https://www.frontpagemag.com/showdown/
On Thursday night, June 27, unpopular President Joe Biden faced off for a debate against challenger and former President Donald Trump, whose popularity is surging despite (or in many cases because of) him being labeled a “convicted felon.” The 90-minute showdown took place before heavily biased moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper in the Atlanta studios of CNN, the least trusted name in news.
To keep tight control over the debate process, Team Biden requested there be no live audience – because Trump knows how to work a crowd – and that Trump’s mic be muted when Biden is speaking and vice versa; this, according to the New York Times, is “intended to guard against Mr. Trump’s penchant for interrupting and speaking over debate opponents.”
In other words, Biden’s team and his media collaborators wanted to hamstring Trump’s successful pugilistic style. They couldn’t afford to allow him to fluster his senile opponent with the kind of devastating off-the-cuff remark like the one he used to skewer Hillary Clinton in their 2016 debate. Hillary had said it was a good thing “Trump is not in charge of the law in our country” and he shot back, “Because you would be in jail.” Disappointingly, the debate constraints left no room for that kind of spontaneous kill shot.
Biden’s handlers also refused to allow the aging President to be tested prior to the debate for performance-enhancing drugs, despite widespread speculation that he would need to be “jacked up,” as Trump put it, to maintain mental focus and to prevent Biden from reaching for nonexistent hands to shake or wandering offstage.
As it turned out, if Biden wasn’t on any performance-enhancing drugs for the debate, he should have been, because there was immediate widespread consensus among his fellow Democrat leaders and media supporters that the debate was a colossal failure for the aging President.
The debate kicked off with a question about the economy, a topic that recurred throughout as both candidates blamed each other for soaring inflation, high taxes, and the decimation of the middle class. Biden accused Trump and corporate greed of causing families to struggle with rising prices, and declared that the road to prosperity lies in taxing the rich. Trump blasted Biden for turning us into a third-world country by allowing illegal immigration to cripple the economy.