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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Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.