Chapter 28 #2
“Well, I’m just going to leave you alone to take your shower and get dressed,” I said.
Jacob went in and briefed him a little bit while he was getting dressed. The amazing makeup artist Tim Quinn came in and did Joe’s makeup. Then it was time to head to the arena.
In the elevator, I looked over at Joe, and I did a double take. He looked like he was made of clay, strangely monochromatic. My first thought was that Tim had made a rare mistake.
But no, it wasn’t Tim’s fault. There was just something very wrong.
I had to quiet my own mind. I reassured myself: He always rallies.
He responds to the energy of the moment.
He’ll do fine. He’d done something like fifteen major debates by then.
No matter how awful he felt, he would get up there and he would deliver.
We got off the elevator. I gave Joe a hug and a kiss.
I was confident that in spite of not feeling his best, he would do well.
Joe took a right and headed into a room with some of his senior advisors.
I went straight into another holding room to watch the debate with Anthony Bernal, with Annie occasionally coming in and out.
The debate began. In the audience were only the moderators, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, at a table at the foot of the stage.
I immediately noticed that Joe didn’t look good.
He didn’t seem himself from the opening.
It was almost like with every line his energy dropped and he had to regroup.
I wasn’t listening to the words. I was looking at the body language.
He kept putting his head down. I said out loud to the television, “Pick your head up! Look into the camera!”
I was imagining what it would be like to be watching as one of my sisters, or as one of the women I’d met that day in Virginia Beach.
How would they be perceiving Joe? I could see myself having the debate on while I cleaned up my kitchen, graded papers, or folded the laundry.
Half-watching, I would still be able to tell that he was struggling.
“Give me the numbers! Be specific,” he was surely saying that whole debate-prep time—he always wanted to be precise when he made points about policy, and to offer exact statistics.
When he asked me for advice, I told him, “Talk from the heart. Tell people you know prices are too high at the grocery store and say what you’re doing to fix it.
Don’t just talk about inflation percentages. It’s about how you make people feel.”
When I speak at events, I can tell that a lot of people are not necessarily taking in all the words, but they’re looking at my shoes, or the pin on my blazer, or my posture.
The general impression you make counts for so much in politics.
I imagined that even with the sound off, no one could think the debate was going well for Joe.
A few minutes in, Anthony gasped. Joe had said something nonsensical about beating Medicare.
Is he short-circuiting? I thought. Is this a stroke?
It felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching.
Has he been drugged? Oh God—will people watching assume that this is how he is all the time?
Our holding room was dead silent. Anthony and I had known each other so long we didn’t have to speak to know what the other was thinking.
In that debate, Joe lost himself. He lost the essence of who he was.
He did not speak from the heart. His opponent lied more than a hundred times, but that didn’t matter.
My first guess was that he’d just frozen. He’d choked. In competitive sports, there’s a phenomenon known as “overtraining syndrome,” a term I heard when swimmer Simone Manuel, Katie Ledecky’s former teammate, failed to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics. Perhaps Joe had been overcoached?
As the debate went on, my mind was racing. I was waiting for Joe to punch back, but he looked lost. What was going on? Was he having a medical emergency?
While that Medicare moment was a low point, the whole debate was awkward.
He couldn’t get into a rhythm. The night was unprecedented.
Even if he stumbled in the course of a public event—and his whole life, his childhood stutter came out when he was tired—he’d eventually get into a groove.
Joe did improve in the course of that debate, but not enough to reassure me or anyone watching that he was okay.
He clearly wasn’t. So what was wrong? Nothing explained what I was seeing.
I’d never seen that look on his face before in my life.
Finally, someone came into the room and said to me, “He has five minutes left, if you want to go out.”
As soon as the debate ended, I walked out onto the stage. Our eyes locked. He smiled at me and we hugged.
Up close, Joe looked weary, but he seemed more like himself than he had even fifteen minutes earlier.
His opponent walked off the stage.
“Let’s go say hello to Jake and Dana,” Joe said.
I didn’t want to go say hi to anyone. But at every debate Joe liked to personally greet the moderators.
I looked over to where they were sitting and saw that the floor was covered in stripes. I couldn’t tell if the stripes were steps or not. I had heels on, so I said, “Let me take a hold of your arm, Joe.”
This image would be taken as evidence that he needed to lean on me for support and that I had to lead him. Have you seen my shoes? I am a “the higher the heel, the closer to God” woman. Joe was never leaning on me, I promise.
We went down to say hello and goodbye to the moderators, and they were almost completely silent. I thought, Wow, this really has gone terribly.
Then it was officially over. As we walked off the stage, Joe whispered to me, “I really f**ked up, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did,” I whispered back.
To this day, I still don’t know what happened.
Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me.
The only other time he’d sounded like that was right after he’d had surgery.
I wish I’d thought of asking for a blood test, just so we’d know what was in his system.
Had he taken something on the plane for his cough, something at the hotel to sleep—codeine cough syrup or Ambien?
I’d been on the campaign trail and hadn’t been with him, so I had no idea. I only wish I had the answer.
In politics, bad nights happen. I thought back to the New Hampshire primary, when we left for South Carolina.
On nights like that, there is no time to stop and reflect.
You have to keep moving. In the car from the arena to the hotel where Joe was set to do the first of three postdebate events, Annie broke the silence.
“Hundreds of people are waiting at the hotel for you to address them,” she said. “Shoulders back. Smile.”
Joe looked grim. The fact that he knew it was bad I took as a sign of his having returned to himself.
As we made our way from the car to the backstage area, the staff that was moving with us—always, there are at least thirty or forty people in the presidential entourage, from the person with the nuclear football to the doctor to the advance people to the Secret Service—looked like they had just been gut-punched. Nobody knew what to say.
The crowd was still energetic and enthusiastic. Many of them had been campaigning during the day and were now unwinding with some drinks. The DJ was keeping the energy high. I went up onstage to introduce Joe. Anthony reminded me, “Be positive! High energy! The crowd is fired up. Oh, and smile!”
I grimaced—I was always the one telling everyone else to smile more.
As a teacher, I believe in leading with praise no matter how bad the test result or essay is.
So I became my teacher self onstage. I couldn’t say, “Wasn’t that a great debate, everyone?
” Because it wasn’t, and that would be phony.
But I knew Joe was hurt and had to hear something positive.
I was trying to move forward and stay upbeat.
So I got up there next to Joe and, with a smile on my face, I said, honestly, “You answered every question. You knew all the facts. And let me ask the crowd: What did Trump do? Lie.”
Indeed, Joe’s opponent had dodged any question he hadn’t wanted to answer.
Joe had tried to give full answers to every question.
But looking back, my comments probably sounded a little too disconnected from what people saw.
I wonder if, from those very first moments after the debate, we were trying so hard to reassure everyone that we didn’t take the time to acknowledge that he looked very unwell in that debate, to say to the public: “Yes. That was bad, no doubt.”
Maybe only then, once we validated people’s disquiet, could we continue the conversation and find an explanation.
The truth was, Joe was not who he was on a day-to-day basis in that debate.
At the event with supporters that followed, his energy returned; he recovered his rhythm.
As the crowd cheered Joe in that hotel ballroom, he revived.
Not an hour after the debate, he spoke well.
I found the speech eloquent, even beautiful.
Still, the staff remained in shock; you could read it on their faces.
Somehow we still had two more stops to make that night.
After the hotel event, we were whisked back into the car and driven to Waffle House.
This is the kind of postdebate activity that gets planned when you think the debate will go well—a victory lap through town, some pancakes at midnight.
When we walked into the restaurant, we saw that the place was packed.
Part of the crowd was thrilled to see Joe.
A group of young people looked up from their breakfast platters and cheered when they saw him.
Many people wanted selfies and hugs. Joe and I were both having our hands shaken again and again by palms sticky with maple syrup.
But part of the restaurant was looking at us with blunt hostility.
There were far more MAGA supporters there than we had anticipated.
Meanwhile, news reports were coming in on our phones, and none of it was making us feel any better.
This was when we first began to hear the chatter about how, clearly, Joe’s cognitive decline must have been concealed deliberately by those around him so we could stay in power.
To me, it was so absurd that I couldn’t imagine ever having to dignify it with a response. I never guessed that theory would take on a life of its own.
Finally, Joe and I took our order to go from Waffle House and made our way to the airport to fly to our final stop of the night: Raleigh, North Carolina.
We landed around two in the morning. Amazingly, given the hour, a substantial crowd of smiling people had gathered, and they even had a band there playing music.
I walked off the plane and out onto the tarmac feeling dizzy.
The night was pitch-black, but the area by the plane was lit with spotlights.
“Great debate!” someone actually said, shaking Joe’s hand.
We felt enduring enthusiasm for Joe’s candidacy. There were still a lot of believers. Joe was fine on the flight. And yet, I was distraught. I tried to be cheerful for the crowds, who, after all, had trekked out to an airfield in the middle of the night just to wish us well.
On the Raleigh tarmac, Joe and I smiled and shook hands in that odd oasis of light until it was time, at last, to go to bed. We were driven to a hotel, and for a few hours, we were able to sleep before facing the aftermath.
The next morning, I woke up first as usual. After I had my coffee, I went in to wake Joe up. There was a heaviness. I said, “Get up. We’re not going to let ninety minutes define a whole career.”
That day, he gave what I thought of as one of his all-time best speeches. He spoke from the heart:
“Folks, I don’t walk as easy as I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but… I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong, and I know how to do this job. I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down, you get back up.”
Standing by him in my vote vote vote dress designed by Christian Siriano, I felt that we were moving forward.
But that feeling didn’t last. The biggest lesson for us, I think, was that if you don’t explain something well enough then the question won’t go away.
There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe’s debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it.
Everywhere we went, we still heard people shouting, “Stick with it!” and “You’ve got this!
” But from that moment on, there was also a drumbeat calling on him to get out of the race.
In the days to come, it would grow louder and louder.