Talk about an own goal. Joe Biden and his advisers wanted an early debate with Donald J. Trump that was supposed to upend the campaign. It did. Biden scored the unusual achievement of delivering the worst debate performance in modern American history.

Instead of Biden taking the fight to Trump, Trump took the fight to Biden. Biden didn’t suppress doubts about his ability to serve a second term. He raised them anew. It would take an amalgam of Tokyo Rose, Lord Haw-Haw, and Baghdad Bob to contrive an argument that Biden somehow delivered anything remotely resembling a successful performance on Thursday evening.

It is now clear that Biden should never have run again but adhered to his original pledge to be a transitional president. For all the focus on Trump’s vanity, it seems obvious that Biden also suffers from a form of the same affliction. Robert Kagan has argued that Americans are sleepwalking into tyranny. Last night, Biden looked like the biggest sleepwalker of all. The most pressing question for Democrats will be whether he can be persuaded to forego his run for a second term--or miraculously reboot his campaign.

Biden was cowering, unable to go on the offense, let alone defend himself. He mumbled, stumbled, and crumbled. His voice was raspy, barely rising above a whisper for much of the time. As he gazed vacantly into the distance with an open mouth, Biden made the wax figurines at Madame Tussauds look animated by comparison. So much for the malarkey about Biden being pumped up on drugs or quaffing Mountain Dew or whatever conspiracy du jour was circulating on the political right before the debate.

Had Biden framed the debate in his opening statement by pointing to the serial disasters of the first Trump presidency and painted a portrait of why a second term would be even worse in both domestic and foreign policy, he could have put Trump on the defensive. He was running against a candidate who had announced that he wanted to be a dictator on his first day in office. Instead of pillorying Trump, he lurched into a meandering statement whose import was almost impossible to decipher. “We finally beat Medicare,” Biden said at one point. With that, the debate became a referendum on Biden, not Trump.

Perhaps Biden’s team deserves some of the blame. Did they stuff him full of facts? Was he trying to be the A+ student, impressing the teacher with his grasp of minutiae? Biden has never been a good student and his native folksiness was almost nowhere in evidence. The union hall Democrat went AWOL, replaced by a rambling policy wonk.

When Biden did throw the facts and figures overboard, it was to try and pummel Trump over his golf fame or his low morals. But even here it backfired as Trump sententiously stated, “Let’s not act like children.” When you’re being dressed down by Trump for childishness, you’ve got a real problem.

“It’s hard to debate a liar,” Biden said after the debate. No doubt. But Biden’s remit was to show that Trump was constantly lying last night and contrast it with his own record. CNN notes that Trump made 30 false claims at the debate. He lied about abortion. He lied about Ukraine. He lied about the budget and trade deficits. He lied about Biden referring to Black people as “super predators.” He lied about Nancy Pelosi, the National Guard, and January 6. And so on. Biden knew that Trump lies as easily as other people take a sip of water. But he was woefully unprepared, or simply unable, to counter Trump’s unceasing stream of taradiddles.

The Democratic establishment will spend the next several days pondering whether Biden can be successfully replaced by vice-president Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, or Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Releasing the delegates at the Democratic convention would probably lead to chaos in Chicago. Harris remains the only one with national name recognition, and she gamely tried to defend Biden after the debate. However, Biden stepping down would already constitute a huge victory for Trump, and the only person who could probably persuade Biden to exit is First Lady Jill Biden. At this point, Biden seems likely to double down rather than concede that he should exit the political stage after decades of national service.

The only hope Democrats have at this point is that Trump has peaked too early. But last night, he delivered a roundhouse to Joe Biden that will be difficult for him to recover from. Trump solidified his own standing in his party, while Biden accomplished the reverse.

About the Author

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.