There’s only one way the first presidential debate could have been worse: if we watched it all in silence.
Media panic aside (a whole other story), President Joe Biden did not perform all that badly. He mumbled, lost his train of thought, and seemed confused — but that’s just par for the course. At least he didn’t crap his pants on stage, which is really all he had to do. Meanwhile, Trump stayed reserved, and without landing any of his signature zingers, mostly gave Biden plenty of room to embarrass himself. Overall, it seemed like an underwhelming night that would fail to move the needle of public opinion.
But strip away what the candidates actually said, and we have something like the most disastrous debate of all time: Kennedy vs. Nixon. That’s not to say those two stood in silence. Rather, it was optics that won the day.
Tonight’s presidential debate will be the 1st time since the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates where both candidates will face off live in a TV studio without an audience.
The Kennedy-Nixon debates were also the first presidential debates to be broadcast live on TV. #DebateNight pic.twitter.com/t6lJtq0u5k
— JFK Library (@JFKLibrary) June 27, 2024
It was the first televised debate. Kennedy was magnetic, standing there young, handsome, a bright smile shining through his perfectly tanned face. Then we had Nixon, who, unfamiliar with the medium, refused any make-up. He had visible stubble. The camera often caught him looking out of frame, making him appear shifty-eyed. He sweated profusely, and kept having to wipe sweat from his face. Viewers at the time said he looked “exhausted and pale” — a corpse compared to Kennedy’s dazzling masculinity.
This was the first time media optics destroyed a presidential campaign.
Strip away everything our contemporary candidates said, and their mannerisms decided the day. Their faces said it all.
On the one hand, we have Trump: confident, tanned, wholly unperturbed. He stood there taking every wild accusation from Biden without reacting in the slightest. He had one of two expressions: mostly he stood like a statue, an imposing, but hardly menacing, scowl fixed on his face. In all fairness, he probably could have lightened up a bit, showing some more of the happy warrior breeziness we’re all used to seeing at rallies. But this still shined through rather frequently, with carefree smirks, even a dash of a smile, seemingly mocking Biden as he tried and failed to land a blow. Either way, there was no sweat off Trump’s brow, literally or figuratively.
On the other hand, we have Biden, with the glazed-over stare of a blind old dog taking his last trip to the vet. Why am I here? Am I going to get some chicken nuggets first? His face said it all without uttering a word.
This is the demeanor of a man, or what’s left of him, sadly confined to a nursing home: stooped over, trembling, a breathiness that you didn’t even have to hear, but could see in the way his lower jaw hung limp, agape and slightly quivering. His big white teeth looked too fake to be healthy, let alone real. His skin — was it veiny? wrinkled? a slipping face lift? it’s hard to tell — seemed to be nearly falling off his face. The only signs of life were the occasional show of anger, when his otherwise droopy eyes darted with an incoherent flash of rage.
This juxtaposition all came through clearly with the sound on, but would have been so much worse with the volume off. As bad as Biden performed as a whole, the optics looked so much worse on their own. If only Americans hit the mute button last night, Trump would have won all 50 states.
At last, President Nixon gets his well-deserved revenge.
