Debating Trump Is A Mistake
Presidential debates have outlived their usefulness.
Donald Trump and President Biden should engage in no one-on-one debates. And Biden’s just-announced decision to participate in two debates is an error that overly validates Trump. With Trump’s participation, the events would merit the name “debate” only in an abstract sense, while modern communications technology renders the format itself much less necessary than it once was.
The first televised presidential debates were between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. The contrast between them and the last debates between Trump and Biden is striking—and appalling. The 1960 candidates soberly aired their views on issues of the day, differing with one another firmly but in a civil manner. The events were reasoned, mature, and valuable. There were reasons Nixon’s sobriquet was “Tricky Dick” and they were widely known. But on camera in those debates he, from today’s vantage-point, seems almost professorial, measuring his words and tackling serious issues.
Donald Trump is incapable of meaningful participation in such an event. Only in the sense that “match” can apply to both chess and mud wrestling could the word “debate” apply both to the Kennedy-Nixon event and to Trump’s on-stage behavior. Trump cannot help but distort a debate into a cage-fight. He will, again, shamelessly lie and endlessly interrupt.
This is especially problematic because Trump’s behavior during such events can be misleadingly seductive. Being highly focused on the details of political issues is by no means a human universal, and probably should not be. But this means that what can determine elections, especially with our modern media, is charisma. To many, Trump’s unplugged alpha splatter lends an enticing sense of vigor, strength, and even leadership quality. Showbiz inevitably plays a role in any debate—Nixon famously lost the first one with Kennedy because he was sweating and had a five o’clock shadow. But Trump’s verbal towel-snapping is extreme—he is now renowned for the ability to entrance an audience while communicating all but nothing of importance. Even if Biden summons the same speechmaking chops that he did in his State of the Union address, the problem will remain.
One eagerly anticipates something called a debate. One thinks of the high school kind, or Lincoln vs. Douglas, Malcolm X vs. Bayard Rustin; we associate the word with enlightened civic engagement. But since the 1960s, America's linguistic culture, like its sartorial and sexual sensibilities, is much less formal than it once was, and the lesson to let it all (or at least some of it) hang out has transformed how televised political debates actually proceed. Few of us miss fedoras and formal dance steps, but the new mood has also encouraged the normalization of acting up as “authentic,” “honest.” The cocky cacophony of what passes for political debate today is another result of the same development.
But even if our debates hadn’t become so coarse, the whole idea of presidential candidates competing in them made more sense with the media of another time, when there were fewer ways for candidates to get their message out. In the nineteenth century and beyond, presidential candidates toured on a train, going from town to town making speeches (and before amplification!) because there was no other way to be heard by so many people. Televised debates where the candidates could air their views made sense certainly in 1960, when the only way to experience the candidates speaking was to turn on the radio or television at a scheduled time. Today the candidates can speak to us at length via assorted forms of media, always available to us in our pockets.
Yes, a great many voters only engage with politics starting in debate season. The proper response to that, however, is not that Biden participate in the fiction of a “debate” with Donald Trump but that he should kick off this season of heightened voter engagement with three town hall sessions where he alone takes questions. We would learn just as much about him, and probably more, than putting him in a cage for ninety minutes with Trump, who meanwhile can share himself at his rallies. Seeing the two men together will serve no serious purpose. Recall, for example, that in the previous Trump-Biden debates, Biden spent his time speaking directly to us because it was all but impossible to actually engage Trump’s verbal incontinence.
In refusing to engage in a charade, Biden would, to be sure, be accused by some of running from Trump’s call to battle. However, he could ward off some of these catcalls by simply refuting them: It is not that he is afraid of debating Trump but that there is evidently no point in doing so. We might also wonder how many voters would decide not to vote for Biden on the basis of this choice; quite likely the choice would be understood by many more, with the demonstrated maturity and clearheadedness seen as a mark in Biden’s favor.
Trump’s sneery jabberings are already an embarrassment to America on the world stage. Packaging them as acceptable in our most important political debates is especially egregious. It’s bad enough that we have online, forever, debates in 2016 and 2020 where a serious, accomplished candidate winces their way through a battle with a middle-school hallway bully spewing delusional id. For the sake of our nation’s dignity—as well as Biden’s and our own—there should be no 2024 edition.
John McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, a columnist for The New York Times, and a member of Persuasion’s Board of Advisors. He is the author of, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
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I disagree. We never see Biden in anything but brief and highly-staged managed appearances. And in those he reads (badly) from his note cards and still manages to cause international incidents with his alarming ad-libs. He won't even talk to the New York Times. His campaign seems detached from reality and unaware that it is losing. A little trial-by-fire is exactly what we need to see.
Have to disagree. Since one of this election's biggest injustices is that Biden's age is an issue but Trump's isn't, this is probably the best way to clarify who's more cognitively competent.