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A Four-Part Plan For Outdebating Donald Trump
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A Four-Part Plan For Outdebating Donald Trump

Beating Trump is easy, but Joe Biden can make actual headway in the race if he advances these simple goals.

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Brian Beutler
Jun 24, 2024
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A Four-Part Plan For Outdebating Donald Trump
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(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Democrats in Washington and everywhere else are anxious about Thursday’s presidential debate. Republicans are, too, of course, they’re just better trained to channel their anxiety into false bravado. 

This asymmetry is more or less constant in American politics: Democrats are liberals and being neurotic in public is practically hardwired into liberal culture. 

But they have more meritorious reasons, too. Joe Biden isn’t as depicted in deceptive GOP cheapfakes, but he’s also past his prime presenting years. He’s not nearly as rhetorically dextrous now as he was in 2012 he whooped Paul Ryan in the vice presidential debate—which is part of why Trump, in a belated scramble to raise expectations for Biden, recently cited that performance. 

They’re also worried Biden will become flustered or marble mouthed at pivotal moments—that in one way or another he’ll confirm swing-voter misgivings about him, and thus lose substantial ground in polling. 

It’s a reasonable thing to worry about. It has been since Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee four years ago. His primary-debate performances in 2019 and 2020 were not stellar, and even after he beat Trump in two debates that fall, we knew it’d be four years til he faced another general election opponent: plenty of time for sharpness to dull.

So, yes, I share some of these concerns. I also think the task before Biden just isn’t very hard. Trump has never won a presidential debate, and only seems formidable through bluster, which should be easy to shrug off after eight years. Beating him requires very little effort, while true success entails advancing these four simple goals:

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