If we’ve learned anything over the last four years it’s that Donald Trump is a despicable human being and that calling him a “human being” may be too kind. Child separation, attacks on widows, “suckers” and “losers,” indifference about 200,000 dead Americans—you know his greatest hits. But on Tuesday night, during the first presidential debate, Trump apparently thought that the best way to reach undecided voters would be by making the case that he’s truly one of the worst people on earth and that there is no contest between him and Joe Biden vis-à-vis who is several rungs below pond scum on the asshole scale.
Hitting Trump on the report that he called dead soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” Biden told the president, “The way you talk about the military, the way you talk about them being losers and suckers—my son was in Iraq, he spent a year there, he got the Bronze Star, he got the Conspicuous Service medal, he was not a loser, he was a patriot and the people left behind there were heroes.”
“You’re talking about Hunter,” Trump snarled.
“I’m talking about my son, Beau Biden,” the former Vice President said, referring to his son who died of brain cancer four years ago.
“I don’t know Beau,” Trump said without skipping a beat before launching into an attack on Biden’s son who is living, and who he tried desperately to convince Ukraine to smear last year. “I know Hunter got thrown out of the military, dishonorably discharged…for cocaine use and he didn’t have a job until you became Vice President.”
While no one would have thought any less of Biden if he’d crossed the stage to sock Trump in the mouth, instead he offered a response that very likely connected with a lot of people in the country in a way that the current president never could, particularly considering America is still in the middle of an opioid crisis. “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people at home, had a drug problem,” Biden said. “He’s overtaken it, he’s fixed it, he’s worked on it and I’m proud of my son.”
In sum, if viewers took one thing away from the debate, it’s probably that Donald Trump is a terrible person who has zero compunction about trashing someone’s son as they’re speaking about another child they tragically lost to brain cancer.
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