‘Will You Just Shut Up, Man?’

Susan Glasser: “What does the worst debate in American history look like? It looks like the debate that took place on Tuesday night between President Donald Trump and former Vice-President Joe Biden. It was a joke, a mess, a disaster. A ‘shit show,’ a ‘dumpster fire,’ a national humiliation. No matter how bad you thought the debate would be, it was worse. Way worse. Trump shouted, he bullied, he hectored, he lied, and he interrupted, over and over again.”

“Remarkably enough, it was seemingly on purpose. Losing in the polls, and with the country stricken by a pandemic that has claimed two hundred thousand American lives, the President offered incoherent bluster, inflammatory racism, and personal attacks on his opponent’s son. But mostly what came through was Trump’s refusal to shut up. He talked and talked and talked. He talked over Biden. He talked over the moderator, Fox News’s Chris Wallace. He talked over Biden some more. How bad was it? The line that history is likely to record as among the most memorable was Biden’s lament, at the end of the debate’s very first segment: ‘Will you just shut up, man? This is so unpresidential.'”