Nobody is Actually Surprised that Biden is Incompetent. Absolutely No One.

This debate is the moment they've been waiting for so they could say it out loud.

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I used to love politics. I’ve come to hate it. But as a citizen, a husband, a father…I can’t exactly just walk away, either. This is not, as you know, a political Substack. But I’m an American, so let’s talk about this briefly, because it affects all of us who live here.

After debating whether or not to watch tonight’s presidential debate, and after finishing my contribution to making dinner this evening, I decided to flip on YouTube and livestream CNN. If you missed it, you can catch it here.

Here are my brief takeaways:

• Biden has (mostly) lost the plot. He had moments of cognizance, but his memory and ability to stay in the present moment are gone. His mastery of facts is also deeply compromised, though it’s harder to separate that out from normal political bullshittery. The man has dementia and everyone who has experienced dealing with someone who has dementia can see it.

• Biden’s voice was weak and often unintelligible. He mumbled, stumbled, and fumbled. All I could think of was this guy from Napoleon Dynamite:

• Trump didn’t come across as ferociously as he used to, but that could be a fruit of rehearsal and attempted discipline. He didn’t have as many zingers as usual, either, but he was clearly in possession of his senses and had more self-control than usual. His greatest liability was his inability to let previous debate go and focus on the question set before him. He had lots of missed opportunities, but Biden handed him the debate on a silver platter, so it ultimately didn’t matter.

• Biden leveled what should have been crippling shots against Trump to little avail. He’s a “convicted felon.” He “sexually molested a woman in public.” He “had sex with a porn star while his wife was pregnant.” Hugely damaging accusations, and every one bounced right off. Trump’s denial that they were true came across as sincere. His characterization of the legal action against him as politically motivated and a “scam” did as well.

• Trump came out looking better on abortion, the border, inflation, the economy, the Ukraine war, Israel, NATO, and January 6 — literally every issue. He clearly won on competence, and had a couple of devastating shots on Biden’s lack of awareness on what was going on. This one was just a killer:

  He also went after Biden’s cognitive health, which was clearly the focus of the debate for most people watching. I was keeping an eye on Twitter the whole time, and people on both sides of the political spectrum were aghast at how bad Biden was. Stupidly, this devolved into a debate about who is the better golfer, but Trump managed to realize it was childish and said so by the end of the segment.

• CNN did a surprisingly fair and balanced job, and I thought their microphone cutoffs worked well to keep the candidates from talking over each other.

• At the end of the night, it was crystal clear that only one of the two men on the stage has the capacity to act in a leadership role, and it was not Biden. Whether Trump can do a good job remains to be seen, but there was no indication whatsoever that he’s lost his mental acuity.

What’s really interesting is how quickly the post-debate analysis turned to Democrats acknowledging how “dismal” Biden’s performance was and whether he needs to be asked to “step aside.” This is where I felt like we started to see the scripted portion of this evening’s events. There is absolutely nobody anywhere in this country with a functioning brain who thought Biden was compos mentis. Every bit of surprise we’re seeing is performative and feigned. It was as if they were waiting for this moment so they could say it out loud and replace him with someone else. Here’s the CNN panel (click the image to see the video since I still can’t embed Twitter/X links here):

Here are The Young Turks:

More CNN, where Erin Burnett says of Biden’s preparation, “He knows every one of these questions is coming,” which sounds directly like an admission of him being fed the questions in advance. (Note that she didn’t say they both knew.)

Again, ALL of this surprise is feigned. Nobody actually thought Biden was competent.

Vivek Ramaswamy has been saying since last year that Biden would not be the nominee. He repeated this again on Fox News back in February, when he said: