Before the debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was over, his aides were telling the media that he had a cold. No one actually believed that excuse. If he truly did have a cold, why didn't they mention it before? And, a cold wouldn't have explained his overall abominable performance. It's crazy to think they thought that excuse was going to fly. A cold wouldn't explain his freezing on stage, or his inability to be coherent or complete sentences.
His performance was so bad that major papers, including the New York Times, called on him to drop out of the race.
"The greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election," the New York Times editorial board declared.
It should be remembered that Mr. Biden challenged Mr. Trump to this verbal duel. He set the rules, and he insisted on a date months earlier than any previous general election debate. He understood that he needed to address longstanding public concerns about his mental acuity and that he needed to do so as soon as possible.
The truth Mr. Biden needs to confront now is that he failed his own test.
Of course, he hasn't done so, and instead has doubled down, claiming he's not going anywhere, and making even more excuses for his performance, like when he told donors the problem was caused by jet lag.
“I decided to travel around the world a couple of times… shortly before the debate,” Biden explained a few days after the debate. “It wasn’t very smart [to be] traveling around the world a couple times.”
“I didn’t listen to my staff," Biden added. "And then I almost fell asleep on stage."
While Biden did do some international travel before the debate, the debate took place nearly two weeks after his last international trip, and he'd been resting at his beach house for a couple of days before spending a week at Camp David for debate prep.
That was bad, yet during his interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, he had yet another excuse to offer.
"I just had a bad night. I don’t know why," Biden said.
"And — how — how quickly did it — did it come to you that you were having that bad night?" Stephanopoulos asked.
"Well, it came to me, I was having a bad night when I realized that even when I was answering a question, even though they turned his mic off, he was still shouting," Biden claimed. "And I — I let it distract me. I — I’m not blaming it on that, but I realized that I just wasn’t in control."
There's just one problem with Biden's newest excuse: it's a lie. While there may have been a few times Trump could be seen speaking when his microphone was turned off, for the most part, he simply stood there, reacting silently as Biden spoke. Not once could we ever see or hear him shouting.
It just didn't happen.
Blaming jet lag when his last international trip was two weeks prior was pathetic, and a major stretch, but the same people who watched the debate and panned Biden's performance aren't going to say that Trump was shouting over Biden when they know he wasn't. We saw Trump a lot while Biden spoke on the split screen; he was disciplined and knew that the best thing to do was let Biden dig his own grave.
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