Donald Trump and Joe Biden come into Thursday’s presidential debate as incredibly well-known quantities defined by shared unpopularity and competing weaknesses. But their most important liabilities — for the incumbent, his decrepitude and his record on inflation; for the challenger, an unfitness distilled and confirmed by the events of Jan.
People gather in Lititz, Pa., to watch the first debate between then-President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden on Sept. 29, 2020. 6 — feel too well known to be worth discussing further until we see what happens on the stage.
But before the two men meet with those or other destinies, it’s worth giving some space to their crucial secondary weaknesses, the places where each candidate’s support might be undermined among those “double-hater” voters who regard each candidate’s primary liabilities as canceling the other’s out. The Biden administration would obviously deny responsibility for these deteriorations, and argue that Biden has managed a set of extremely difficult situations better than a dictator-sympathizing Trump would have done. And as a defender of the Afghanistan withdrawal despite its disastrous implementation, and a partial defender of our attempted balancing of risks and evils in Ukraine, I have some sympathy for the White House’s self-justifications.
Trump’s crucial secondary weakness, meanwhile, isn’t a matter of his record but his promises: specifically, his commitment to a sweeping 10% tariff on imported goods as the big-ticket economic policy of his potential second term. That throws the immediate costs of a 10% tariff, which might fall heavily on an inflation-weary middle class, into particularly stark relief. Some of those costs could be potentially offset, especially if the more serious supporters of a tariff policy were designing it. But that’s a complicated argument to make, and complicated policy arguments are not a Trumpian forte.
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