Opinion | A Debate Before the Trump-Biden Debate

Gail Collins: Not to be obvious or anything, Bret, but do you have any predictions about the big debate tonight?

Bret Stephens: No predictions, just the wish that both candidates deliver roughly the same performances they put in four years ago: a coherent Joe Biden and an unhinged Donald Trump. My fears are that Trump will rein it in and avoid being goaded into flatly denying the results of the 2020 election — and that Biden will lose it with some obvious memory lapse, slurred sentence or troubling blank stare.

But here’s my question for you: If Biden’s performance is disastrous, will you join me in calling for Democrats to find a new nominee?

Gail: It’d have to be pretty super disastrous, Bret. Sure, if the president suddenly goes blank and stares at the screen in silence or forgets where he’s speaking and starts commending the Democratic congressional candidate from Delaware.

Bret: Or if he says some of the sorts of things he’s said in the past. Such as, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”

Gail: But if Biden delivers boring answers that don’t put Trump in the corner he deserves, I’ll be depressed. There’s no way the Democrats are going to refuse to renominate an incumbent president who has been performing his job very well on all fronts.

I suspect you disagree ….

Bret: My first, second and umpteenth goal is to defeat Trump. Is there any question that if, say, Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, were going into that debate in place of Biden, he’d wipe the floor with the former president — while all but guaranteeing a Democratic victory in the must-win Keystone State?

Gail: Look, there’s almost always a better scenario than the real one. But we live in a political moment when not-disaster is the most reasonable goal.

Bret: So I guess I’ll just cross my fingers. And hope that Biden delivers three simple messages: You can’t entrust your democracy to a man who won’t accept the result of an election. You can’t entrust your freedom to a president who appoints justices who deny your right to choose. And you can’t entrust your security to someone who would happily feed Ukraine to the wolves of the Kremlin.

And speaking of freedom, any thoughts about the Ten Commandments in Louisiana schools?

Gail: All negative. I don’t have anything against the Ten Commandments, even though in a perfect world a little rewording would be nice. But there are a lot of kids going to public schools whose culture doesn’t include the story of Moses on Mount Sinai, and that’s just the beginning of the problem.

It’s very easy to imagine individual teachers using the Ten Commandments on the wall to teach the dogma they believe. Like certain politicians in Louisiana.

You?

Bret: I’ve sometimes wondered what Commandments XI through XX might have looked like if Moses hadn’t run out of tablets. “Thou Shalt Not Enslave” and “Thou Shalt Not Rape” would be high on my list. Also, “Thou Shalt Not Shove Your Religion Down the Throats of People Who Don’t Want Your Religion.”

Gail: Love your additions.

Bret: If people want to send their kids to parochial schools, they’re welcome to do that. I don’t even object to using tax dollars to fund school vouchers for them. But the Louisiana ploy isn’t just an affront to the separation of church and state. It’s an effort to set off another cultural war, which would only become worse if Trump gets elected.

Gail, the other topic on people’s minds this week is the Trump veepstakes. I can’t imagine you have a favorite, but do you have a … least un-favorite?

Gail: Bret, I’ve gotten my head around Kamala Harris but you can’t possibly expect me to have non-negative feelings about any of the Republican would-be-veeps.

Bret: Not even Elise Stefanik?

Gail: The three likelies seem to be J.D. Vance, the senator from Ohio; Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota; and our old friend Marco Rubio of Florida. From Trump’s perspective, Burgum might be the best bet since he’s both rich and too boring to steal any of the spotlight.

None of them would make a good president, but would any of them make a better president than Trump? That part might not be too hard.

Ceding the discussion to you …

Bret: All of them would be better presidents than Trump. And that isn’t meant as a compliment.

I struggle to understand why Burgum is on the short list. He delivered semi-incoherent debate performances when he was still running in the primaries, is the governor of an unimportant state, and signed a near-total ban on abortions in North Dakota — something that won’t help Trump win over undecided women in the Philadelphia suburbs where the election may well be decided.

Gail: Well, dragging down the ticket certainly works for me. But go on.

Bret: J.D. Vance scares me: He’s made himself into one of the more committed isolationists in the G.O.P. caucus. I remember being on CNN with him just before the 2016 election, where we both agreed that we wanted Trump to lose by the largest possible margin. To have shifted from that to the full-on MAGA guy he is today shows he has no principles, just raw ambitions.

Which leaves Rubio — or “Little Marco,” as Trump used to call him. In his heart, he’s a relatively sane Republican with reformist instincts. And he’d help deliver a lot of Hispanic votes to the G.O.P. Which probably makes him Trump’s best pick, assuming there is a way around the constitutional problem caused by having a presidential and a vice-presidential candidate from the same state.

Gail: If Trump recreates himself as a New York citizen, there’s gotta be something the rest of us can do to torture him.

Bret: Unlimited McDonald’s gift certificates?

Gail: But back to the debate — hoping the moderators will ask the candidates to say something nice about each other. What do you think they’d come up with?

Bret: Uhhhhhhhh …. How about, “Joe, I’m touched by your loyalty to that grifting wastrel you call a son,” to be immediately followed by, “Donald, Jill and I truly admire you for having the honesty to admit your sexual attraction to your daughter”?

But seriously, what would you like to hear the candidates asked?

Gail: Well, it’s only fair that Biden be asked the age question. We’ve never had an 82-year-old being sworn in on Inauguration Day. There are plenty of talented Democratic presidential prospects. No reason to be pushing the line so far.

Of course, Biden can point out that Trump would be the oldest inauguree, too. And while Trump conveys a much more energetic 78, you could argue that the only thing worse than a president with an overage brain is a president with an overage brain and limitless juice to push his awful ideas forward.

Bret: Hehe. The questions I’d push Trump on are all about denying the results of an election and his responsibility for Jan. 6.

I’d also like to see the moderators go over a list of things Trump has said about the people who served in his cabinet — “dumb as a rock” (Rex Tillerson); “Coco Chow” (Elaine Chao); “mentally retarded” (Jeff Sessions); “delusional” (Mike Pence) — and ask him why he has such terrible judgment in people.

Anything else?

Gail: Well, there are about nine million things to ask Trump. Does he expect us to think his lines about being elected dictator are just … jokes? What about his promise that if another politician was “doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them.”

Meanwhile, most of the Biden questions are issue-y stuff, like how he thinks his student loan forgiveness program worked — I know you and I differ on that.

Bret: A tad.

Gail: Bret, there haven’t been many memorable presidential debates. The first one I ever watched was one of the few: Kennedy versus Nixon. My father was a rabid Republican so we were juiced up to root for Richard Nixon. But when I actually watched the two of them on camera, the depressing, jowly, kind of glowery look Nixon had was such a huge contrast with John F. Kennedy’s almost glamour, it was startling.

Think that one made a difference. But now that people see the main presidential candidates online every single day and night, it’s hard to imagine that kind of surprise.

Bret: The race has gotten tighter in the last couple of weeks, and Biden has an opportunity to prove he’s more clearheaded and fit than his enemies claim and his friends fear. And Trump has a chance to show that he’s capable of thinking beyond his own Himalayan narcissism. So I think this debate could make or break either of the candidates. We’ll be bringing popcorn and chardonnay to the viewing party.

Gail: Agreed but going for merlot.

Bret: One final thing, Gail. We skipped our regular conversation last weekend, but I wanted to make sure readers had a chance to read our colleague Cornelia Channing’s exceptional Father’s Day reminiscence about her dad, who died too young of dementia when Cornelia was still a teenager. Here’s her description of some of the final times she got to spend with him: “And there were moments when the silliness gave way to something almost sacred, a kind of wordless filial language. It allowed me to reach across the chasm of his illness and grab hold of something tangible and familiar.”

I hope my kids someday remember me as beautifully and meaningfully as Cornelia recalls her father. May his memory be for a blessing.