed for time, here is the central idea of this essay:

Our political culture has been so degraded by creeping authoritarianism that the old forms, like debates, no longer have their former meaning. They become stages for propaganda —which is not always even recognized as propaganda any more— and are transformed into spectacles that serve authoritarian ends.

Joe Biden is old. Trump is old. Trump is also a criminal linked to the most dangerous people in the world, Putin and Xi included, and wants to destroy our democracy. As a member of our Lucid community put it in an email to me this morning: “Biden had a bad night. Trump is a bad man.”

Biden did have a bad night and showed his age at the debate, misspeaking several times and failing to rebut Trump’s lies as someone younger and sharper could perhaps have done —such as Vice President Kamala Harris, who is a former prosecutor. Or Gov. Gavin Newsom, or Sec. of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

Here is journalist Nina Burleigh’s fine analysis of the disaster. “It was like taking candy from a baby,” she writes of the interaction between Trump and Biden on stage:

“Biden lost his train of thought over and over. Trump lied and lied, while Biden fumbled over his talking points, drifted…It’s true the bar is lower for Trump. All Trump has to do is sound and look slightly more reasonable than we expect him to. He seems to have figured that out.”

Trump has been captured repeatedly mumbling gibberish —but not on this occasion. He is a seasoned performer, with decades of experience on stage, including his own reality television show, and is energized by being on camera.

Trump is also more in control of his messaging than people realize. As I have written in Strongmen, authoritarians calibrate their messages to please different audiences, and this involves style as well as content. Because they have no values or ideology beyond getting to power, staying there, and making money off of public office, they refashion themselves to be whatever their audience needs them to be in that moment.

As Burleigh observes:

“I heard [Trump] talking to tech tycoon David Sacks on the All In podcast last week, and I had a bad feeling about what was ahead. I was surprised at how logical and prepared he sounded. No rants, no retributions, lots of stats. No electrocuted sharks. I chalked it up to the fact that he was with a bunch of friendly sycophant science and tech moneybags he respects. He certainly doesn’t talk that way at his rallies.”

All of this is why I have emphasized Trump’s immense skills as a propagandist. He has repeated the same lies for years now, and they have been absorbed as fact. Studies about propaganda are clear on this point: When lies are repeated enough, they become familiar and then are accepted as reality.

Here is Daniel Dale, CNN’s fact checker at the debate, reminding people that Trump has been taking credit for the President Barack Obama’s Veterans Choice Act for years now. Dale is still correcting the record, but he’s doing it on CNN, not Fox, where Trump voters would see it.

The impact of Trump’s relentless propaganda goes beyond the awful normalization of extremism, which is well documented, to include a kind of nefarious unconscious enchantment of many with his cult of invincibility and his methods, to the point where so many think the economy was better during his administration.

Or they are so habituated to his lies that these falsehoods are no longer defined as such. As an example, the New York Times front-page headline called Trump’s lies “bluster.” That’s a term that refers to style, or empty posturing, not to the deliberate promotion of false content.

I made this point on X during the debate.

Note that no one is demanding that Trump step down due to his making a mockery of the “debate” with his lying, or because of the disgrace he brings to America’s global reputation by being a convicted felon and having staged an insurrection.

Instead, it’s Biden who is supposed to step down.

Biden has been one of the most successful presidents in American history. He came into office in a situation of double crisis —the pandemic, and the shock of Jan. 6— and had to repair the damage wrought by Trump and his collaborators in multiple realms of governance and society. It is a huge credit under the circumstances that his policies have led to an economy that is booming, a sharp drop in crime, and a record number of jobs created.

But 90 minutes on stage seems to have nullified all of that. So let’s be clear about the nature of this “debate.” It was a chance for Trump to spread his lies, and he did with vigor. No matter that he spewed racism with his comment about “Black jobs.” His stage presence was superior and so he is hailed as the victor, his convicted felon status seemingly less important than his performance skills. That’s not a sign of a healthy democracy.