Author’s note: This is the analysis of one round of the 2024 Presidential debate between Biden and Trump. It is linked from a more comprehensive article.
I won’t dig as deep into this as it is a closing statement and not a response to specific issues. But I do have some notes, especially since, rather than closing, he tried to sneak several new claims in.
Like so many politicians, this man is just a complainer. He said we want to do this. We want to do that. We want to get rid of this tax, that tax, but he doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t do.
This from the man who complains about everything, from fake news to the Justice Department’s vendetta against him
All he does is make our country unsafe by allowing millions and millions of people to pour in. Our military doesn’t respect him. We look like fools in Afghanistan.
We didn’t stop – Israel, it was such a horrible thing that would have never happened. It should have never happened.
Iran was broke. Anybody that did business with Iran, including China, they couldn’t do business with the United States. They all passed.
Iran was broke. They had no money for Hamas or Hezbollah, for terror, no money whatsoever.
Again, Ukraine should have never happened.
This is another series of tangental leaps, from immigration to military respect to Afghanistan. You can explains the leaps psychologically, but it’s not a logically coherent thread
He never returns to the question of immigration even though it’s the primary issue of his campaign. In fact, he drops immigration completely in his closing statements.
He talks about all this stuff, but he didn’t do it. For three-and-a-half years, we’re living in hell. We have the Palestinians and we have everybody else rioting all over the place.
You talk about Charlottesville. This is 100 times Charlottesville, 1,000 times.
Another series of cognitive leaps about “stuff,” from Israel (before he brought up Ukraine and then dropped it) to Palestinians (and everybody) else rioting to Charlottesville.
He’s equivocating protests on campuses with riots where lives were endangered and property was destroyed. Those occurred during his term/
As to Charlottesville being 1000 times worse, nobody has been run down by a car by campus protestors, and they aren’t carrying rifles and other weapons with them.
The whole country is exploding because of you, because they don’t respect you. And they have to respect their president and they don’t respect you throughout the world.
From a psychological point of view, this closing is revealing. Respect seems very important to Trump, and he continues to insist he’s more respected than Biden despite evidence to the contrary.
What we did was incredible. We re – rebuilt the military. We got the largest tax cut in history, the largest regulation cut in history.
The reason he’s got jobs is because I cut the regulations that gave jobs, but he’s putting a lot of those regulations back on.
At no point in the debate has he ever discussed which Biden regulations are so damaging.
All of the things that we’ve done, nobody’s ever – never seen anything like – even from a medical standpoint. Right to Try, where we can try Space Age materials instead of going to Asia or going to Europe and trying to get when you’re terminally ill.
Now, you can go and you can get something. You sign a document. They’ve been trying to get it for 42 years.
This is a totally incoherent statement. This is a mishmash of claims related to the 2018 Right to Try Act somehow garbling
the use of space age materials
the fact that Americans go abroad for treatments not yet approved in the US
documents
an unspecified “they” have been trying get an unspecified “it” for years
Once you unpack the comment, and research it, and lay it out in coherent sentences it makes sense. But it feels like Trump is grasping to make a claim about health care he doesn’t fully understand.
He has not mentioned Right to Try in the debate. Biden has no real chance to address the issue even if he understands what Trump said.
But you know what we did for the military was incredible. Choice for our soldiers, where our soldiers, instead of waiting for three months to see a doctor, can go out and get themselves fixed up and readied up, and take care of themselves and they’re living. And that’s why I had the highest approval rating of the history of the V.A.
He’s confusing the military with veterans. The “choice” legislation targeted the Veterans Administration, not the Department of Defense.
Once again, he’s introducing new claims into his summation when they can’t be rebutted.
He leaves out the fact that the courts struck down key provisions of his legislation.
This is an ironic claim given the fact that members of his own party held up military promotions because they didn’t think women in the military should have the choice to leave the state for legal abortions.
So, all of these things – we’re in a failing nation, but it’s not going to be failing anymore. We’re going to make it great again.