But those three advantages may matter less than a fourth one, which I found myself mulling after reading and contributing to the coverage of the second round of Democratic primary debates last week. Dozens if not scores of journalists, including me, picked apart Joe Biden’s closing statement, in which he badly bungled what were supposed to be instructions to send a text message of his name to a certain phone number.

Some also noted that he rued the possibility of “eight more years” of Trump rather than “eight years,” which was obviously what he meant. Fact checkers additionally took Biden to task for exaggerated claims about both his health care plan and his role in withdrawing American troops from Iraq.

Finally, there was widespread concern about his fuzziness. As I wrote in my quickie debate appraisal, there’s “that way in which he trails off at the end of a sentence or an argument, all the little hiccups en route, the messy seams connecting one thought to the next, the demeanor that falls into a maddening gray area between engaged and fully animated.” I noted that if Cory Booker and Bill de Blasio “traffic in too many exclamation points, Biden traffics in too many ellipses.”

All of these complaints, I think, were accurate and fair. But they’re also picayune in the context of what Trump bungles, exaggerates and invents all the time. In the days immediately leading up to and following the debates, he bragged about frequent visits to ground zero after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that he never made, falsely claimed that he had tried to get his rally audience in North Carolina last month to stop chanting “Send her back” about Representative Ilhan Omar and more.

As for verbal precision and phonetic crispness, remember when Trump implored journalists to look into the “oranges” of Robert Mueller’s investigation? That was in the same stretch of remarks where he bizarrely unfurled the fable that his father was “born in a very wonderful place in Germany.”