“The Commission on Presidential Debates said Wednesday it would be making changes to the format of the remaining presidential debates after the first debate [between Trump and Biden] devolved into a chaotic disaster the night before,” CNN reported the day after, Wednesday, September 30, 2020. Read story here.
There are all sorts of post-mortems floating around, the most cogent of which is that moderator Chris Wallace from Fox News did a crappy job and deserves an “F” grade (this comes from a university debate coach), but let’s skip those and look to the future: What should the remaining two debates look like?
With format changes a foregone decision, the only question is what those changes will be. We offer these suggestions:
- Get a different moderator. Actually, this is so obvious it doesn’t need to be said, and is moot anyway, because there will be different moderators for the two remaining presidential debates.
- Put Trump in a soundproof booth. Maybe Israel still has the one they used for Adolf Eichmann’s trial and will let us rent it for a reasonable fee. We only need it for a month or so, and we’ll return it to them after disinfecting it. This booth was designed to keep bullets from coming in (Eichmann wasn’t a popular guy in Israel), so it should work to keep Trump’s gibberish from coming out.
- Hire an interpreter. Trump’s voice will be piped to this person through earphones, who then will translate it into English, prefaced by “What he means is … “. This can be either a university linguist or a cryptanalyst. An example of how this would work is:
TRUMP: (“The Proud Boys should stand back and stand by.”)
INTERPRETER: “What he means is the Proud Boys should stay home and watch BLM protests on TV.”
- Award a federal contract to the Lockheed Skunk Works to develop and manufacture YUUUGE popcorn machines. The ones we have now aren’t big enough. More popcorn, please!
Photo: The remaining debates would be more orderly if they used a format similar to the Eichmann trial.
Get rid of the moderator.
Allow wrestling costumes.
Get 3rd party candidates on stage.
Have the daughters of the revolution host and moderate.
full paintball.
Don’t you think it’s sad that political debate in our country has come to this? Will we become the next Syria?