Donald Trump immediately brought up Thursday’s debate during a meeting in Virginia on Friday.
“Hello, Virginia,” he opened to a crowd in Chesapeake. “Did anyone see something called the debate last night?”
Related: Biden delivers powerful first speech after presidential debate with Trump
The former president said he had scored a “great victory” over it Joe Biden in a debate that showed from the start the Democratic president’s failure to make coherent points. Biden spent a week at Camp David preparing for the debate and got the rules, date and moderators he wanted, Trump said, but it didn’t help.
“He studied so hard he didn’t know what the hell he was doing,” Trump said. “No amount of rest or manipulation could help him defend his appalling record.”
Trump lied profusely during the debate and dodged questions about his role in the January 6 insurrection and political violence. But he visually outshone Biden, throwing insults and pivoting to talk about what he wanted, with light moderation by CNN.
Biden’s performance prompted Democrats to publicly ponder whether he could be replaced as the Democratic nominee at such a late date. Some Biden defenders — and Biden himself — have since sought to reassure that the debate was just one poor performance and not indicative of his ability to lead or representative of his policy track records.
While Democrats did their best, Republicans basked in the Biden flop but worried about whether and how another Democrat could take his place. Trump’s campaign ran an ad to that effect, showing Biden stumbling up the stairs and struggling to put on a jacket.
“Will he last four years?” the ad pondered. “And you know who’s coming behind him. Vote for Joe Biden today and get Kamala Harris tomorrow.”
Trump posted clips of his golf game, and Biden’s, on Truth Social, a rebuttal to Biden’s claims that he had a low golf handicap. And he shared some clips from the debate, both ones where he made his key points and ones where Biden stumbled. “WOW – WHAT IS HE SAYING?!” Trump wrote of Biden’s biggest blunder, inexplicably saying, “We finally defeated Medicare.”
Biden’s performance, some said, was a sign of his advancing age and how it was affecting his mental acuity. But Trump said age wasn’t the deciding factor here — perhaps because Trump, at 78, is only three years younger than Biden.
And at the Virginia rally, he tried to attack Biden for making the country a “banana republic” instead of his age. He said the president’s biggest problem was not his “personal decline” but what his administration has done, citing immigration and climate crisis policies.
“He has no problem except his competence,” Trump told the crowd in Virginia. Trump said he knows people much older who are doing much better than Biden.
Despite speculation that other prominent Democrats — such as Harris or California Governor Gavin Newsom — could be installed on the ticket in place of Biden, Trump said he did not believe that would happen. Biden is doing better in the polls than these other Democrats, he claimed. “I have no idea what’s going to happen,” he said.
The debate was an “important moment for people of common sense,” Trump claimed.
He said people should not be asking whether Biden can survive a 90-minute debate, but “whether America can survive four more years of crooked Joe Biden in the White House. In fact, I don’t know if we can survive five more months.”
