Let's not recap Thursday night's presidential debate because I'm sure you've read enough of those by now, but there is one thing that needs to be said: did I call it, or what?
Ever since Donald Trump agreed to debate Joe Biden on all of Joe Biden's terms — no audience, two CNN-DNC flacks for moderators, etc. — the conventional wisdom was that Trump had made a big mistake letting them stack the deck against him like that.
Ten days before the debate, I wrote a contrary take for PJ Media VIP and VIP Gold subscribers. "What if Trump goes up against Biden with this one message underpinning his performance: 'I've come to this debate the same way I'll go back to Washington, with literally everything stacked against me. And I'll still win.'"
Trump walked into the lion's den, did his thing, and walked back out unscathed.
Washington is such an impossibly geared Rube Goldberg device that it's impossible to predict what will happen on one end of the machine when you start turning the crank on the other. It's nice now and then to see it play out how you thought it might.
Also in need of mad props is PJ Media's own Athena Thorne. While I called what went down in the broadest possible terms, Athena drilled down into the specifics — and, if you don't mind me mixing metaphors, nailed it.
It's a "blessing," she wrote on Wednesday, "that there won't be a live audience; Trump will be in CEO mode rather than in full live-rally bluster. The conditions are in place for him to revert to his natural form: a killer negotiator who will dominate his opponents."
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That's exactly what we saw for 90 excruciating (for them!) minutes last night. Then this follow-up gem from early this morning:
Turning off Trump's mic so Biden could speak uninterrupted will go down as one of the worst campaign decisions in history. #DebatePresidencial #debate
— Athena Thorne (@Athena_Thorne) June 28, 2024
I'll finish today with something I posted last night, sometime between my last drunkblog scotch and my bedtime brandy.
If Denial were a river in Egypt, somebody just bombed the Aswan Dam. https://t.co/GQbq5gNcOX
— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) June 28, 2024
You blow up a dam the size of the Aswan and a lot of damage is going to get done downstream.
We don't know what last night's floodwaters will take away with them or what will be left after they recede. But there's a lesson here if only Washington would learn it.
You can deny reality for only so long, and the longer you deny it, the harder it will hit when it finally does break through. I don't just mean trying to hide Biden's increasing senescence. I'm talking about all the tough decisions that Washington denies they have to make about the budget, the debt, the impending bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare, the perilous condition of our military, and so much more.
Last night's undeniably revelatory debate performance, believe it or not, was just the smallest example of everything I've tried to warn people about for years already — or, in some cases, for decades.
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