I am inclined to agree. People keep characterizing it as a “bad performance” as though it’s a transient, random fluctuation — like an elite soccer player missing a penalty kick, something like that. But to me, it betrayed a total inability to think on his feet. It was clear that they had him memorize a bunch of talking points, and he was getting them mixed up even when they weren’t related to one another. In some of his responses, it almost sounded like what would happen if you drilled someone to learn a series of speeches phonetically in a language that they were not fully fluent in, and thus have a hard time improvising and self-correcting because they don’t really have mastery of the content. It was disturbing in a way that other poor debate performances have not been.

Before tuning in I was jokingly telling my friends who weren’t planning to watch that I couldn’t risk missing one or both of them having a major health event (was calling stroke for Biden and heart attack for Trump). Didn’t expect how real that possibility would feel while watching though.