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.
Question: What would you do to make childcare more affordable?
TRUMP: Just to go back. The general got fired because he was no good. And if he said that, that’s why he made it up. But we have 19 people that said I didn’t say it, and they’re very highly respected, much more so than him.
The other thing is, he doesn’t fire people. He never fired people. I’ve never seen him fire anybody. I did fire a lot. I fired Comey because he was no good. I fired a lot of the top people at the FBI, drained the swamp. They were no good. Not easy to fire people. You’d pay a price for it, but they were no good. I inherited these people. I didn’t put him there. I didn’t put Comey there. He was no good. I fired him.
This guy hasn’t fired anybody. He never fires. He should have fired every military man that was involved with that Afghan – the Afghanistan horror show. The most embarrassing moment in the history of our country. He didn’t fire?
Did you fire anybody? Did you fire anybody that’s on the border, that’s allowed us to have the worst border in the history of the world? Did anybody get fired for allowing 18 million people, many from prisons, many from mental institutions? Did you fire anybody that allowed our country to be destroyed? Joe, our country is being destroyed as you and I sit up here and waste a lot of time on this debate. This shouldn’t be a debate.
His rebuttal claim about calling soldiers losers and suckers is a repeat argument that’s been covered elsewhere.
Trump’s claim about firing people is totally off topic. He’s made his rebuttal point about John Kelly, but, as often happens with Trump, the statement leads him away on another tangent.
Incredulity fallacy
Assumption fallacy: Firing people is good, not firing them bad.
Debatable claim: I drained the swamp. By other standards, he made the swamp deeper with cronyism and corruption.
He is the worst president. He just said it about me because I said it. But look, he’s the worst president in the history of our country. He’s destroyed our country. Now, all of a sudden, he’s trying to get a little tough on the border. He come out – came out with a nothing deal, and it reduced it a little bit. A little bit, like this much. It’s insignificant.
He wants open borders. He wants our country to either be destroyed or he wants to pick up those people as voters. And I don’t think – we just can’t let it happen. If he wins this election, our country doesn’t have a chance. Not even a chance of coming out of this rut. We probably won’t have a country left anymore. That’s how bad it is. He is the worst in history by far.
Hyperbole
Multiple repeat claims which would be fine if they had anything to do with the issue. But they’re all off topic
Those claims are still lies
TAPPER: …President Trump, the question was about what would you do to make child care more affordable? If you want to take your minute.
TRUMP: Just you understand, we have polling. We have other things that do – they rate him the worst because what he’s done is so bad. And they rate me – yes, I’ll show you. I will show you. And they rate me one of the best. OK.
Ad hominem.
Repeated claim.
Lie. He rated near last in a survey of Presidential scholars when he left office and last in 2024
And if I’m given another four years, I will be the best. I think I’ll be the best. Nobody’s ever created an economy like us. Nobody ever cut taxes like us. He’s the only one I know. He wants to raise your taxes by four times. He wants to raise everybody’s taxes by four times. He wants the Trump tax cuts to expire so everybody, including the two of you are going to pay four to five times. Nobody ever heard of this before.
All my life I’d grow up and I’d see politicians talking about cutting taxes. When we cut taxes, as I said, we did more business. Apple and all these companies, they were bringing money back into our country. The worst president in history by far, and everybody knows it.
Repeated claim
Non-responsive
Nobody ever heard of this before: argument from ignorance.
This is a misleading in every way. Biden isn’t proposing across the board tax increases. He is proposing
corporate fuel taxes,
taxes on capitol gains,
corporate income taxes, and
taxes on the top one percent of income earners.
Even the corporate income (21 to 28 percent) and minimum income (15 to 21) increases are far less than Trump’s claims of a 400 percent increase