By Mike Huckabee
June 28, 2024
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Well, I know many people were watching the debate to see if President Biden would have a “senior moment,” but I don’t think anyone was expecting he’d have one that lasted 90 minutes.
No matter your political leanings, it was obvious to everyone within the first few minutes that something was seriously wrong. It was as if the White House had sent over the Biden robot from Disneyland’s Hall of Presidents, and it was short-circuiting. This was so bad a trainwreck, they must’ve let Pete Buttigieg do his debate prep. One of my writers said there were two big winners last night: Donald Trump and Visiting Angels, which got a free 90-minute commercia
Usually, debates don’t have that much effect on polls, but this may be the rare exception, judging by the immediate post-debate polling.
(Question: Who are the 33% in that CNN poll who thought Biden won, and what have they been smoking?)
Not surprisingly, the immediate post-debate talk was about replacing Biden, who clearly can’t do four more years (judging by what we saw last night, he’ll be lucky to last until November, as will the rest of us if he remains President.) You could tell the Democrats knew the caliber of the catastrophe when not even their media mouthpieces on the DNC news channels could put a good spin on it. Even many party loyalists, such as Van Jones, were calling for a replacement candidate.
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You could also tell the Dems were gobsmacked by Biden’s implosion when none of them showed up for the post-debate “spin room.” It was filled with Trump surrogates ready to pump up Trump’s performance, but it took quite a while for any Dems to show up (no doubt, they were in an emergency meeting on how to polish this cow pie.) California Gov. Gavin Newsom finally appeared and was asked if he would press Biden to step down. He replied, “Absolutely not! I have his back 100%. I would never turn my back.” But I bet he’d dance a jig if someone stabbed Biden in the back and made him the candidate.
Of course, there are always the diehards, denying reality to the end. Like Donna Brazile, who admitted Biden lost the debate and the party has “work to do” (a brain transplant?), but that Biden would be the nominee and win.
And VP Kamala Harris, who might also stand to benefit if Joe retired to his rocker, brazoned it out, saying he had “a slow start, but a strong finish. And the bottom line is this: Let us not decide the outcome of who’s going to be President of the United States based on a 90-minute debate.”
The debate was only the latest reason to change Presidents, and I must’ve missed the “strong finish” part. My mind was still reeling from the start and the middle, with all the rushed, disjointed, garbled, whispered gibberish (I really feel sorry for whoever had to write the closed captions for this), and Biden repeating several repeatedly-debunked lies about Trump, like “very fine people,” “injecting bleach” and “losers and suckers.” This did finally give Trump a chance to set the record straight, not that it penetrated Joe’s skull (he continued to insist that these notorious whoppers were true.)
Biden also made some truly wacked-out comments that will go down in debate history, like discounting crimes by illegal aliens by saying that “there’s a lot of young women being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters,” and that “we finally beat Medicare.” The worst, however, was claiming that no soldiers have died during his tenure. Has he also forgotten Afghanistan?
As for Trump’s performance, I think he did well and that the Biden team’s insistence on the strict debate rules was a huge tactical error. I suspect they thought Trump would never agree to debate under those terms, but they actually worked out in his favor. By not letting the candidates yell over each other, Trump came across more measured and presidential, letting Biden ramble and rant and hang himself. He also did a good job of correcting some of the many lies about him and his record that the media have allowed to become “common knowledge” by refusing to correct them or give him airtime to correct them.
And I have to give props to the moderators. They occasionally bailed out Biden when he was obviously sinking in a pool of his own verbal quicksand, and they asked some of the expected DNC-approved questions about climate change and “will you accept the results of the election?” (Why does nobody ask Democrats that, considering it’s their supporters who are threatening to riot if Trump wins?) But I suspect that all the pre-debate focus on their previous TDS statements made them not want to appear too in-the-bag for Biden, which has many leftists hopping mad at them. How dare they act sort of like actual journalists?!
It wasn’t a perfect performance by Trump, but few people have one of those. For instance, I wish he had put a stake through the “Two state solution” nonsense by clearly stating that we don’t reward terrorists with their own nation bordering the people they want to mass-murder. He has a tendency to make blanket statements about one thing or another being “the best of all time,” which his supporters see as just his brand of braggadocio, but it gives nit-picking opponents an opening to throw contradictory statistics at him. All he really needed to do was remind people of how much better things were.
I also wish he’d had a stronger closing, painting a positive vision for the future, with less focus on the past. And I doubt that many young Americans struggling to pay their rent could relate to two old rich guys arguing over who’s the better golfer. Maybe if they’d been talking about duck hunting, it might’ve held my attention better.
But those are all minor quibbles. Overall, it was a great night for Trump and America, which is reflected in the immediate shift in the betting pools on the race.
There are mountains of commentary out there, including the real-time blogging of debates on Redstate.com, PJ Media.com and Twitchy.com, which are always fun to scroll back through. So I’m not going to say more about the specifics. However, I do want to make an important point that too many people are overlooking:
Last night, Trump exposed some of the many lies that have been told about him for years, and for some viewers, it might have been the first time they’ve actually heard the truth. I hope that helped yank the blinders off of casual observers who tend to believe whatever they see on the media or social media. Not many people do the kind of deep-dive research we do here, hunting down original quotes and double-checking partisan claims.
But I hope it doesn’t stop there. Now that those viewers’ eyes have been opened to how badly they’ve been lied to, about everything from Russian collusion to “very fine people,” I hope they will wake up to the fact that this entire Administration and much of the coverage of it has been a huge false façade from day one. To quote Buddy the elf, this President sits on a throne of lies.
The Dems ran Biden in 2020 by hiding him in his basement and assuring us he was perfectly capable of leading the country for four years (they also told us he would be a moderate uniter, another total lie.) They told us Hunter’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” and polls showed that if people had known that it was real, it would have cost Biden enough votes for Trump to win handily.
In recent days, as Biden’s cognitive health has obviously deteriorated, they continued lying to us, telling us he was sharp as a tack “behind closed doors,” or that videos showing him faltering and flailing were “cheap fakes.” All the time, they knew he was incapable of being President, but as long as they could fool us into thinking otherwise, they would continue to use him as the face of the Administration while unelected radicals ran things. There’s no way they didn’t know it was this bad. What we saw last night is what they see every day, and the only reason we finally got to see it was either because they couldn’t stop it (never expecting Trump to accept their onerous debate terms) or they wanted to get rid of him to replace him with someone with a pulse so they let the disaster happen.
But make no mistake: Whether Biden remains as their ventriloquist’s dummy or is replaced by someone more alive, it will still be the same coterie of unelected radicals pushing the same failed policies on the same unwilling public, only under a new set of lies. If they were willing to lie to us about something as vitally important as the ability of the President to serve, they will lie to us about anything.
Yes, Biden needs to be replaced. But so does everyone around him who engaged in this willful, historic abuse of the public trust.
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