The first presidential debate of 2024 might also be the last—or at least, the last between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His voice weak and memory failing, Biden performed so poorly that putting him on stage was pure sadism and, for his party, tantamount to suicide. Biden isn’t too old for a second term; he’s too old for his first.

Trump is as old as Biden was in 2020, but he’s sharper than Biden was then, and by comparison with today’s Biden the ex-president seems like a brash bronze colossus. Trump was so confident that he wandered into minefields that would have been hazardous if he was facing any opponent more competent than Biden. Trump’s abortion answer was predictably tangled, emphasizing states’ rights but also the radicalism of the Democrats’ support for late-term and even partial-birth abortions—yet if, as Trump implied, those 8- and 9-month procedures are obvious to all as infanticide, they presumably should be banned by whatever level of government is necessary, with the federal government stepping in if states permit such horrors. Of course, if that’s true, then those for whom the humanity of the unborn is apparent even before the third trimester would be justified in calling for the federal government to overrule liberal states’ laws in other cases, and abortion wouldn’t remain a state matter at all.

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