US debate trainwreck: Trump could be in real trouble now

President Joe Biden’s performance in Thursday’s night showdown with Donald Trump was the worst in presidential debate history.

Biden looked slow, stilted, and a bit bewildered as he made his way out to the podium at the event’s outset. It only got worse from there.

His verbal stumbles, visible confusion, and raspy, wavering voice finally forced the entire country to confront a self-evident truth: Joe Biden is no longer fit for the presidency, much less to run a viable campaign and then serve four more years in the world’s most taxing position.

Team Trump, meanwhile, is overjoyed – and for good reason. A snap poll conducted by CNN found that by a 34-point margin (67-33) viewers believe Trump prevailed over Biden at the debate. What’s more is that his victory comes on heels of a series of polls showing that he boasts leads nationally and in all of the battleground states that will actually decide the election this November. There is no longer any argument to be had: Trump is the prohibitive favorite to retake the White House.

Still, there is one way that Thursday night’s events could backfire on the former president.

After months of defending Biden from charges of senility and smearing those who suggested otherwise, Democrats and their allied media institutions turned on their heels. “There is a deep, wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party,” reported CNN’s John King moments after the debate ended, before noting that party elites were discussing whether to plead with Biden to drop out or put public pressure on him to do so.

“Is that how he is every day?” King’s concerned colleague Anderson Cooper asked Vice President Kamala Harris in a post-debate interview.

The collective panic attack has carried on into Friday. A murderer’s row of reflexive Democratic partisans at The New York Times opinion page is calling on Biden to bow out. Even MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a stalwart Biden cheerleader – and reportedly the host of the president’s favorite show – delivered some tough love in a monologue.

“I fear Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, unless things change,” mused a sorrowful Scarborough. “Last night, he [Biden] simply was not on the biggest debate stage ever.”

There is no easy mechanism for forcing Biden out. The president has the delegates necessary to lay claim to the Democratic nomination and must willingly relinquish them if he’s going to be replaced at the top of the ticket.

But if the pressure campaign that began before Biden even walked off the stage on Thursday succeeds, his dismal performance may ultimately prove decisive in defeating Trump.

In a vacuum, Donald Trump remains deeply unpopular, and his apparent whip hand only exists in comparison to Biden’s weak one. The president  is beset by a unique and devastating litany of vulnerabilities that don’t apply to other Democrats.

While Trump has opened up leads in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin, the Democratic candidates for Senate in all of those states are still running ahead of their Republican rivals. This is demonstrative of the fact that while voters are fed up with Biden and unconvinced of his ability to do the job, there is no red wave on the horizon.

Democrats have options, too. Vice President Harris and California Governor Gavin Newsom are the most obvious choices if Biden reconsiders his candidacy, but they aren’t necessarily the best ones. Harris’s approval rating is already underwater and Newsom has a far-left record that could help Republicans plausibly paint him as a radical who might take the abhorred Biden agenda to new depths.

If winning was the only consideration, Democrats would turn now to a red or purple state executive like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Colorado’s Jared Polis, or Kentucky’s Andy Beshear. Not only have all three demonstrated an ability to win tough races, they’re not inextricably tied to Biden and his record in the way that Harris and Newsom are. That said, even Harris or Newsom would present a much more daunting challenge than Biden currently does.

For the duration of his political career, Trump has benefitted from facing off against a stable of subpar general election opponents. Biden’s flop on Thursday raises, for the first time ever, the possibility that he may need to overcome a competent adversary.