As the evening of June 27, 2024 approached, I wondered if the debate was really going to happen. For months now, we’d been seeing videos of President Joe Biden spacing out, drifting off into a fog at official events. At the G7, he’d wandered off and Italian PM Meloni had to gently guide him back; that was only two weeks before this debate, and the video of it went viral. Donald Trump would demolish him, some predicted, a spectacle Democratic Party power brokers could not allow; they’d cancel the debate with some face-saving excuse, and gracefully usher Biden off into retirement. His replacement would be another apologist for Palestinian mass-slaughter, somebody just as vicious as Genocide Joe, but clear-headed.

If the debate did actually take place, it would be an historical event. My friends and I wanted to watch it together with an audience and see the responses of people around us. The day came, and we headed off to the New Parkway Theater in Oakland.

People were lining up at the snack bar for popcorn and drinks as we went in to take our seats. Within minutes two CNN moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, appeared on the screen and explained the format. There was no studio audience, they told us. So in effect, we and the whole world in dozens of countries around the globe had virtual ringside seats to this event, now being broadcast live.

Seconds later candidates President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump appeared on the screen in front of us. Okay, so it was really happening.

Biden took the first question, one about the economy. He started off well, far better than I had ever expected.. I was impressed at how he could rattle off (alleged) facts, figures, and policies at such amazing speed that I could barely follow.

Wow! I thought to myself. He’s really cranking that stuff out!

Another round of questions. A moderator had asked Trump about the national debt, and after his response, turned to Biden.

“He (Trump) had the largest national debt of any president’s four-year period,” Biden said, and reminded us of Trump’s tax cut which “benefited the very wealthy. What I’m going to do is fix the taxes.”

Great! I thought, but he’d already had nearly four years without doing much about it. Well, that’s Biden. Promises, promises. He went on, promising to correct the tax inequalities and do “all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, . . . strengthen our healthcare system. . .”

There he seemed to skip a beat, then picked up again. “With dealing with everything we have to do with –.” Having gotten that far, he froze up went silent.

He stood there, zombie-like, a vertical cadaver; he seemed to be struggling, agonizing to come back to the studio, back to the audience. Seconds ticked by, seeming like hours.

“See there!” came a voice from the audience. It was a guy sitting in the row in front of me, off to the right. “He’s zoning out!” Some others were also saying, “Biden’s lost it!”

Till then he’d been soaring through the sky as though on automatic pilot — but woops, a device made by Boeing, perhaps. Now he was stalling out. This lasted only about two or three seconds, but long enough for us in the theater — along with the rest of the worldwide audience — to see and know that the guy who nominally runs the U.S. empire might be non compos mentis. It was an eternal moment that few of us will ever forget.

It got even worse as he partially reconnected and gasped out the words:

“We finally beat Medicare!”

“Thank you, President Biden,” said the moderator, and turned to Trump who gleefully pounced on Biden’s misspoken words, saying:

“Well, he’s right! He did beat Medicaid. He beat it to death. And he’s destroying Medicare.”

Poor Biden had pulled himself out of a nosedive, only to crash into a mountainside.

This was only about ten minutes into the event. There was almost another hour and a half yet to go. Biden did not attempt to correct his “beat Medicare” slip; whether he was even aware of having said it is not certain. He seemed to come out of it and went on for the rest of the debate as though nothing strange had happened, though he continued to have a slightly cadaver-like appearance. Nevertheless, at times he did quite well, and drew occasional loud applause from about a third of the New Parkway audience.

I’m guessing that most of the people here were Democrats, though not necessarily Biden supporters. It isn’t only Biden’s senility which causes people to consider him unfit; there was also his role in the Iraq invasion, and now his policy of supplying arms to the Israelis, which has earned him the epithet “Genocide Joe.” (Trump promises to be even worse on that issue. “Let [Israel] finish the job,” he said.)

Biden’s not the first president who became senile, Ronald Reagan did too, but that didn’t seem to disturb anyone. Perhaps Journalist Caitlin Johnstone was right when she said: “A dementia patient can be president because it doesn’t matter who the president is.” The government is run by unelected empire managers who are chosen undemocratically by the power elite. “Biden is just the official face on the operation,” she wrote. Well it sure does look that way, though I do think there have been some exceptional presidents who took the reins of power into their hands — JFK for one, and we saw what happened to him when he refused to carry out the wishes of the power elite.

The debate went on. Both Biden and Trump both scored some points, though not many. Mostly they were regurgitating stuff we’ve been hearing for years. Biden boasted his achievements, and Trump told us what a great job he did and is going to do again after he’s elected. “I’m going to make America great again!”

Among the New Parkway audience, nobody cheered for Donald Trump, or booed him either. To the contrary, Trump’s preposterous lies occasionally drew explosions of laughter.

This non-support for Trump was to be expected since Oakland, and the San Francisco Bay Area in general, is generally progressive. We can assume that in other parts of the country, there would’ve been many screen-viewing gatherings where Donald Trump was being applauded as hero of the evening.

Trump’s default talking point was to hammer on immigrants, and accuse Joe Biden of letting them in. “He allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country,” Trump asserted. He repeated that several times in the course of this debate.

I wonder how anybody can forget that except for Native Americans we’re all immigrants in this country. But when Trump says “immigrants,” it sounds like he’s really using that as a code word meaning non-white.

Nevertheless, Biden has continued some of Trump’s policies that abuse immigrants. And this spring Biden supported a Border Act which he said would be “the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen.” When Republicans come up with some odious thing that seems to gain them popularity, Biden seems all too ready to borrow it.

For about an hour and a half, they each got their turns, blasting away at each other, trading insults. Biden called Trump a criminal, “The only person on this stage that is a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now!” Biden said. Trump countered with reminding Biden of the criminal activities of his son Hunter Biden, and of Joe Biden’s role in supporting his son’s Burisma affair.

“You have the morals of an alley cat!” Biden said, mentioning Trump’s affair with a porn star. Throughout the event the called each other liars and other names. “You are a child,” Biden declared. He also called Trump a “whiner,” and even hinted that Trump was too fat.

People in the audience around me were munching popcorn and sipping soft drinks, beer and wine. My friends and I ordered a pizza.

Some of this was funny. Some was not. On the topic of the Middle East, Trump used ‘Palestinian’ as a pejorative, and said, “He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.”

“I’ve never heard so much foolishness!” Biden shot back.

And that was foolishness. After all, Joe Biden has been supporting the Israeli genocide with weapons and diplomatic cover. We need to give discredit where discredit is due.

Regarding Gaza Biden said:

“Hamas cannot be allowed to be continued. We continue to send our experts and our intelligence people to how they can get Hamas like we did Bin Laden.”

Was Biden referring to our 20-year-long adventure in Afghanistan? The empire lost that war, and the Taliban is back in charge. Or maybe he meant that the U.S. and Israel working together can achieve anything they set out to do and all will turn out well? In reality Israel is now in the ninth month of its war on a rag-tag militia, and though it has massacred some 40,000 civilians, it doesn’t seem to be winning. Does Biden know that? Haaretz is available in English, but maybe he doesn’t read it.

Biden didn’t really explain exactly what he meant, but further on he told us:

“We are the most admired country in the world. We’re the United States of America. There’s nothing beyond our capacity. We have the finest military in the history of the world.

Nobody cheered. Nobody laughed either.

“We’re the strongest country in the world,” he reiterated a few minutes later.

Really? Looking at declining U.S. fortunes in the forever-wars and proxy-wars — eastern Europe, the Middle East, and above all in Palestine — we gotta wonder if those glory days aren’t about over.

“We’re a country in the world who keeps our word and everybody trusts us.” Biden went on. “. . . Right now, we’re needed. We’re needed to protect the world.”

Was Biden debating Trump? — or was he fending off some ghostly voices of doom?

Our pizza arrived. But what were we watching? — an end-of-empire drama? We were sitting in a movie theater, but this was not a movie. It was history being played out, presented live, on the screen in front of us.

For these 90 minutes, Biden continued on at full speed except for that one blackout. Some of what he said was a bit scrambled and out of sequence, but in general I felt he did much, much better than I had ever expected, though I do hope they’ll revoke his driver’s license.

The debate ended, and the moderator announced, “Stay with us because we have full analysis of this debate.”

A panel of pundits came up on the screen, and immediately they laid into Biden’s performance, mercilessly ripping the poor guy to shreds. Their evaluation was so instantaneous, so unanimous, I was totally caught by surprise. I could hardy believe what I was hearing. Was the pundits’ response pre-planned? My first thought was to suspect that Biden had stumbled into an ambush. Although Biden had called for this debate, it was strange that his Democratic Party handlers had let him go through with it. Maybe they’d decided this was the only way they could get rid of their candidate who was unlikely to win the upcoming election.

I almost felt sorry for Joe Biden — even though he’s not some kindly old gentleman who deserves a lot of sympathy. “Don’t feel sorry for him,” a friend chided me. “He’ll be remembered as ‘the genocide president,’ and not only that, he makes elderly people look incompetent.”

• Virginia Browning and Steve Gilmartin contributed to this article

The post Popcorn, Pizza and the Theater of Debate first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.