Who thinks it’s time to replace Biden? Plus: The death of Chevron deference.

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In today’s debate-yet-again edition:

• The debate was a painful routing of substance by style that moderators maybe could have stopped. President Biden wasn’t up to the task, and Democrats are freaking out. And they should be; it’s time to replace the president.
• The Supreme Court kills Chevron deference

Post-debate …

Okay. So. Do you want the bad news or the bad news?

Bad news it is. You know by now that the debate was not pretty, not for Biden and not for democracy. Thirty-five minutes into Thursday night’s debacle, Catherine Rampell said in our columnists’ live chat, “This is excruciating to watch.” Forty minutes in, she said, “I am now yelling at the TV.”

The Editorial Board, in its recap of the debate, characterized the whole thing as “Ninety minutes of pain.”

I want to be very clear: This has just as much — more — to do with Donald Trump’s voluminous falsehoods than Biden’s stumbling, mumbling attempts to bat them down. As I edited late into the East Coast night Alexandra Petri’s satirical summary of the debate, the two of us texted, wrestling with how to balance talking about a thing that’s ultimately a performance even though the stakes are who ends up running the country.

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Where we ended up was moderator Dana Bash turning to the camera at the end of the recap and asking, “Are you waking up in a cold sweat and wondering: How did we get here? How did we decide that live television performance was the best way to determine who should run the country? And how was this that performance?”

Well, how did we get here?

Alexi McCammond thinks CNN fell down on the job by not fact-checking Trump, a topic she discusses in her latest Prompt 2024 newsletter. Erik Wemple, however, points out to her the huge roadblocks to real-time verification, writing that “for media people, I believe we are no closer to cracking the code on whether you can ever allow Trump onto live television, under any circumstance whatsoever.”

But the greater blame might fall on the Democrats who allowed this to happen.

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As Dana Milbank writes in a column engulfed by Trump’s lies, “the truth needed a standard-bearer on that stage.” It is woeful that the country discovered all at once that “Biden plainly was not up to the job.”

Didn’t the people around him know this already?

Karen Tumulty writes that now comes the “Great Democratic Freakout,” not just for the inner circle but for everyone in the party. “The anxieties that Democrats have had all along about Biden’s decision to run for a........

© Washington Post