Politics

The Week

Instead of appealing to the better angels of our nature, he spent nearly two hours of his first televised debate with former Vice President Joe Biden behaving like an insufferable, Thanksgiving-wrecking narcissist, impervious to the deleterious effect of his manic hatefulness on the audience and falsely confident that riling up his base with aggressive non-sequiturs would somehow deliver him back to the Oval Office. The first of three presidential debates between Trump and Biden was ugly in a way that normal language can't quite capture. Moderated by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, the lived experience of it was like watching a plane carrying someone you care about deeply drop out of the sky in mid-flight and explode into flames.