I will not be watching the debate tonight – not even one second. It’s all political theater. It means absolutely nothing. These debates represent everything that is wrong with modern American politics. The candidates are asked an important question, that will have a major impact on the lives of the American people, and they get 90 seconds answer, 90 seconds. It is not an intellectual or academic exercise. It is a show. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the debaters were allowed to speak on a subject for an hour to fully explain their position, and we only get to hear 90 seconds of the candidates speak on border security, crime, energy, oil and gas production, government spending, inflation, taxes, foreign wars, and so on.
If anybody is watching this debate to determine who they will vote for in November, they are willfully uninformed or they have been living in a cave for the last 8 years. Donald Trump was President for four years and Joe Biden has been President for the last three and a half years. The way both of these people have run our country could not be more polar opposite. The choice is extremely clear. There are no subtle nuances in their differing approaches to running the United States government that need to be fleshed out in a debate. If a clever soundbite or the commentator painting one of the candidates into a corner with a gotcha question determines who you’re voting for, you probably shouldn’t be voting. You’re not taking the right to vote seriously enough to inform yourself on the important issues. Their performances in the debate and what they say they are going to if elected are not even glimpses into how they will actually govern. They both will be telling the voters what they want to hear to win votes not what they are actually going to do.
CNN is running the debate which is a strange choice considering their recent dubious history with Presidential debates. Wasn’t Donna Brazile working for CNN when she gave candidate Hillary Clinton the questions before a Democrat primary debate in 2016? In 2020, during the debate on CNN, moderator, Chris Wallace, actually answered questions for Joe Biden numerous times and attacked Trump instead of asking question. So, CNN has a track record of cheating for their favored candidate during a Presidential debate, and not only are they allowed to run this debate, they think we should actually take this debate seriously and use it to help determine who we are voting for, instead of just looking at the record of each candidate’s first term as president.
Most of the political pundits covering this debate already have their articles written, they already have crafted their talking points. Is there any circumstance in which the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN or MSNBC will ever admit that Donald Trump won this debate. They’ve already written their articles saying that Biden looked Presidential and Donald Trump was a raving madman. The pundits at Fox News, Breitbart and the Daily Wire are no better. They already have their articles written and their talking points ready, characterizing Biden as a doddering old man with early onset dementia. And we will spend more time listening to the so-called experts analyze the debate then actually watching the debate and most people’s opinions will be heavily influenced by listening to the pundits who have already made up their minds on who won and who lost prior to the debate. Don’t trust your own eyes, listen to the “experts”.
That’s the way it works in American politics. Yesterday, sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists, all liberal and one of whom is Janet Yellen’s husband, signed a letter attacking Donald Trump’s fiscal irresponsibility and praising Joe Biden’s handling of inflation. The letter stated, “Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast. There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.” This is the height of gaslighting. Like the debates, we are supposed to believe the experts rather than believe our own experience. We are supposed to listen to these liberal economists rather than believe our own experience about inflation under Joe Biden. Haven’t we already gone through this in 2020? 51 intelligence officers lied and signed a letter stating that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” when they all knew it was real and that letter was used in the debate to counter Trump’s truthful claims about the laptop. The letter like the debate is just political theater. And to tie it all together, Jeremy Bash - the husband of debate moderator Dana Bash - was one of the intelligence officers who fraudulently signed the Hunter Biden laptop letter.
We don’t need Presidential debates. Who wins and who loses means absolutely nothing because we already know how each candidate will run the country for the next four years if re-elected. All you have to do is think back and ask yourself was the economy better when Trump was President or when Biden was President? When was inflation better? When was border security, crime, the job market, energy, world peace, and whatever other issue that is important to you, better? Under Trump or under Biden? Answer those questions and vote accordingly. Everything else during this campaign is just political theatre that means absolutely nothing.
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Judd Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.