Thursday’s debate between President Biden and Donald Trump was novel in at least one way: For the first time in six such debates over the last eight years, Trump finally “won” one according to snap polls and the consensus of reporters. That reaction, of course, had nothing to do with Trump himself, and everything to do with Biden’s halting performance. But to declare Trump a “winner” loses sight of the Trump we saw on that stage.
The former president wasn’t just everything we’ve known him to be; he was worse. It was truly a bravura performance of mendacity and deceit. Reading through the transcript, it becomes clear that there was not a single answer Trump gave that did not include some awful prejudice, a preposterously misleading statement or an outright lie, often more than one.
Many times, Trump’s nonsense became outright laughable.
The day after the debate, at a rally in North Carolina, Biden was far more energetic than at the debate. Trump, on the other hand, will continue to lie about matters large and small, insist he won the 2020 election, and prepare his supporters for another violent burst of rage should he lose this year as well. That makes it even more important to consider what Trump said as much as we consider how Biden appeared.
Start with the racism. Near the middle of the debate, Trump tried to turn a discussion on inflation into one on immigration. “They’re taking black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs,” he claimed. As NAACP president Derrick Johnson told NBC News, “There’s no such thing as a Black job or a white job.” Unsurprisingly, Trump didn’t bother explaining what he thinks a “black job” or a “Hispanic job” is.
That embarrassing segment came not long after Trump used the word “Palestinian” as an insult. “He’s become like a Palestinian,” the former president said of Biden, with evident disgust. “He’s a very bad Palestinian.” (And if there was any doubt about Trump’s intentions, he echoed the language the next day, saying that Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer — who is Jewish — has “become a Palestinian.”)
As for Trump’s lies, most take the form of what we might call hyperbole ad infinitum, in which he says “We’ve never seen anything like it before” or “I had the greatest economy in history” or that something he said was “one of the strongest statements you’ve ever seen.” This kind of falsehood is ridiculous more than sinister, even as it contributes to the idea that honesty is for suckers.
Many times, Trump’s nonsense became outright laughable. Asked about climate change, Trump bragged that when he was president, “We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever.” Indeed, what happened to H2O? Just a memory now.
Asked about the opioid addiction crisis, which was mostly caused by prescription drugs, Trump said, “We got great equipment. We bought the certain dog. That’s the most incredible thing that you’ve ever seen, the way they can spot it. We did a lot. And we had — we were getting very low numbers.” Not to denigrate the efforts of “the certain dog,” but numbers of opioid overdoses were never “very low” under Trump, and by the time he left office they approached 100,000 deaths per year.
Other lies were far less amusing. He claimed that Biden wants to quadruple everyone’s taxes, and that Biden is allowing millions of undocumented immigrants to “come in here from prisons, jails, and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.” Trump makes the latter claim often, and not only is it false, the purpose is to both stoke fear and justify his plans for mass deportation. If you believe him, you might conclude that if families are broken up and innocent people deported as part of what will be perhaps the most gigantic domestic paramilitary project in American history, it’s just a price we ought to pay.
On abortion, Trump’s comments were even more unhinged and detached from reality.
Trump even said Biden is trying to put undocumented immigrants on Social Security, which is of course preposterous. But the fear Trump tries to promote is comprehensive: When immigrants aren’t killing your family, they’re robbing you of your government benefits.
On abortion, Trump’s comments were even more unhinged and detached from reality. “Fifty-one years ago, you had Roe v. Wade, and everybody wanted to get it back to the states, everybody, without exception, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives. Everybody wanted it back,” Trump said. This is a remarkably brazen lie: Clear majorities of Americans disagreed with Roe being overturned. But Trump wasn’t done. “They’re radical because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth,” he said. Abortions after birth is not a thing. By defining Democrats as the radicals on abortion, he sets the stage for the further restrictions Republicans want to make: outlawing the use of abortion medications (which now account for a majority of abortions), punishing doctors, and eventually having the Supreme Court declare fetal “personhood,” making every abortion — or IVF treatment — an act of murder. When the debate moderators finally got around to the topic of January 6, Trump claimed — as he has before — that he offered then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “10,000 soldiers or National Guard, and she turned them down…and now she admits that she turned them down.” This is a fantasy — he never offered troops to Pelosi — and a continued effort to deflect responsibility for the insurrection. And Trump’s promise to pardon rioters is a further signal to supporters that if he loses in November, another spasm of violence in order to overturn the results might be warranted. Finally, there’s the matter Trump lies about more than any other: his loss in the 2020 election. Asked whether he’ll accept the results this year, he said, “If it’s a fair and legal and good election — absolutely. I would have much rather accepted these but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous.” To any reasonable observer, that means “no.” Everyone knows Trump will not accept the results of the election unless he wins. One of the worst things about the debate was that Trump served up one opportunity after another to cut him down to size; had Biden been better able to hit back, viewers would have better understood how Trump was deceiving them. This debate proved yet again that no one is quite sure how to deal with Trump’s blizzard of deception: not the news media, not his opponents, and not the voters. He won’t be shamed into telling the truth, his supporters don’t seem to care, and his lies only grow uglier as time goes on. But even if no one can make him stop, the worst thing would be to pretend it doesn’t matter.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
