That Sucked Bigly

I remembered on Thursday night why I stopped watching presidential debates in 2016.

It was during the 2016 election cycle that I would hunker down and gleefully watch Donald Trump tear to shreds his Republican primary opponents, then get in bed and toss and turn all night as my schadenfreude hardened into anxiety, then terror. What was a sick joke during the debate's primetime broadcast became a waking nightmare as I tried to relax and let sleep wash over me.

I lost many nights of sleep in the run-up to the 2016 election. Debate nights were followed by days in which I could hardly function as a writer, editor, a partner, or a parent. One morning after a Trump-Clinton debate, I had to call in sick; I knew I had no chance of doing my job in an adequate way after getting precisely zero shuteye. I stopped sleeping and eating and lost 30 pounds that year on a diet of brain-warping anxiety.

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I didn't analyze this much at the time – I just wanted to get a little shuteye – but in the years after Trump's bull-in-a-china-shop entrance into presidential politics, I realized what it was that kept me up all night, replaying unthinkable things the Big Boy had said to the crowd's delight.

It felt like a virus had slipped into the body politick, and that body had no defense, no way of fending off the sickness that had made a home within it. Trump was using our for-profit media apparatus against us. He knew the major networks more than anything wanted a show, wanted ratings, and he would deliver those like no other candidate in U.S. history. The mainstream media's much-practiced and carefully honed bothsidesism worked beautifully for Trump in those early days of his presidential aspirations: He knew media would equate his calls for ending immigration from Muslim-majority nations with reasonable and more practical immigration policies touted by his opponents. Good and bad things being the same has worked wonderfully for Donald Trump over the past decade.

His ability to manipulate the media and his understanding of television culture and ratings and the insatiable drive for more and more advertising profits made him unstoppable in 2016. It became a waking nightmare to watch this conman use our media and political norms against the system he longed to take over. I could not sleep on all those debate nights because I could not dismiss the reality setting in: This country's institutions and media and political culture had no way of fending off Trump. If he was the virus, we would all soon be sick.

I was waiting for the worms. And I knew so many people – including my father – who would mindlessly follow the worms of fascism all the way to their end, which always comes with an “ecstasy of terminal destruction.” I guess it was the worms, slimy and festering and quietly burrowing into the public consciousness, that kept me up all night. They made my bed not a place of peace and relaxation, but one of worry and dread and outright horror. Like so many of you in those dark days, I could feel a change. Not in me or people I knew, but in everyone, in everything. Aided by late-stage capitalism and the proliferation of social media, our fragmentation had turned into something unspeakably awful.

I recalled all this long-ago agony on Thursday night as I watched Joe Biden appear to be unaware of where he was or even who he was during his first 2024 debate with Trump, who, nine years after descending the golden escalator to become the head of the 21st century fascist movement, is still running for president.

Biden, as you probably saw, was worse than anyone could have imagined. This wasn't the guy who barnstormed the State of the Union in February and triggered Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits alike. This was a feeble and unintelligible old man unable to beat back the bully to his right. Biden could not even mount an attack on Trump's nightmarish and deeply unpopular abortion rights record – the one issue on which Biden can be on offense. Biden's mumbling and stumbling created the kind of viral moments that play to massive (often apolitical) audiences on social media. A better gift the Trump campaign could not have asked for.

I found myself unable to even look at the screen as I sat in my kitchen and watched our little TV and drank a Heineken that had been sitting on its side in the back of my refrigerator since Christmas. Please just stop talking, I thought every time Biden opened his mouth to meander about immigration or Medicaid solvency or the national debt (it's amazing that we have an actual insurrectionist, anti-democracy presidential candidate and the debate moderators first asked the candidates about the debt, which does not matter at all and is not a good-faith concern for a single living American voter). It felt like watching my kids give a speech before a big crowd. I cringed, I wanted so badly to control the words coming out of his mouth, I wanted the damage to be minimal. Biden succeeded in making Trump look like a mentally fit presidential candidate. It's quite the fucking accomplishment.

My only hope now is that partisan lines are so hardened that disastrous debate performances don't really matter anymore, or that debates don't matter, according to the analytics. Perhaps all this post-debate Democratic bed wetting will look silly in three or four or five months. People have no attention span of which to speak in this age of five-second videos. Ninety days might as well be 90 years in our cultural environment. Maybe no one will remember how inept Biden was come November.

That Joe Biden is the final bulwark against an organized and determined fascist movement ready to take permanent control of the levers of power will not do much for my sleep. Excuse me while I order a crate of melatonin gummies.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads and X at @CDCarter13.