With just a little over a month remaining until the Nov. 3 election, a lot was on the line for both presidential candidates during Tuesday's debate.
President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee and former vice president, have both called this the most important election in U.S. history, which would technically make this the most important debate thus far.
After 90 minutes of name calling, interruptions and anger-fueled laughs, somebody needed to be crowned a winner in some sense and I can say with full confidence that it was not moderator Chris Wallace.
Trump was in control from the get-go.
Loud interjections, refusals to stay within the time limit and just a blatant disregard for any conditions set prior to the debate were the name of Trump’s game, but that was to be expected.
What was not as expected was how well he was able to mold his interruptions into his own talking points.
The best example of this came during the candidates’ first discussion topic, the Supreme Court vacancy.
Trump initiated the conversation with the assertion that he won the 2016 election fairly and that if a Democrat was in his position, he or she would also try to fill the seat.
A fair point.
However, that was the last talk of Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Amy Coney Barrett, for quite some time.
The Supreme Court discussion went awry when Biden brought up Barrett’s viewpoints on the Affordable Care Act.
At this moment, Trump was in full control for the first time in the debate.
The current president was armed with numbers, whether they were accurate or not, that damaged Biden’s plea that Trump has no health care plan.
Trump claimed his plan would cut drug prices 80-90% and that products such as insulin, which diabetics need, would be “so cheap it's like water.”
Biden’s final statement, “everything he has said so far is a lie” prompted moderator Wallace to get the two candidates back on the Supreme Court discussion topic.
And that's when Trump landed his biggest punch.
When asked, Biden would not answer whether he would pack the Supreme Court if he was elected president, which refers to adding more seats to the Supreme court and filling them with justices that would rule on cases in line with the president’s views.
His efforts to avoid the question made me extremely uncomfortable as I watched Biden slur his words, searching for any way to move onto the next topic.
Although the argument about the Supreme Court justice opening was a major win for Trump, Biden did have a few tricks up his sleeve.
Throughout the debate, Trump constantly hounded Biden for having radical leftists wrapped around his finger and made certain when Biden said something moderate that everyone knew it.
“You just lost the left,” and other jabs were thrown toward Biden during the debate, but what Trump did not expect was Biden to distance himself from the far left.
Biden said he didn’t want a socialized health care system, does not want to defund the police and even said he does not support the Green New Deal.
It is already well known that Biden is no Bernie Sanders when it comes to left wing policy, but Biden making these statements on the debate stage was a powerful message to Americans and his fellow members of the Democratic party, that this is his candidacy, not his party’s.
He even went so far to say “I am the Democratic Party right now.”
With Democrats being haunted by the fear of Trump being reelected, it's fantastic to see Biden claim his presidential run as his own rather than following the whims of the Democratic Party.
The problem for Biden is that a number of the points he made won’t matter to die hard Trump supporters and the remarks on policy from the former Vice President will be seen as nothing but debate kerfuffle.
Trump refused to condemn white supremacist violence, but rather attacked antifa saying “almost everything I see is from the left wing,” when referring to the Black Lives Matter protests happening around the U.S.
He was also unfazed when it came to the discussion of his tax returns, in which he stated that the $750 federal tax report by The New York Times is fake because he paid “millions” in taxes.
Elusive question dodging doesn’t make for a great debater and it sure doesn’t make for a debate winner, but in Trump’s case, his following is so strong that it's hard to see anything making a dent in his favorability ratings.
Trump dominated the debate with utter force, but this was more than expected.
For weeks Biden’s critics were prepping for the slurred-speaking former vice president to stumble his way off stage. But despite these predictions, Biden turned what was set to be a slaughter into a close contest.
And that in itself should be seen as a victory for Biden.
