Tanzina Vega: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Tanzina Vega. The first of three presidential debates between President Trump and Joe Biden was held last night at Case Western Reserve University and moderated by Fox News's Chris Wallace. The debate devolved into an hour and a half of juvenile name-calling and shouting between the two candidates. For the better part of the 90-minute spectacle, Wallace was unable to control either of the candidates.

Biden appeared distracted by the President's taunts and, as a result, was unable to deliver a cohesive policy message to the American people. A combative President Trump ignored many direct policy questions himself and in a moment that echoed his response to the white supremacists at Charlottesville in 2017, the President once again refused to disavow white supremacy.

Donald Trump: I'm willing to do anything. I want to see peace.

Chris Wallace: Then do it, sir.

Joe Biden: Say it. Do it. Say it.

Donald: What do you want to call them? Give me a name. Give me a name. Go ahead. Who would you like me to condemn?

Chris: White supremacists and white Proud Boys.

Donald: Proud Boys stand back and stand by.

Tanzina: Joining me now to commiserate over last night's debate is my colleague, Amy Walter, host of Politics with Amy Walter here on The Takeaway every Friday and national editor of The Cook Political Report. Amy, hi.

Amy: Yes, hi.

Tanzina: Our colleagues in other news outlets have called this many things. A dumpster fire. Amy, I watched this debate, about half of it, last night and it felt to me like there were men arguing at the Thanksgiving table.

Amy: Maybe it wasn't the Thanksgiving table, Tanzina, as much as it was a high school or middle school cafeteria. It felt more like, to me. I think it's pretty clear that this was the plan all along for President Trump. It is what the last four years have been, which is the idea that the President is allowed to do things and say things and act in certain ways that other presidents haven't. His whole goal last night wasn't to say, "Here's why we should have four more years." It was, "What can I do to try to make Joe Biden stumble, tumble, and then we can all point and laugh at him?"

Tanzina: I think he was somewhat successful in that. Joe Biden, to me, appeared to have allowed the President to get under his skin. What surprises me is we've known that this is the President's approach to his presidency. This is how he operates. I think I understand why Joe Biden was trying to do the whole, "When they go low, we go high," but that didn't seem to work last night.

Amy: I'm curious what you would have wanted to see more of for Joe Biden because I was wondering that too. He couldn't be Donald Trump. We didn't want to watch that, and he shouldn't. He has to be his self and his authentic self. His entire message of the campaign has been "Unify America. Soul of America. Let's get us back from this dark place." He had to be careful not to devolve into that.

You're right in that he wasn't able to get into a groove. He wasn't able to give this more optimistic, inspirational message, tell us how things were going to be different under a Biden administration policy-wise. I think by his very standing up to Donald Trump and not being completely dismantled or going with Donald Trump into that place, he showed us that that is what his presidency was going to look like, just in the actions of it rather than the words.

Tanzina: I also wonder, to that point, what could he have done differently. I wonder how much of this is also about the moderator, Chris Wallace, who is one of Fox News's best journalists, best interviewers but, unfortunately, lost control of the debate multiple times last night. I was reading Margaret Sullivan's column in the Washington Post and what does one do? At what point do you cut off the mic?

Amy: That's what I wondered. What can you do? Even cutting off a mic, is that enough? Again, in a really small space where there aren't crowds, there's no other noise, the mic is really only for the TV audience. You could probably still hear him if he decided to keep talking. That really is the question. What is a moderator to do? What do you think should be done in the next one?

Tanzina: I think this is where Margaret, in her column today, makes a really good point. She even suggests canceling the next two debates until we can--

Amy: Isn't that giving in, then, to this idea?

Tanzina: I think it is giving in--

Amy: You can't control-- He's the President of the United States. We should be able to have these debates without giving up and saying, "Well, he's just going to act like that, so forget it."

Tanzina: She, tongue in cheek, says, "Wallace at the very least needed a mute button," which I do think is one step. I think, though, I guess, Amy, we're in this situation where is it better to postpone and wait and see if the election committee can get it together to implement some other trigger to control that type of crosstalk? Actually, I don't know if what happened last night was a service to the American people. Granted, I don't think that there are that many people who are still on the fence, but I still think it was a disservice to us as a people to really be able to see these candidates side by side and into what devolved into just bickering.

I don't have the answer. I just wonder is cutting the mic enough? Is rescheduling a debate enough? Is it enough to say, "Listen, President Trump, that can't happen anymore," knowing that he's not going to play by those rules? Is it a question of Joe Biden having to have a different approach? These are all questions, I think, that all of us are trying to figure out. I think at the end of the day, this was an absolute disservice.

Amy: Tanzina, what really worries me the most, and it came up at the very end of the debate, was the back and forth between Chris Wallace and President Trump about will he abide by the results of the election. This is somewhat where the Proud Boy moment came in, but all the other intimidation tactics. The President dove once again into the misinformation and disinformation about vote-by-mail, about conspiracy theories he's been hearing about what's happening around the country with these mail votes.

That's really what he's doing right now and has, quite frankly, spent the last few weeks doing, which is attack the integrity of the election process itself. If you cancel the debates and if you don't push back every day on, "No. What you said about voting by mail, this thing is incorrect, this thing is correct. People should not be standing at polls intimidating voters. That's illegal," then we have really lost a crucial pillar of our democracy.

Tanzina: I agree 100%. We're also dealing with a situation where this president thrives on the personal insults, thrives on personal attacks, and that was a big part of his strategy last night. I think Biden had to be very careful to do the same. In fact, at one point, he says, "I'm not going to talk about your family in that way." I thought one of Biden's more successful moments was when he looked directly at the camera and said, "This is about you, the American public, not about him. He's trying to make it all about him, but this is about you."

Amy, at the end of the day, I haven't seen what the viewer numbers were on this debate, but I don't know if this-- How much do you suspect this debate is even going to matter?

Amy: [laughs] Right.

Tanzina: Like I said, I think the number of "independent voters or swing voters" this year is really small. A lot of people know they're either going to vote Biden, they're going to vote Trump, or they're not going to vote at all. I wonder if this, like you said, might be telling people, "You know what? I'm not going to participate in this process at all," or did it even matter?

Do you think Americans have had-- We've had a lot on our plate for the past couple of years. Is this the thing that people are going to say, "Oh, I didn't know that about the President?" Or, "Oh, that's a new piece of information." He really doubled down on not just his approach but a lot of the things that he has said over and over again. There really weren't a lot of surprises from President Trump. I wonder if that ultimately is going to matter.

Amy: That's the whole point, Tanzina. This is a fixture, not a bug of his presidency. For all the talk that there's chaos and inconsistency, he's incredibly consistent about who he is and how he operates. It's also the reason that he is trailing in the polls and his favorable ratings are as low as they are. It works for about 40% to 42% of the American public. They like that, but you cannot win an election at 40% or 41%.

What he needed to do last night was to put the onus, then, on Joe Biden and basically say, "I know you don't like me and my style but this guy, he can't even stand up for 90 minutes. This guy can't handle it when somebody taunts him. This guy is a senile, and he's captive to the left-wing, and he will just be a puppet for them." That's what he needed to have happen is that the narrative of this conversation changes, and it didn't in part because, as you said, all it did was reinforce what we already know about Donald Trump.

In that sense, we're back to where we've always been, which is a president who instead of coming into office and trying to build on a base, is all about just doubling down on it but that bass is not bigger. It's loud but it's not as big, and therein lies his November challenge.

Tanzina: Biden made a comment last night where he referred to himself as the Democratic Party. He said some things, including that he would absolutely not defund the police, which is something we've heard called for repeatedly from more progressive members of the Democratic Party this summer, in particular, after the uprising for social and racial justice across the country.

That’s really going to be, I think, an issue for more progressive voters who, I think, are saying, “Look, we need to vote for Joe Biden whether we like his policies or not because we want to get President Trump out of office.” Does Joe Biden represent the Democratic Party? I don't necessarily think so. I think there are many parties within the bigger party that he doesn't reflect.

Amy: That's right. Every presidential nominee represents the party. We’re not a parliamentary system. In the UK, you have an opposition leader, you have the prime minister. Here, we have a nominee for president and that person then has to represent all that the party supposedly represents. It's why you see so many Republican voters saying, "I'm a Never Trumper. I'm still a Republican. I consider myself a Republican but I do not consider myself to be a Trumpian."

What is interesting is that the Republicans, certainly the Trump folks, believe that this rift within the Democratic Party is significant enough that it will cause Biden trouble in the November election as we saw raised in the primary. We are seeing poll numbers that suggest that Joe Biden is not doing as well, especially with Latino voters. Not doing as well with African American voters in terms of the margins that he's putting up right now against Donald Trump. If he wins, once he gets to Washington, he's going to have to put together this diverse coalition to accomplish something.

I thought what was really interesting-- I don't know if it was last night or this morning. Looking at a tweet from Representative Ocasio-Cortez who was responding to something that Kellyanne Conway said, again, trying to highlight this division, trying to put a wedge between Joe Biden and the more progressive faction of the Democratic Party, saying, “Hey, AOC, did you see this? He is not supporting the green new deal.” She said, “Yes, I understand that, Kelly-Anne, that's the point. We’re a diverse party. That's why I'm on his climate change task force and we’re working through differences. That's how this party works. We're not denying climate change.”

I think the expectation that many Republicans have that Joe Biden's centrism was going to doom him in the primary, that didn't pan out. That it's going to doom him in the general election, I don't think right now that is panning out. The realistic path forward for Bidenism in a congress that is still going to have significant policy rifts between the more centrist and the more liberal is there.

Tanzina: I think what struck me was seeing three white men in their 70s. We know politics move slowly but that feels really regressive in this moment. I just was just taken aback by seeing that play out. I thought this is what is-- We are in a moment right now where the American people are struggling on so many levels. This felt not just like a disservice but it also just felt out of touch with so much of what's happening in the world, so much of how our country has changed demographically, politically, on so many levels. To have that as a representation of both media and the two most powerful men potentially in the world was a message in some ways.

Amy: A message of how little we've changed, do you mean?

Tanzina: How little we’ve changed, yes. How far we haven't come.

Amy: That's an interesting way to think about this in some waysm and yet they also-- Well, especially Donald Trump represents-- As a 74-year-old man white man, he has done more to uproot, which is the kindest way I can say it, I guess, the traditions of the presidency. He's done more to shake up and shake off. Well, here are the prescriptions and the rules and behavior that presidents are supposed to display. It wasn't a young person who came in and shook these up. It wasn't somebody who came as somebody who wasn't from the establishment elite class who did that. It was an old white guy who's been part of that class forever, that's been his whole life, who came and disrupted all of that.

It was Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary who was the one who was calling for the most disruption and change to our current infrastructure in terms of our political infrastructure, economic infrastructure, social-cultural infrastructure. It’s interesting they both, as who they are, who they represent, in some ways, it's more of the same. Yet they are also, both Trump and, I would argue, Bernie Sanders, the most disruptive political forces that we have right now.

Tanzina: It’s interesting. I just saw a meme on Facebook that said, "If the Academy Awards can mute you when your time is up, why can't the debate folks?"

Amy: I know. Well, you know what they're going to maybe have to do, Tanzina? I was thinking about this because the mute might not work. What if you had just plexiglass boxes? They’d go up and down and up and down, which is creepy but it may work. Look. The other thing, Tanzina, as you know, with children, or you're soon going to learn too-- [chuckles]

Tanzina: I’m on the path. I’m getting there.

Amy: You're on the path to learning. Life, it's pretty simple no matter if your little or as you get older. If you're rewarded for certain behaviors, you'll keep doing them. If you're not rewarded for them, you will stop doing them. If Trump feels like he was rewarded by this behavior, then that's exactly what we're going to get in the next debate. If what comes out of it is this actually made things that much worse for him, he's not going to stop being who he is but it may look different in the next debate.

The problem that we know for the president is after the first debate, and even if this weren't the dumpster fire that it was, the problem is that voters often then tune out the next two. They are tuning in the very first one because they just want to get a sense of, “Am I right about this race? Do I think I know these two folks? Is this what I thought it was?” After last night, they go--

Tanzina: "Let's reaffirm what I wanted to hear."

Amy: Exactly. They go, “Yes, that's pretty much what I thought. Okay. Bye-bye. The next debate, I am going to wash my hair or make sure that I have something else to do."

Tanzina: I don't think a lot of Americans walked away feeling like they really needed that.

Amy: That was a good use of 90 minutes of their lives. Again, it did reaffirm Joe Biden's overall message, which isn't a policy-driven message. It isn't an issues-driven message. It is a message simply of, "Let's just have some normalcy in our life. If you want four more years of the bluster, and the chaos, and the yelling, and all what you saw last night, you can do that. If you want to go to a place where that is no longer the norm, I'm your guy."

Tanzina: Well, we're going to be paying attention for the next debate on October 15th. Amy, thank you so much. Amy Walter is the host of Politics with Amy Walter here with us on The Takeaway every Friday and the national editor of The Cook Political Report. We'll be talking soon, Amy. Thank you.

Amy: Thanks, Tanzina. Bye.

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