Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
I've changed my mind: This week's presidential debate matters.
Before I continue, a quick recap: Last month, I expressed my long-standing view that presidential debates aren't very meaningful and are very stupid. They are pseudo-events, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin's term for manufactured media spectacles that feel significant because we imbue them with significance.
My opinion on this as a historical matter is unchanged. Even debate lovers concede that John F. Kennedy won the first presidential debate in 1960 because he was telegenic and Richard Nixon looked like he woke up in a motel room after a bender. In other words, the debates have always been about style over substance.
And even the style hasn't mattered much. Researchers have found that debates have virtually no detectable electoral impact.
So why have I changed my mind about this debate? For starters, because in a "vibes" election, a vibes debate could matter.
We've all heard that many voters -- around 20 percent -- are so-called double-haters, people who really don't want to vote for Trump or Biden. Perhaps more important, as recently as a few months ago, an even larger share of voters didn't believe they would really face a choice between Trump and Biden. Only 33 percent of those surveyed by Economist/YouGov pollsters in March said a Trump-Biden rematch would "definitely" happen.
That's one reason the Biden camp wanted a debate in June, the earliest such meeting in history by three months. They need to get their "gettable" voters to stop wallowing in the crapulence of denial, accept that this is the choice and come home. That alone makes this debate different.
Normally, debates serve one or two functions. Sometimes, they are last-ditch efforts to persuade voters to make their choice. In other cases, they are post-Labor Day attempts to introduce or reintroduce candidates to voters who haven't been paying attention.
But this debate is first and foremost an effort to get voters to understand what their choice is. These candidates -- an incumbent president who's been in politics for half a century and a former president and reality-show celebrity -- do not need to be reintroduced to voters, though voters do need to be reassured about them.
That's why a debate, with its tendency to amplify style over substance, could matter more this time. Big debate moments occasionally arise from well-placed one-liners, but more often they involve unintentional factors such as gaffes, body language and even sighs. The takeaway from presidential debates tends not to be a policy position or plan but rather a comfort level with the idea of a person being in our faces for four more years.
That's a fairly stupid standard for choosing a president. But these are stupid times. And when the single biggest challenge for the candidates is to sway voters who have deep misgivings about their mental acuity and character, comfort level might be all that matters.
That's why the stakes for Biden are higher going into this debate. Yes, it was foolish for Trump to set the bar so low for his opponent by suggesting he is a "brain-dead zombie," but I think the traditional punditry about the expectations game is overblown. Regardless of Trump's rhetoric, millions of people -- undecided Democrats, independents and especially those double-haters -- have legitimate and sincere concerns about Biden's mental and physical fitness. I don't think debates are a good test of presidential fitness, but for a lot of voters, this debate could be a decisive test of Biden's mental fitness.
Even progressives such as Van Jones have conceded that if the president really messes up this debate, it will be "game over" for him. I think that's correct. Fair or not, if Biden has a major malfunction, it will be an irreparable confirmation of voter concerns about his age. I would expect the whispers about replacing him on the ticket to become shouts almost overnight.
But if Biden clears that very low hurdle, the stakes suddenly become higher for Trump. Most voters do not like the former president and pretty much never have. If he leans into the traits that turn them off -- if he follows that age-old advice, "Be yourself" -- and Biden is even modestly reassuring, the double-haters and other undecideds could easily break for the president. Not all of them, sure, but Biden doesn't need all of them.
To put it in boxing terms, if it's a knockout, Biden will likely be the loser. If it's a split decision, the odds are good that it will split in Biden's favor.
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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.