James Fallows is a veteran writer about American politics. What follows is the beginning of his reaction to last night’s debate. Open the link to read it all. Lies went unrefuted.

He begins:

Deb and I watched every minute of the dreadful “debate” tonight on CNN. I grabbed the remote to turn off the TV the instant the pundit-panels kicked in. A man can take only so much.

So what follows is my own “certified organic” reaction to what I just saw. It may or may not match the prevailing reaction tone—I haven’t seen or listened to any of it. That’s for the morning. Apologies in advance for inevitable late-night typos. 

1) The overview: A disastrous start.

Thirty minutes in I tweeted out this summary:

Things shifted—in Biden’s favor, and against Trump—as the night went on. But I can’t imagine that many people stuck it out as long as I felt obliged to. And what made the opening-minutes performance so striking is the “range” point I mention in the tweet, which is a version of the famed “expectations game.”

—Biden’s range. Everyone know that Joe Biden is old. And everyone has seen the way his carriage, his gait, his facial expressions have become stiffer and more labored during his time in office.

But anyone who has watched Biden in office has seen him time and again“exceed expectations”—seeming to shake off the years and come on strongest when the stakes were highest. The best-known recent example was this year’s State of the Union address. In the days before, Fox and the GOP were presenting him as comatose. On the day after, they were saying that he’d shouted too much and must have been on pep pills — what else could have made him come across so forcefully? 

The State of the Union wasn’t the only example. Biden also did very well with his big D-Day address just this month, with his commencement speech at Morehouse before that, and in most other recent performances. His trademark had become “beating the spread,” rallying when it counted most.

That is what I was expecting tonight. The Trump forces must also have been expecting it, given their revival this week of the “pep-pills” line to pre-discount a strong Biden performance. 

So that is why his labored, halting, raspy, fact-clogged, uneasy sounding first set of answers was so startling. Without consciously realizing it, I had gotten used to the idea that in a crunch he could sound younger than he looks. This time he sounded very old. That’s what I meant by the bottom of his range.

—The range for Trump. Everyone knows that Trump rambles and rants and makes things up as he plays to the crowd. And in its sentence-by-sentence content, what he said this evening was as outrageous a slurry of insults, nonsense, narcissism, and lies as any of his standard rally speech. I can type fast, but I literally could not note the lies down as quickly as he uttered them. Daniel Dale and others at CNN tried to keep up in an online tally here. 

But sentence by sentence, the Trump of these opening minutes sounded more polite, less ranting, more concise, and generally more “normal” than the man who spins his stories about sharks or shouts that everything is rigged. That’s what I meant about the high end of his range. In one of the debate chronicles I wrote back in the pre-Trump era, I noted that sometimes you can judge a debate’s effect by watching it with the sound turned off, and just noting the expressions and body language. In tonight’s case, if you listened “with the words turned off” — ignoring content and just listening to tone of voice — you’d hear sounding much more confident and forceful, and, bizarrely, calmer, than Biden did.

—And for CNN. The moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, are both fully capable of very tough follow-up questioning. They did almost zero of that tonight, presumably because of whatever pact CNN had to sign to make the debate happen.

As a result, Trump could reel off one preposterous, defamatory, easily disprovable lie after another—for instance, that Biden is a “Manchurian Candidate” paid by the Chinese government, or Trump’s repeated claim that Democratic governors favored making it legal to kill babies “even after birth”—and Bash or Tapper would respond with, “Thank you. And now to you, President Biden…” 

Even at his best, Biden wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the torrent of lies. No one could: You can get out a lie in one sentence, but it can take three or four to explain the truth. (For instance: Trump’s claim that Biden was going to “wipe out” Social Security and Medicare by putting “millions and millions” of illegal immigrants on the rolls. In fact, immigrants improve the finances of those programs, because they are on average young. But, as you see, it takes more words to lay that out.) 

The net effect: Trump started out the debate lying but sounding controlled; Biden started out fact-clogged and sounding unsteady; and CNN became the sluice for this toxic lie-dense fare.

The lingering question after last night’s debate: Why did the moderators never correct Trump’s egregious lies? Dana Milbank can’t understand it, and neither could I. He concludes that lying won last night.

He writes:

It was a big night for the big lie. And the little lie. And every size lie in between.
The first and probably last meeting between Donald Trump and President Biden wasn’t a debate. It was a 90-minute disinfomercial promoting the former president, who uttered one egregious fabrication after the other, with barely a pause for breath between his inventions. The truth never had a chance.

The debate host, CNN, apparently decreed that its moderators could offer not a word of correction nor check a single fact, so instead they validated each stupendous lie by responding with no more than a mild “thank you.” But the ultimate failure was Biden’s: He looked weak and lost, mouth agape, mumbling and meandering and losing his train of thought.

Even when he had good lines and on-point rebuttals to Trump’s barrage, he delivered them so poorly that their effect was lost.

The truth needed a standard-bearer on that stage in Atlanta on Thursday night. Biden plainly was not up to the job.

Trump was so off-kilter in his claims, even for him, that a worthy opponent would have had an easy time exposing the nonsense and setting the record straight. Instead, the incumbent president was woefully and painfully ineffective. This was disastrous for Biden, and for Democrats — but also for the critically endangered idea that truth still matters.

Not a question was asked without Trump turning the debate into a vehicle for deceit. Of Biden, Trump fabricated:

“He gets paid by China. He’s a Manchurian candidate.”

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

“He allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.”

“He has killed so many people at our border.”
“He’s got the largest deficit in the history of our country.”

Trump lied about former House speaker Nancy Pelosi: “She said, ‘I take full responsibility for Jan. 6.’”

He lied about Democrats, saying they “will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.”

He lied about his former chief of staff’s statement that he called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” Trump said Biden “made that up,” too.

He lied that immigrants who are in the country illegally are receiving Social Security and being housed in “luxury hotels.”

And he lied extravagantly about his own record. The economy was “perfect” when he left office, he’s the one who reduced insulin prices, he deserves credit for “getting us out of that covid mess,” the government was “ready to start paying down debt” during his presidency, he had “the best environmental numbers ever,” and there was “no terror at all during my administration.”

These were all obvious howlers — yet none of it was corrected by the moderators and little by the struggling president. Capping the performance, Trump had the chutzpah somewhere in this litany of lies to say of his opponent: “I’ve never seen anybody lie like this guy.”

The few things the former president said that weren’t outright lies were arguably even worse. Trump absolved himself of any responsibility for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, claiming that “we were respected all over the world” on that day. He wouldn’t commit to accepting the election results this time, either. He called Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky a “salesman” and said that “we shouldn’t be spending” money to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia.

The statements were so outrageous, the zany claims so easily refuted, that Biden should have made quick work of Trump. Instead, he looked stunned, he spoke in a faltering and raspy voice (his campaign explained belatedly that he had a cold), and he had difficulty forming coherent answers. He spoke, for example, about “what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, with the covid. Excuse me, with, um, dealing with everything we have to do with, uh — look, if — we finally beat Medicare.”

Biden explained the Roe v. Wade trimester provisions by saying: “First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. A third time is between the doctor — I mean, between the woman and the state.” On Ukraine, he ventured: “We found ourselves in a situation where, if you take a look at what Trump did in Ukraine, he’s — this guy told Ukraine — told Trump, do whatever you want and do whatever you want.”

Attempting to discuss the border, Biden said he would “continue to move until we get the total ban on the — the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.”

Asked to respond, Trump said: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
It was devastating.

Biden recovered slightly from the unmitigated disaster of the debate’s early minutes, though the rest was only a slightly mitigated disaster. He protested the lies. (“I’ve never heard so much malarkey.”) He delivered a few barbs. (“You’re the sucker. You’re the loser,” and “You have the morals of an alley cat.”) Late in the night, he offered a strong rejoinder to Trump’s constant refrain that the United States is a “failing country.” Said Biden: “I never heard a president talk like this before. We’re the envy of the world. … We’re the strongest country in the world.” But seconds later, he allowed himself to be drawn into ludicrous bickering with Trump about his golf game. “I got my handicap, which, when I was vice president, down to a six,” the president said.

If the country is “failing,” it’s because it is experiencing a relentless, disciplined and coordinated attack on everything that is true — and because the one person the reality-based community was counting on to save us has just shown himself to be unequal to the task.