Of course, President Donald Trump’s performance was more energetic, informed and convincing. The president went issue by issue, making a strong case for keeping Joe Biden out of the Oval Office.
But Joe Biden didn’t deign to leave his basement and travel to Ohio to actually debate. He was there to do damage control.
The future of America depends not on Biden’s stale talking points, wrongfully memorized statistics and useless attacks on the debate stage, but on the fires, bullets and barricades on America’s city streets.
After months of deafening silence about the unrest afflicting cities across the country, Biden’s belated, halfhearted (at best) negative comments about violence and looting failed to convince Americans that the former vice president is sincere about restoring the rule of law.
With yet another recent round of mob violence in Louisville, Kentucky, including the shooting of two more police officers, America’s two camps are no longer best described as Republicans and Democrats. Those are just the teams doing battle on the debate stage.
In the real battle, the one in the streets, the sides are simply those willing to tolerate looting, arson and murder—and those who will not stand for such lawlessness.
There are those ready to accept the tearing down, spitting on and debasing of monuments to their Founding Fathers, to shrug as their already COVID-stricken neighbors lose their businesses amidst the greatest riot-related damage to property in American history. And there are those of us who will never bow down to that.
There are those willing to allow a mob—not the law—to decide what streets they are allowed to drive on, when they need to get on their knees, when they must raise a “Black Lives Matter” fist even if they don’t want to and where they are permitted to eat. And there are those of us who will never allow ourselves or our country to be ruled by the mob.
The biggest question before the American people is to which of these two camps will our leaders belong. It is nothing less than a question of the survival of our nation as it is currently constituted. It is also not a new question. It is much older than even Joe Biden. As a young Abraham Lincoln said in his Lyceum address in 1838:
The Democratic mayors who cynically permitted political violence in their cities this year have made their choice. In their view, standing in the way of the mob is standing in the way of “justice.”
Joe Biden has also made his choice. By ignoring and sometimes mildly encouraging the unrest for so long, he has made it clear that he is at least willing to countenance the American people’s submission to the mob. Joe Biden couldn’t even clearly utter the simple phrase “law and order” during the debate.
Only President Trump has made the opposite choice—that as long as he is our president, the federal government will never accept the rule of the mob. Anything Joe Biden can do to dance around this central distinction, and pretend that he isn’t ruled by the left-wing mob as he so clearly is, is just a sad distraction.
The first presidential debate of 2020 showed, once again, that we need four more years of President Trump’s determined, strong, American leadership—and not Joe Biden’s leftist, weak, gaffe-filled propositions.
Boris Epshteyn is the strategic advisor on the Trump 2020 campaign and served in the White House as special assistant to the president and assistant communications director for surrogate operations.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
