The moderators did their best. Here’s Dana Bash signaling to Joe the direction in which to point his head:

Watch CNN anchor hand signal Joe on where to look pic.twitter.com/QDhyZ2SNJ6— TacoBill’s Pic of the Day (@JerseyBillz) June 28, 2024

Was there anyone else on the stage? Not so’s you’d know from the headlines. Biden lost to himself. And considering that the object was to make the debate all about Trump that’s quite an accomplishment.

So what’s going on? Why did whoever’s running the show allow this to happen?

I’ve been of the view, ever since the 2020 primary season, that Biden is the Permanent State’s conscious response to Trump: in 2016, Trump was all candidate and no minders; Biden is all minders and no candidate. In that sense, the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock-puppet is the perfect embodiment of American politics. We can do all the cracks about “Obama’s third term” or “the Manchurian candidate”, but the truth is that, in a supposedly self-governing republic of 350 million people, we have absolutely no idea who’s actually running the show – other than the fact that, out of those 350 million, the only one we can definitively rule out of having anything to do with it is the purported head of the executive branch.

You have to figure that that’s greatly to the advantage of the Deep State, and that’s why they’d like to keep it that way. It’s quite something to teach the people the lesson that representative politics is just a meaningless joke, third-rate dinner-theatre in which all the faux-combat is an obvious sham. In the Soviet Union, the point wasn’t to persuade you to believe the lie but to force you to live with the lie. Reducing the two-year US election cycle to the same state inflicts an even more brutal humiliation on the masses.

— Mark Steyn, “The Plot Thickens,” 6/28/24