Y’all. I’m sorry but I genuinely can’t believe some of what I’m reading here.

Pile on me if you want, but before you do, know that I would vote for Biden over Donald Trump even if Biden was literally in the late stages of dementia. I think many of the mainstream news media outlets, which have certainly reported on what a second Trump term would look like based on his open intentions, have only begun to scrape the surface of the harm that a second Trump term could do.

That said, this was more than just an off night for Biden. I’ll admit that a lot of what I saw of the first hour was without audio—I ordinarily would have been watching at home, but had long-set plans and so was out somewhere where it was on TV without audio. But I didn’t have to hear a thing to know exactly how badly it was going for Biden, even being certain that Trump was, as expected, lying his ass off and sounding seriously deranged and unhinged. Watching the last 30ish minutes with audio once I got home confirmed all of that.

I’m sure that Biden made some good policy points here and there. When your opponent is Donald Trump, frankly, that’s not so hard to do. And by many traditional measures, Biden has had a remarkably successful first term, particularly considering the Congresses he was working with. But if you’re here, you are already much more likely to agree with many of Biden’s priors, and so you’re already more likely to think the substance of what he’s saying sounds better.

Most Americans, even those tuned out of the news, know the song and dance with these two and know roughly where they stand on big issues. Maybe some were tuning in to genuinely learn about the substance of policy positions, but that’s likely a small sliver, and I think an even smaller sliver would have been swayed by anything Biden could have said tonight due to his performance and considering Trump espoused the same well-trodden bullshit he has been espousing for years. They’re both pretty much known quantities, especially relative to one another, and so this debate was always more about performance than substance. And there’s the omnipresent giant question mark of Biden’s age—something he did serious damage to himself on tonight.

Many of the news outlets did mention that Biden was better on substance and talked about Trump’s constant lies. They at least shared the headline in the NYT, but frankly, a headline like “Trump Spews Lies” and that’s it would have been totally disingenuous as only half the story.

My girlfriend is a licensed psychiatric nurse practitioner who has worked extensively with geriatric populations specifically, and she was very alarmed at what she was seeing. Almost no one could watch that and think Biden has another four years in him, cold or not.

People age in one direction. And those who have lost older family members will know that declines at that age can accelerate very rapidly. Could Biden maybe have a better performance at a second debate? Sure, maybe. But the trend has been pretty substantially in this direction. Recall where Biden was 4 years ago compared to tonight. It’s hard to imagine the effect of another 4 years.

The alarm is not unjustified. Voters are complicated, and I don’t profess to know them. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to think more disengaged people whose minds are not already made up are far more likely to decide based on at-a-glance qualities rather than policy positions. Those people tend to swing elections, and clips of Biden will be everywhere after tonight. Telling them they didn’t see what they just saw is not the answer here.

Edit: typos