June 28, 2024 12:06 PM UTC

So, Uh, How About that Presidential Debate!

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• by: Colorado Pols

If you’re reading these words there is a strong chance you are the sort of person who watched the first Presidential debate of 2024 on Thursday evening.

If you watched that debate, you saw what everyone else saw: President Biden looked pretty bad. Biden’s performance was a shock to the system for many folks who were expecting something…not so terrible. But in any situation, multiple things can be true at once, and it’s absolutely accurate to say that Donald Trump was brutally bad as well (albeit for different reasons).

We’re not here to sugarcoat Biden’s debate performance, but as Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman noted on ‘X’ today, it’s important to back up and zoom out a little further. Lost in much of the post-debate discussion about the fact that Biden is an old man — which is not exactly a new revelation — was that Trump sounded like a raving lunatic on Thursday. Let’s dig in a little deeper beyond the obvious problems for Biden, which (again) we aren’t disputing.

Donald Trump Just Makes Things Up

The Washington Post ran a gazillion-word debate fact-check that pointed out the complete absurdity of many of Trump’s claims. Here are just a couple of the more notable falsehoods from Thursday…

On immigration:

“I’d love to ask him why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.”

—Trump

This is poppycock. [Pols emphasis] Immigration experts know of no effort by other countries to empty their prisons and mental institutions. As someone who came to prominence in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Trump appears to be channeling Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s 1980 Mariel boatlift. About 125,000 Cubans were allowed to flee to the United States in 1,700 boats — but there was a backlash when it was discovered that hundreds of refugees had been released from jails and mental health facilities.

Helen Fair, research associate at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research in Britain, which tracks the world prison population (except for a handful of countries), says the numbers keep growing. In 2013, 10.2 million people were in prison globally — and that had grown to 10.77 million in 2021. A preliminary estimate for February 2024, not ready to be published, indicates the population has grown even more. “In short, I would disagree with Donald Trump’s assertion,” she said.

Trump’s record on slowing illegal immigration is also nothing close to what he claims:

“We had the safest border in history in that final couple of months of my presidency.”

—Trump

This is false. [Pols emphasis] Trump’s efforts to completely shut the border did not bear fruit until the coronavirus pandemic emerged in 2020 and he was able to turn away migrants by citing a public health emergency — but even then apprehensions at the southern border were lower than April 2017, shortly after he took office. Then the numbers began to spike again. Apprehensions in Trump’s final two months in office were much higher than in President Barack Obama’s last two months in office. Apprehensions were 43,251 in December 2016 and 31,576 in January 2017, the last two months of the Obama presidency, compared with 71,141 and 75,316 in Trump’s last two months. The highest number of apprehensions under Obama was 67,342, in March 2009.

Trump repeatedly talked about how illegal immigrations were marauding around the country raping and murdering Americans in massive numbers. His math is…not so good.

“It could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people.”

—Trump

Trump never met a number that he could not double, triple or quadruple. Here, he manages to take a real number — about 5 million migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency — and increase it fourfold. Then he offers a prediction to make it sound even larger.

Here’s the reality: Customs and Border Protection recorded about 9.5 million “encounters” between February 2021, after Biden took office, through April. But that does not mean all those people entered the country illegally. Some people were “encountered” numerous times as they tried to enter the country — and others (more than 4 million of the total) were expelled, mostly because of covid-related rules that have since ended.

CBP has released more than 3.2 million migrants into the United States at the southern border under the Biden administration through April, the Department of Homeland Security said.

On Medicare and Social Security (and immigration):

“He’s destroying Medicare because all of these people are coming in. They’re putting them on Medicare. They’re putting them on Social Security. They’re going to destroy Social Security. This man is going to single-handedly destroy Social Security.”

—Trump

Undocumented immigrants improve the health of Social Security and Medicare by paying payroll taxes without receiving benefits.

In a fact check, we calculated the figure for Social Security payments made by undocumented immigrants is now about $27 billion. For Medicare, it should be at least $6 billion, as the Medicare tax is about 23 percent of the Social Security tax.

On the overturning of Roe v. Wade:

“Fifty-one years ago, you had Roe v. Wade and everybody wanted to get it [the power to legislate on abortion] back to the states. Everybody without exception, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back. Religious leaders. … Every legal scholar throughout the world, the most respected, wanted it brought back to the States.”

—Trump

This is absurd. [Pols emphasis] The docket for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case in which the right to abortion was overturned, is filled with briefs from legal scholars saying it would be a mistake to overturn decades of legal precedent.

Trump also repeated a favorite Republican talking point that has long been dismissed by fact-checkers: That women are getting lots of abortions at the end of their term and even after giving birth. Killing a baby after birth would be covered by existing laws outlawing murder. Late-term abortions are also exceedingly rare, as the Post points out.

On Veterans:

“There was a made-up quote, suckers and losers. They made it up. It was in a third-rate magazine that’s failing like many of these magazines. He made that up. He put it in commercials. We’ve notified him. We had 19 people that said, I didn’t say it.”

—Trump

Trump strongly disputes this, but elements have been corroborated…

…In 2023, John F. Kelly, Trump’s White House chief of staff in 2018 — who had previously not commented on the controversy — issued a statement to CNN that Trump “rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

Absent a recording, there’s no way to definitively confirm the story. Trump references 19 people who denied it — he used to say 25 — but when we examined their statements, 11 were not even with Trump and most of the others were just his communications staff. [Pols emphasis]

On taxes:

“He wants to raise everybody’s taxes by four times.”

—Trump

This is false. [Pols emphasis] For five years, Biden has been consistent in saying he will not raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year, which leaves about the top 2 percent of taxpayers. Biden reiterated this pledge in the budget plan he released earlier this year.

Trump also made a number of patently silly claims, such as suggesting that Biden is a “Manchurian Candidate” controlled by China and that the United States had the cleanest air and water ever during his administration. And then there was this historic quote:

We’re not naive enough to believe that Trump’s lies won’t be accepted and/or repeated by his supporters, but those aren’t the people whose votes are actually up for grabs in November anyway. Trump’s bullshit will only grow from here, and eventually average voters are going to have to make a determination about whether they can believe anything that comes out of the mouth of the Big Orange Guy.

The 2024 Campaign is Really Just Getting Started

This is the other key takeaway from our vantage point. Thursday’s debate was the earliest in a calendar year that we’ve ever had a Presidential debate between presumptive party nominees. There are a lot of other key points to consider:

What happens when voters start to understand more about “Project 2025,” the not-so-secretive plan to remake America into a Christian Nationalist country under a new Trump administration? The average voter isn’t aware yet that Trump supporters — backed by real money — are doing things like making lists of federal employees deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump. That’s fucking creepy, and it’s going to come up more than once.

There’s also an important question to consider about campaign operations. And as Bill Scher wrote for Washington Monthly last week, the Trump campaign’s GOTV plan for the fall is “bonkers”:

We are in an era of nail-biter presidential elections. In 2020, Joe Biden won three states by less than a percentage point, including Wisconsin, the state that notched him an Electoral College victory. In 2016, that exact statement applied to Donald Trump. Polls today suggest 2024 will be similarly close. The get-out-the-vote operations, the so-called “ground game,” may determine the outcome in November.

This is why it’s bonkers that the Trump campaign has outsourced its ground game to far-right operators with no track record of success.

CNN reported that “Donald Trump’s campaign is taking a vastly different approach to 2024 compared with 2020, with plans for fewer staff and expenses [and instead] relying on wealthy conservative groups for data, infrastructure, and significant bank accounts.” It further noted that one of the most important of these groups is Turning Point Action, part of the Turning Point network that began with Turning Point USA.

Turning Point USA is a right-wing student group founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, an 18-year-old soon-to-be college dropout, and Bill Montgomery, an elderly Tea Party activist.

Turning Point USA essentially took over the GOTV operations for the Arizona Republican Party in 2022 (Arizona is Turning Point’s original home), and the results were…not good. Turning Point focused its efforts on three races — U.S. Senate, Governor, and Secretary of State. Democrats won all three races. 

Thursday’s debate was definitely a bad moment for Biden and Democrats, and nobody should pretend otherwise. But it wasn’t a strong couple of hours for Trump, either.

Perhaps Democrats will figure out a way to replace Biden at the top of the ticket. Perhaps Biden will go on to prove that Thursday’s debate was an aberration and that he is not the man he appeared to be on stage in Atlanta.

We still haven’t seen the reaction from voters once Trump is sentenced on July 11 for his felony convictions in New York. We don’t know who Trump will choose as a running mate after suggesting last week that all would be revealed on Thursday.

We still have a long way to go until November. Any emotional reactions from Thursday’s debate don’t mean a whole lot, particularly considering that it will be persuadable voters in a handful of counties in only six states who will ultimately choose our next President.

A better performance from Biden on Thursday might have cemented his place in front of a lying, babbling Trump, but instead we carry on with uncertainty on all levels. In that regard, nothing really changed at all.