Presidential debates don't matter. They are obsolete, game-show era media invented in their current format for TV, which isn't really a thing anymore.
Attachment to them is cultural in the US. European countries like France and the UK have only recently started copying them, ironically just as the world is about to move on.
There were other ways of doing this before. In the US, in the Lincoln era, debates were face to face with no moderator (game shows hadn't been invented). In the UK they were out in the streets on soap boxes.
And there are new ways of doing things. There's no debate at all in China, obviously, so it's more like an Apple style keynote. And in the West, 'debate' has moved online. Trump has more followers than the most watched presidential debate in history had viewers.
Anyone shocked by a debate last night that didn't follow the rules and etiquette of the 1950s is not living in the Internet age. The TV age is over, and we have dangerous populists talking straight at the people through social media.
Unless the Democrats and their supporters realize this, the US is in danger. The world has moved on from an era where telling the president to shut up on air is shocking, while the web is talking about a video of him being urinated on by sex workers.
Trump is able to dog whistle over the head of the debate moderator, directly at the militias. And so while Biden's cool might have objectively won the day a decade ago, today it's irrelevant. That calm and coolness needs to be communicated online...
But, sadly, Biden has 70 million less followers here.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.