OPINION:
ATLANTA — The night began with “In Pharma We Trust.”
It ended with “Atlanta, we have a problem.”
Former President Donald Trump came into the debate here Thursday night ready to rumble. President Biden came in ready to mumble.
Two minutes in, Democrats were looking around for outgoing Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the New York Democrat who got beat in his primary this past week. Somebody needed to pull the fire alarm.
By the time the whole slow-rolling catastrophe was over — 90 excruciating minutes later — there was one clear winner. Vice President Kamala Harris!
Ms. Harris is no longer is the cackling kook-job the kryptonite of this ticket. Mr. Biden is.
Kamala Harris is still an electoral anvil, but she is a soaring, twirling ballerina compared to the sack of dead weight and musty cobwebs at the top of the ticket.
Cue the sad music they play with those TV ads for adopting abandoned puppies. Mr. Biden became the lonely, bewildered face of elder abuse in America on Thursday night.
Even before the debate was over, Democratic operatives in the Biden campaign scrambled to salvage their own political careers by firing rescue flares: Mr. Biden “had a cold.”
That’s not a cold. Mr. Biden is done. He is shot through. He is finished. Nobody is home.
A truly reprehensible part of the whole spectacle is that first lady Jill Biden and the entire Biden family of self-dealing power grifters allowed the old man to be abused like this in such a glaring, public forum. Even worse, in a political sense, is that Mr. Biden is surrounded by partisan political hacks in the White House who lie every day to prop up Mr. Biden and claim that he is still capable of running the country.
Well, that mask got ripped away in the debate for all the world to see. And yes, the whole world was watching.
Seriously, who the hell is president of the United States today?
Still worse are the legion of reporters in the media who are supposed to keep watch of our political leaders all the time and up close, yet prefer to maintain the Democrats’ elaborate lie that Mr. Biden is mentally capable and still making all the decisions in the White House.
The perfect line of the night came after Mr. Biden gave a particularly unspooled answer to a question about immigration. Mr. Trump looked on with a mixture of confusion and pity as Mr. Biden mangled his way through the briars of his addled mind. Never being one to shy away from telling the harsh truth, however, Mr. Trump summed up Mr. Biden’s entire debate performance.
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
There was not a hint of meanness in Mr. Trump’s statement. It was just a matter-of-fact assessment.
The CNN moderators, meanwhile, did all they could to prop up President Spaghetti.
Twice Jake Tapper cut to break right after Mr. Biden landed some canned zinger, leaving Mr. Trump unable to respond.
In perhaps the most vexing moment of the debate, Mr. Biden was talking about the national debt, then taxes, then trillionaires before finally landing on COVID.
“Excuse me,” Mr. Biden corrected himself, “with dealing with everything we have to do with — look, if — we finally beat Medicare.”
Mr. Tapper rushed in to halt the carnage, saying: “Thank you, President Biden.”
And of course, there was no fact-checking of Mr. Biden’s voluble lies.
“The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any this — this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world — like he did.”
This was a particularly galling statement considering 13 U.S. service members were killed during Mr. Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Instead of challenging Mr. Biden on basic facts about the deaths of American troops, Mr. Tapper shot down Mr. Trump and changed the subject to tariffs.
“Am I allowed to respond to him?” Mr. Trump asked patiently.
“Well, I’m going to ask you a follow-up,” Mr. Tapper sniveled. “You can do whatever you want with the minute that we give you.” And then proceeded with his unrelated question.
So spectacularly terrible was Mr. Biden’s performance that perhaps lost in the debate was how spectacularly good Mr. Trump’s performance was. He was cool, patient, focused and presidential, which led to a moment of extraordinary candor.
“And I’ll tell you something — I wish he was a great president,” Mr. Trump said. “Because I wouldn’t be here right now.”
“The only reason I’m here is he’s so bad as a president that I’m going to make America great again. We’re going to make America great again.”
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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