“Trump spent months hammering “Sleepy Joe” or ‘Basement Biden,’ insinuating he was avoiding the campaign trail and the media because he couldn’t answer questions. Even many Democrats spent the summer wringing their hands about Biden’s low profile and what this suggested about his capabilities. The lynchpin of Trump’s strategy in both debates against Biden was to expose his supposed senility. In the first debate, he badgered and taunted his opponent in an effort to make him stammer and melt down. When that backfired on Trump, his strategists calculated they could produce the same effect by backing off. Their reasoning was that Trump’s constant interruptions rescued Biden from his own incoherence. If they allowed him to speak, he would disintegrate on his own.”
“It didn’t happen. Biden gave perfectly cogent responses to every question put to him, controlled his stammer, and displayed a far stronger command of facts and figures than his opponent. (To be sure, knowing more about politics than a man whose understanding comes almost entirely from Fox News is an extremely low bar.) Propaganda works through repetition. Trump invested almost the entire campaign driving a singular theme against Biden. Now the results of that work have just sunk below the surface without a trace” – Jonathan Chait.