Russian state media was initially dismissive of Thursday night’s debate between former U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. President Joe Biden, as the Kremlin blithely insisted the U.S. presidential race was “not on our radar.”
On Friday morning, the tenor of Russian coverage had changed, as state media gleefully reported that Biden’s disastrous performance put the “final nail” in his “political coffin.”
“It’s not on our radar. We have a lot of issues that matter much more for our country, that are relevant for us. These are the issues that our president is focusing on. The U.S. debate does not fit into these priorities,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said when asked if Moscow was following the debate and its tumultuous aftermath.
Peskov claimed to be equally blasé about changes in European Union leadership, scoffing that his Kremlin bosses “do not think that European diplomacy will do anything to normalize relations.”
“I don’t think you can expect the Russian president to set his alarm clock to wake up early in the morning for a U.S. debate,” he said when asked if President Vladimir Putin watched the U.S. presidential debate.
“We are absolutely not going to evaluate these debates, this is an internal matter of the United States, this is the U.S. election campaign. We have never interfered in United States election campaigns,” he huffed.
On Friday morning, Russian state media became quite interested in “evaluating” the Biden debacle. Sputnik, for example, asked California psychiatrist and author Carole Lieberman to dissect Biden’s performance.
“It seems like he was on some performance-enhancing drug, but it was either a lower dose or a less potent drug, or they didn’t take into consideration that his cognitive decline was worse since the State of the Union,” Lieberman said.
Liberman noted that Biden had “a hollow stare, a shaky voice, and seemed as though he might not make it through the whole 90 minutes – but was going to collapse right there.”
“Biden showed some of the typical signs of lying, such as being short of breath, having a rigid body, staring, shuffling, and having increasing difficulty trying to speak,” she said, judging that the sitting president’s biggest problem was “getting lost in the middle of sentences.”
In contrast, Lieberman thought Trump looked “much stronger and passionate” about the problems with America and “his desire to fix it,” although she took back a few points for Trump allowing his “narcissism” show.
“He needs to tone this down a little so more people can feel warm and fuzzy towards him,” she advised.
Sputnik and the state Tass news service enjoyed watching left-wing U.S. media “panic” over Biden’s poor performance. Tass did a little roundup of the best flop-sweat media analysts:
NBC TV channel quoted a party strategist as saying that “Democrats just committed collective suicide” as he described Biden’s “babbling” performance as “a nail in the political coffin” of the current leader.
The New York Post echoed this view as it wrote that millions “witnessed the end of a presidency live on television,” arguing that letting Biden continue to run for re-election is “political malpractice and national malpractice.”
New York Times opinion columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristoff said that Biden should pull out of the presidential race unless he wants Trump to move into the White House in January.
Tass cited a few snap polls that said viewers thought Trump “crushed Biden” and “dominated the debate.”
Unsurprisingly, one of the favorite moments for Tass editors was when Trump accused Biden of “scandalizing his ties with Moscow.”
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