‘Debates don’t matter,” goes the old wisdom, “until they do.” Politico offers but one example of that truism, in advance of the first 2020 debate. And note the qualifier employed: “Debates don’t matter . . . unless someone faceplants.” Of course, back then, the first debate may well have mattered significantly: Donald Trump didn’t exactly faceplant, but — because he was suffering from an as-yet-undisclosed bout of Covid himself, one that put Chris Christie, his unlucky debate-prep partner, in the hospital and nearly in his grave — he gave a disastrously interrupting, impatient performance that night.
Very little, in fact, stands out from the almost nonexistent 2020 “shadow” campaign except the image of a blustering, incoherently angry Trump barely allowing an already visibly diminished Joe Biden to finish a sentence during that first encounter. For a nation still largely on lockdown and long since tired of Trump’s useless public fulminations, it was probably the final nail in the coffin of his narrow November loss. And that performance is driving Kamala Harris’s latest cheap campaign stunt — insisting on hot mics during their one debate on September 10 for ABC, despite a prior written agreement that the candidates’ microphones would be turned off when it wasn’t their turn to speak.
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