The Unfulfilled Promise of the Presidential Debate

The first of the 2024 Presidential Debates has come and gone and we’re all feeling the same thing: profound disappointment. It’s not that we were disappointed by the candidates, by their policies, debating skills, or their plans for the future of the country. It’s impossible to be disappointed by something that you have absolutely no hope for. Trump lied at least as much as usual and Biden displayed a near complete absence of cognitive ability, but those aren’t so much disappointments as confirmations of expectation. What disappointed every single person collectively as a nation was that neither of the candidates died on stage. We were all expecting it, waiting for it, were all but promised, and frankly deserved it. It’s the only reason that anybody watched a second of that debate. We were all cheated.

Neither of those two men should be doing anything of consequence, let alone competing to ride this dying empire into the ground. The fact that they want to be president, again, is evidence of their mental incapacity to do so. They’re both just being spurred along by ego and stubbornness at this point. And Trump’s dream of being able to have his crimes nullified and his enemies assassinated when he enforces fascist rule over the US. It’s not as though either of them actually has any ideas for or intentions to improve the country, and they’re certainly not the best and most capable people of doing so. They should be retired, or locked away, or they should be dead.

In all honesty, the greatest service that either man could do for this country would be to die, publicly, on live television. Not only would it be far more exciting than anything they’re capable of in a debate, or anywhere, it would be such a relief to be able to just start this whole presidential cycle over. It would be like a re-do. We’d get to call a Mulligan by the good fortune of having them both politely expire and clearing the stage for almost literally anyone else.

But, no. They had to go on living and pretending that there can be any positive outcome from this charade, and that is just plain rude. They are rude, selfish men who should just get it over with and keel over already.

I suppose there’s still time. They will be having one more debate, because they’re too pathetic to do the customary three and are acknowledging that even one is more than any of us can stand. If they can drag their soon-to-be corpses back on stage and in front of the cameras one more time, and do the polite thing this time and die, preferably in unison, perhaps we can forgive them for putting us through this. Probably not. And we certainly won’t be forgiving their many other crimes, but they’ll at least have the chance of redeeming themselves for this inane farce. It would perhaps be the first dignified and unselfish thing that they do. We can all hope.