So this is how liberty dies—in the void of an Atlanta TV sound stage plastered with more CNN logos than a NASCAR Camaro, where the relentless march on Washington by an American Mussolini, fueled by lies about everything from national greatness to his sleazy sex life, could not be stopped either by the muzzled moderators or the coughing and occasionally confused 81-year-old who was the last thing standing between the United States and dictatorship.

Everything you need to know about the critical, on-a-ventilator condition of American democracy can be explained by this:

The candidate whose most memorable line was, “I did not have sex with a porn star”—an all-but-certain lie on top of roughly 30 fact-checked falsehoods about important things from NATO to abortion law—and who walked onto the Atlanta stage with 34 felony convictions and civil verdicts of an adjudicated rape and massive financial fraud, and who urged on an attempted coup against the U.S. government, is NOT the guy that pundits are begging to drop out of the 2024 presidential race.

Celebrating four decades of utter fecklessness, consistently choosing candidates not with the goal of winning but with fear-driven hopes of not losing, and consistently siding with rich donors over young people who desperately want a party they can believe in, Democrats are ultimately the ones who threw an 81-year-old deer into the TV headlights of a debate stage.

That guy would be President Joe Biden, who finally beat Medicare—whatever that means—but lost his first debate with Donald Trump, in what may have been his last chance to convince America’s legions of casual, TikTok-besotted, less-tuned-in voters that the oldest president in U.S. history has the strength for another four-plus years in the White House.

It turns out that the president who endured weeks of right-wing conspiracy theories that he was going to be high on Adderall or “jacked up on Mountain Dew” didn’t even bother to take throat lozenges when the moment of truth arrived. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, who gets paid the big bucks to find the humor in such a dire situation, riffed that both men should have been on performance-enhancing drugs, before gesturing at their pictures and slamming down his papers: “This cannot be real life! It just can’t!... We’re America... God!”

But it was real life.

Thursday night, just like many of you, my phone started pinging around 9:05 pm Eastern with texts from nervous and horrified family members, seriously worried about their future. It was a night that reminded me of three other moments: June 6, 1968, when I was a nine-year-old kid walking to school and heard from a car radio that Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was the latest leader to succumb to assassination; September 11, 2001, when I saw the second tower collapse and wondered how I’d ever explain this to my two grade-school children; and November 8, 2016, when Trump’s first election inspired the same kind of frantic texts I got Thursday night, wondering if America was the nation we thought it was.

But our country used to have the resilience to overcome assassinations, riots, even a large-scale terrorist attack. June 27, 2024 felt different. Thursday’s debate didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in a moment when many of our institutions, especially the ones that could be a check on an authoritarian president, are failing—miserably.

In the 48 hours before the lights went out in Georgia, a runaway Supreme Court anticipated the next Trump presidency with rulings that all but legalized political bribery, and made it virtually impossible for federal regulators to stop polluters or white-collar criminals. On the cusp of a Christian nationalist America, Oklahoma’s top educator required Bibles in schools, and a Louisiana law mandated the 10 Commandments in classrooms—because they believe that neither our corrupted courts nor a “Red Caesar” president will dare stop them.

Do not obey autocracy in advance. It’s OK and totally normal to feel demoralized today, but then we have 129 days left to prevent the nightmare of Project 2025 from becoming a reality.

And yet perhaps no once-trusted institution is failing America more right now than the news media. CNN’s stellar fact-checker Daniel Dale went before a national audience and in stunning, rapid-fire fashion, exposed nearly 30 lies by Trump, many of them absurd (like grocery prices have quadrupled) or falsely taking credit for things he didn’t do. But this happened at 11:47 pm, more than an hour after the debate and when most folks were asleep.

CNN moderators Jake........

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