Debate and switch? Biden's stumble

This episode scrutinizes the recent presidential debate performances of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, emphasizing Biden's struggles and the political ramifications of his performance.

1. Joe Biden's debate performance raised serious concerns about his mental acuity and suitability for re-election.
2. Donald Trump maintained his usual debate behavior, characterized by falsehoods and deflections.
3. The episode highlighted a potential crisis in the Democratic Party, questioning whether Biden should continue his candidacy.
4. Discussions about the future Democratic nominee unfolded, with various prominent figures considered potential candidates.
5. The debate's impact extends beyond the participants, potentially influencing the strategic direction of the Democratic Party.

1: Opening Remarks

The hosts introduce the episode’s focus on Biden’s troubling debate performance and its implications for his campaign. Jason Palmer: "Last night, the 45th and the 46th presidents of America faced off in a debate to influence the voters who will choose the 47th."

2: The Debate Analysis

Analysis of Biden’s debate performance, noting his difficulties with speech and memory, which starkly contrasted with his previous debates. Idris Kaloon: "Joe Biden probably turned in one of the worst debate performances in modern history."

3: Political Repercussions

Discussion on the potential fallout within the Democratic Party and speculation about other candidates who might step forward. Idris Kaloon: "Democrats wondering whether Biden ought to step aside and make room for another potential candidate."

1. Stay Informed: Follow reliable news sources for accurate updates on political developments.
2. Engage in Political Discussions: Use insights from the episode to engage in informed discussions about political leadership and accountability.
3. Participate in Polls and Surveys: Express your views on leadership suitability through polls to influence party decisions.
4. Support Transparency: Advocate for clarity and openness from political figures regarding their capabilities and policies.
5. Encourage Competent Leadership: Support candidates who demonstrate clarity, coherence, and the ability to lead effectively.

America’s president had one primary task at last night’s debate: to close down speculation about his mental faculties. It went so poorly his whole campaign is now in doubt. Tentative results from a newish instrument give tantalising hints that the leading theory on the universe’s makeup might need reworking entirely (10:20). And bullfighting moves from literal arenas to the political arena (18:40).

People

Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Idris Kaloon

Content Warnings:

None

Janice Torres
Hi, this is Janice Torres from Joquiero di Nero. From a local business to a global corporation, partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bankofamerica.com bankingforbusiness to learn more. What would you like the power to do? Bank of America na Copyright 2024.

Jason Palmer
The Economist hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. And I'm Rosie Blore. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

More than two thirds of the universe is made up of some unknowns, stuff called dark energy. That's what the theory says, anyway. We look at some tentative results from a new telescope that suggests that just maybe, that theory needs a complete overhaul. And though the death of bullfighting has long been foretold, the spectacle survives in Spain. It could be politicians who deliver the sports killing blow.

Rosie Blore
But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that political figures appreciate a bit of bull.

Jason Palmer
First up, though, last night, the 45th and the 46th presidents of America faced off in a debate to influence the voters who will choose the 47th. Donald Trump is now a convicted felon, which, amazingly, may not harm his chances. The charges haunting Joe Biden, on the other hand, have increasingly been about his mental acuity. President Biden, something the special counsel said in his report is that one of the reasons you were not charged is because in his description, you are a well meaning elderly man with a poor memory. I'm well meaning.

Joe Biden
I'm an elderly man and I know what the hell I'm doing. I've been president. I put this country back on his feet. I don't need his recommendation. It's totally out of your memory.

Idris Kaloon
And can you continue its presence? My memory is so bad, I let you speak. That's the, that's, that's what? Your memory has gotten worse, Mister President. My memory is not.

Joe Biden
My memory is fine. Last night's debate, hosted by CNN, was a chance for Mister Biden to end that kind of speculation, to prove he's still in possession of his presidential marbles. If that was the plan, things didn't go to plantain. Joe Biden probably turned in one of the worst debate performances in modern history. Idris Kaloon is the economist's Washington bureau chief.

Idris Kaloon
He was everything that he was not supposed to be. He couldn't complete his sentences. He looked old. This debate was about demonstrating competency and the ability to be in office. And Joe Biden utterly failed.

And I think his candidacy is in serious question now. Okay, let's do something of a post mortem here. Idris, talk me through it. How did the whole thing play out? It was very bad at the start, and it got a bit better, but never really any good.

The very beginning, the president seemed to get confused when he was trying to discuss Covid. Every single, solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with. Look, he trailed off in the middle of a sentence. He said that he planned to beat. Medicare if we finally beat Medicare, which.

Was a quizzical statement that didn't really make any sense, which Donald Trump leapt on. Well, he's right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death and he's destroying Medicare because all of these people are coming in, they're putting them on Medicare, they're putting them on Social Security, they're going to destroy Social Security. That provoked a lot of consternation among Democrats.

That continued throughout the debate. But later on, when he was discussing Roe versus Wade, which ought to have been really a signature issue of his campaign. It's the thing that he's running on, saying that Donald Trump is responsible for the fact that women in America no longer have the right to abortion because of the justices he appointed. It's been a terrible thing what you've done. The fact is that the vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe when it was decided.

Joe Biden
Support it, row. But he struggled to really land the lines that he had spent days rehearsing with his advisors. He had this very bizarre statement where he talked about three trimesters and they didn't really relate to the gestation. They seemed to relate to some kind of arrangement between women. It's very hard to even place what he was trying to think about.

Do you support any legal limits on. How late a woman should be able. To terminate a pregnancy? I supported Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters.

The first time is between the woman and the doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. The third time is between the doctor. I mean, between the woman and the state. The idea that the politicians, that the founders want the politicians to be the ones making decisions about women's health is ridiculous.

Idris Kaloon
We had many moments like that where the president just seemed to not really be able to land rhetorically what he was trying to say. And it's difficult to make Donald Trump look lucid and coherent in comparison. And yet that's exactly what happened. It's all relative, I guess. Okay, what kind of performance did Mister Trump turn in?

Trump was true to form. He was meandering. He said that on January 6, that it was all Nancy Pelosi's fault and that he had nothing to do with it, that he offered to send 10,000 troops to the Capitol to quell the insurrection, which is not true. And Nancy Pelosi, if you just watched the news from two days ago on tape, to her daughter, who's a documentary, they say, but she's saying, oh, no, it's my responsibility. I was responsible for this because I offered her 10,000 soldiers or National Guard, and she turned them down.

He lied repeatedly. The thing about that, though, is that people expect that from Donald Trump. People expect this exaggeration, this lack of coherence, this lack of principle. Even so, Trump wasn't outstanding in any respect. He didn't seem more presidential.

He attempted to be a bit more moderate on abortions, saying that it should be left up to states and whatnot. Now the states control it. That's the vote of the people. Like Ronald Reagan. I believe in the exceptions.

Joe Biden
I am a person that believes, and frankly, I think it's important to believe in the exceptions. Some people, you have to follow your heart. Some people don't believe in that. But I believe in the exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. I think it's very important.

Idris Kaloon
But that quickly dissipated, and we got vintage Trump back. He decided to open up our border, open up our country, to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylum, terrorists. We have the largest number of terrorists coming into our country right now. All terrorists, all over the world, not just in South America, all over the world. They come from the Middle east, everywhere, all over the world.

Joe Biden
They're pouring in. But the big point here was Biden's deterioration relative to, even if you look back to his debates in 2020 against Donald Trump, Joe Biden had an ability to push back forcefully against Donald Trump and to do so with empathy and do so convincingly. And I think that if you just hear the difference between those two debates, that tells you everything. If you're a middle class family, you're getting hurt badly. Right now, you're sitting at the kitchen table this morning deciding, well, we can't get new tires, they're bald because we have to wait another month or so, or are we going to be able to pay the mortgage?

Or who's going to tell her she can't go back to community college? They're the decisions you're making in the middle class families, like I grew up in Scranton and Claymonth, theyre in trouble. We should be talking about your families. But thats the last thing he wants to talk about. He seems a lot more coherent, a lot more able to articulate what his positions are and why hes running for president.

Idris Kaloon
And here he just seemed utterly incapable of doing so and were already saying, just a few hours after this debate, Democrats wondering whether Biden ought to step aside and make room for another potential candidate, which would throw the entire process into complete disarray. That is an astonishing outcome from this debate. I mean, what does that process even look like? There will be a concerted push in the next few days to really try to convince Biden to stand aside. The choice has to be his.

It's very hard to imagine, given the delegates that he's already accrued that are necessary to win the nomination to be the democratic nominee, that he would be forced by any other mechanism. He would have to decide on his own. Someone would have to convince him to do so. The closest parallel would be what happened in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson said that he was not going to seek reelection. But that was in a very different system than the one we have now.

And that was an incredibly, incredibly chaotic year. It could mark an open convention, meaning that the nominee is not known before it starts for Democrats in August. There would be a very, very fast primary, which is very different from the basically years long process that it normally takes now. Okay, that's something of the process. But what about the person, who would we be looking at for the democratic nominee?

There would be a very big contest for that. Obviously, the vice president, Kamala Harris, ran against Biden in 2020. She'd be very interested in being the nominee. But many people are worried that she's too weak to win against Donald Trump herself. And so I think that there would be an attempt to have a contested convention.

You have people like Gavin Newsom, who's the governor of California, who has been seeking national prominence. You have people like the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who seems to be angling for a national bid at some point in the future. And then there's a large democratic bench of people who are thought of as presidential tier, people like the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, people in Biden's cabinet, even like Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary. There are a lot of people who could conceivably step into the role. But deciding which of them would possibly succeed Biden, I think, would be a very messy and chaotic process.

Jason Palmer
And Idris I have no doubt you'll be talking about this in some detail on checks and balance, which is out later today. Yes, I will be speaking with my co hosts Charlotte Howard and Adam O'Neill about the debate to work out what democrats do from here. Well, I genuinely will be tuning in. I've got so many questions for the moment. Let's leave it there.

Idris, thanks. Thank you.

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Jason Palmer
Let me tell you what physicists reckon is the recipe for the universe. 5% is normal, the stuff of me, you the gizmo, youre listening to this on everything you can see in the night sky. 27% is so called dark matter. They dont really know what it is, but it acts like real matter in the sense that it attracts. It has gravity like the normal stuff.

And then 68% is something called dark energy. I know, right? Its like it should be pronounced dark energy anyway. It acts in an opposite way to matter, driving the expansion of things rather than drawing them together. Just a little pause here to emphasize 5%.

Remember that everything youve ever known or thought about is 5% of what the universe is ultimately made of anyway. That is mind stretching enough, if its correct. But theres a new wrinkle thanks to a new telescope, that recipe may have been changing over, say, 14 billion years. For the last three years, the dark energy spectroscopic instrument, also known as DeCE, has been looking up at the universe from an observatory on a mountaintop in Arizona. Emily Steinmark is a science correspondent for the Economist.

Donald Trump
It's been building a 3d map of the universe, the largest ever built, examining light emitted from tens of millions of galaxies, collecting lots of data, including on dark energy. Now, these first results that have come out from the instrument, if they are found to hold up, this is just the first year out of a five year survey and much more data is coming in. But if they are found to hold water, it would completely throw out the current cosmological thinking. And as regard to the current cosmological thinking, first of all, how do we know that dark energy exists? So, as you can tell from the name, it's a very mysterious entity.

We are not exactly sure what it is. We do know what it does. It's a name attached to a thing that has happened in a phenomenon which is the accelerating expansion of the universe. In 1998, a group of astronomers found that supernovas are moving faster away from Earth than they ought to. And their conclusion was that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Now, it wasn't clear to them why this would be happening at all. And so they said, well, something must be doing that. And that something is what we now think of as dark energy. It does it through almost like an opposite force to gravity. So whereas gravity pulls stuff together, dark energy pushes stuff apart.

Jason Palmer
And we dont think we know exactly what it is. No. I mean, we cant detect it directly. But there is a leading hypothesis, which is that it is an energy intrinsic to the emptiness of space, or the vacuum of space. According to quantum theory, the vacuum, or the empty space, isn't actually empty.

Donald Trump
It's full of tiny virtual particles that are popping in and out of existence, creating energy that, if it is, dark energy, is able to push space apart in the way that it would need to do in order to be dark energy and drive the current expansion of the universe. But we know that vacuum energy, as an idea, is kind of flawed. This is to say, it's definitely there, but it comes up against something that has the very dramatic name of the vacuum catastrophe, which is that the amount of energy that these interactions in space should be producing does not align at all with what you can actually get out of observational evidence. It's orders of magnitude different. And, I mean, without making too much of it, it is probably one of the largest unsolved problems in physics.

So it is not a theory without issues. So this new instrument, Desi, has dumped its first data then, and adds what to this discussion? Okay, well, so you have to remember that even though we dont know what dark energy is, physicists have thought for a long time that the density of dark energy, so the amount of energy in each patch of empty space, has been constant since the beginning of the universe almost 14 billion years ago. But the thinking was that as the universe expanded, there became more and more empty space, and so more and more dark energy. But the density was basically constant throughout that.

And so that was the thing that could drive expansion. But so what Dessie's data suggests now is that that density has not been constant and that really changes not just how we think about the evolution of the universe up until now, but going into the future, it changes how we think about the ultimate fate of the universe. So we've moved from what we know about the universe to ultimate fate of the universe. Okay, so what's the fate? What are the fates?

Yeah. Well, if you assume that the density of dark energy is constant and isn't going to change, the view of the ultimate fate of the universe is something like just the galaxies floating further and further apart until they disappear from each other's horizons, and you just basically get this big, cold space called the big freeze. Not very nice. But if you can have a dark energy that's changing in time, which is what these preliminary results from dese suggest, then other scenarios that are arguably worse come into play. So the first one is in the situation where the density of dark energy is increasing, which would mean that ever denser dark energy pushing things apart would eventually cause atoms and even spacetime itself to rip apart, which is called the big rip, aptly.

On the other hand, you might also have a decreasing density of dark energy, which would mean that matter and gravity eventually would take over again, as in the beginning of the universe, and you would have a kind of a collapse back towards a sort of reverse big bang, which is known as the big crunch. Neither of these things sound particularly pleasant. Humans don't have to worry too much, though, because I'm afraid the sun probably is going to swallow up the earth way before that happens. We at least can rest easy or. Humans will destroy themselves before the sun has a chance.

But there is that. Yeah. I guess the question then is, in the much, much, much nearer term, what this means for cosmology itself, what the possibility of a fluctuating dark energy density means for the people who are trying to figure all this stuff out. Yeah. So not only are the decid results very strange, in that it actually suggests the density of dark energy that first increased and then about 4 billion years ago, began decreasing.

So really being able to go in both directions, it's very odd. The people I've spoken to do not know what to make of it. If these results hold up, it would mean a complete re evaluation of what dark energy is, this idea of vacuum energy totally out the window. There are other theories. So, for example, you could have something like a dark energy field called quintessence, which is pervading all space, and that can change in time.

And that's one of the ideas that's been floating around for how a time arable dark energy could look like. But the results from dese that increase and now decrease that I told you about, they indicate something even stranger than that. The most simple quintessence models wouldn't be able to explain that all better off. Essentially, the only thing we do know is that the standard model of cosmology would be toast. So the stakes, at least for the people who are in this business, are really high.

Jason Palmer
I mean, what comes next? How to figure out whether or not to throw everything in the bin? Yeah, super high stakes. The first thing will obviously be to look at the data that dese is sitting on. But they're not the only ones that are pursuing this.

Donald Trump
There is the European Space Agency's Euclid satellite telescope, which is already up, that will also be investigating dark energy and the density of dark energy as well. The Vera Rubin observatory in Chile. And so if you have all of these different strands of data coming together pointing in the same direction, that will be very compelling and probably enough for the field to say, all right, we need to look at whether our model is up to it or not. Emily, thanks very much for your time. Thank you very much.

Lane Green
Last month, I went to a bullfight held in front of a sold out crowd at Madrid's annual San Ysidro festival, which honors the city's patron saint. Lane Green is the economist, Spain correspondent, and Johnson columnist. There was a bit more drama than the fights I've been to before. Bosinero, the name of the bull who weighed half a ton, came in and impressed the crowd a little bit more than the two bulls who had been there before him. In fact, he got his horn under the right leg of the matador, Tomas Ruffo, and flipped him up in the air.

Ruffo bounced off his back and landed nearby, and the bull actually rolled him over a few times before several other toreros jumped in and distracted the bull. Rufo was soon up and limping, but he shook off the pain, and before long, Bosineiro had Thomas Ruffo's sword between his shoulders and died within a minute. For me, that's always the longest minute of a bullfight.

Despite many predictions, bullfighting has lived on in Spain and in other places. Outside the stadium, there's a statue of Alexander Fleming, the guy who discovered penicillin in 1928. You might wonder why there's a statue of a doctor standing there outside the bullring. And that's because, thanks to penicillin, many bullfighters since that discovery have survived injuries that killed them before them. But if the number of bullfighters who have survived has changed quite a bit since 1928, the ritual almost hasn't in the century since then.

It's very much the same thing that, say, Ernest Hemingway would have written about in 1932 when he wrote death in the afternoon about bullfighting. Lane I think as long as I've been a journalist, I've been editing stories about how the days of bullfighting are nearly over. Why are people still doing it? Well, people will give you many different explanations. One is that it's an opportunity, uniquely, to sort of see death and face the hard realities of life.

Others will call it an art form. But I think most importantly, there is this simple element of tradition and being deeply rooted in spanish culture. It's, in effect, just who we are for many Spaniards and for countries influenced by Spain. So bullfighting is also popular in countries in Latin America, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, other places, as well as in southern France. And, in fact, there were bullfighters from several of those countries in the San Ysidro festival.

But those critics of bullfighting, increasingly those who want to see it banned, are becoming more and more confident in Spain and in Mexico. And why are they so confident now? What's different about recent attempts to stop it? Well, this year there have been two legal actions against bullfighting in Spain. Ernest Dortazun, who's the culture minister here from a far left party, announced that they were canceling a bullfighting prize, an annual prize of €30,000 given out to a bullfighter, and explained that he said animal torture.

Those are his words, that fewer and fewer people understood that animal torture was not only practiced, but was given prizes at the same time. A little while ago in Mexico City, there was a question mark hanging over the opening of this year's season. Mexico City has the biggest bullring in the world, and it's the second most important bullfighting country after Spain. But protesters held it up with judicial actions.

And so finally, after some suspense, the season did, in fact, go ahead. Five of the 32 states in Mexico have outlawed it. And so we can see that in several countries, bullfighting is not just a sport within the ring of the bullfight itself, but in the political arena as well. Ok, let's turn to the political arena. You said a spanish minister described this practice as prizes for animal torture.

Rosie Blore
Those are pretty strong words. Is that a view widely held in Spain? Well, it's widely held in certain parts of Spain and very much rejected in other parts. And I think what's happening is that increasingly voters on the spanish left, both the sort of central left socialists and the far left party, they are increasingly the ones in favor of banning bullfighting. Those on the right, there's a center right party as well as a sort of hard right party, want it not only to stay legal, but even to continue to receive state subsidies.

Lane Green
And that's what's really changed. I think maybe 2025 years ago, you'd find more left wing voters who were perfectly happy with bullfighting. They just saw it as part of spanish culture, and it wasn't polarized on the left and right wing spectrum. What was the debate about before it became quite so politicized? Well, there have always been critics.

It is a blood sport, so much so that a papal bull actually forbade bullfighting in 1567, and that's, in fact, never been repealed. They said that bullfighters and people who participated could not be allowed a christian burial. You've had left wing supporters of bullfighting, people like Pablo Picasso and Federico Garcia Lorca, the poet, who were big fans of the fights. You've also had sort of traditional Spaniards who were opposed to it. I always associate bullfighting with Spain.

Rosie Blore
But you mentioned that the sport is popular in Mexico, too. Are there similar controversies there? The debate in Mexico is less along the left right axis, and it's really more. First of all, the center of the country versus the north and the south. Those states that have banned it tend to be outside of the center, in the north and the far south south, whereas eleven states in the center of the country have declared bullfighting formerly part of their cultural patrimony.

Lane Green
The president of the National association for the Breeding of Fighting Bulls told our correspondent there that he now spends as much of his time defending the sport as he does talking about bull breeding. So the criticism there is certainly on the increase. Ok, lane, so people have been calling time on bullfighting for decades, even centuries. What's your prediction? Are we finally going to see the death of this sport?

Well, they say never predict, especially about the future in the old joke, but we see it in decline. There's been a gentle fall in the number of full fledged bullfights by about a third since 2010. So that's pretty significant. If you just drew a straight line, in a couple more decades, you'd have very few to no bullfights remaining. But there's an element of when the critics come along and say, we're going to ban this or this should be banned, I, and there's a kind of rebound effect.

People flock to the bullring and they carry signs saying, bullfighting is culture, bullfighting is ours. And so every time the politicians stick their nose into the ring, they may actually be doing their part to keep bullfighting alive. Whether you're opposed or you're a fan, very few people change their minds in the course of their lives. Or in other words, a lot of people in this debate are rather bullheaded. Lane, thanks so much for talking to us.

Thank you, Rosie.

Rosie Blore
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Joe Devlin, and our sound designer is will Rowe. With support this week from Timo Saylor. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Lanyuk.

Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Khadifa and Benji Guy. And our assistant producers are Henrietta McFarlane and Koonal Patel. With extra production help this week from Jonathan Day and Elna Schutz. We'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend.

Intelligence.

Idris Kaloon
Hi, this is Matt and Sean from two black guys. Good credit from a local business to a global corporation. Partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bankofamerica.com dot banking for business to learn more. What would you like the power to do?

Bank of America n a copyright 2024.