Trump-Biden Debate Twitter Recap: Politics Is a Metaverse

Earlier this week, which is to say Sunday night, The New York Times dropped a bombshell, an almost-October surprise just a couple of days too early: President Trump’s taxes. Long a white whale of political journalism, the documents obtained by the Times showed that, among other things, Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016, the same amount in 2017, and no federal taxes for 11 of the 18 years for which the paper had secured returns. In any other election year it would be the kind of thing that Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, could leverage for weeks on the campaign trail. But this is 2020, and to paraphrase Drake, nothing is the same.

Not that Biden and the Democrats aren’t trying. In the lead-up to the first presidential debate, the campaign released a video calling Trump’s taxes to attention and set up an online calculator: "Do you pay more or less in federal income taxes than our 'billionaire' President?" Biden also released his own tax returns Tuesday afternoon. Republicans mostly kept quiet about the news. Trump tweeted about it. Pundits speculated about how the issue would play during the debate.

As it turned out, the president’s taxes were about the least confrontational aspect of the evening. The remaining 90-ish minutes were a barrage of interruptions during which very little sense was made. Each candidate got in their zingers—Biden telling Trump to “shut up” turned some heads—but for the most part, it felt like a Reddit thread turned into a play written by an AI trained entirely on misplaced snippets from Aaron Sorkin scripts. Points were made about Covid-19, about the economy, about climate change, but in the end they didn’t make much sense.

But here’s the thing: No one knows if Americans will still be talking about Trump’s tax returns in a week, or two weeks, or tomorrow. Same goes for health care, or jobs reports. In 2020, news moves fast, and the conversation around it—which, during the pandemic, is happening online more than ever—never stagnates. Moreover, thanks to filter bubbles, these conversations never seem to be happening in conversation with each other. One recent poll found just 1 percent of voters are undecided; polls should always be viewed with skepticism, but it still seems likely that Americans have found their place on the playground and plan to stay there, talking amongst themselves. In separate spheres, what’s sounding in the echo chambers is often based on different assumptions, different interpretations of the facts. (And sometimes “alternative facts,” but that’s a story for another time.)

Americans are, in many ways, living in a political metaverse: a real world enhanced by 24-hour news tickers, reaction GIFs, Twitter threads, TikToks, and countless other points of commentary, most of it tangentially related to what actually happens in the corridors of Washington. Trump and Biden may have been the ones standing and breathing on that stage, but in the end they were avatars—rolling out tweet-ready lines just before getting cut off again, millions of indistinguishable voices yelling back at them from the digital abyss. Lots of folks took Fox News' Chris Wallace to task for his moderation, or lack thereof, but really, has any social network ever managed to do better?

Earlier today, science-fiction writer (and friend of WIRED) Charlie Jane Anders released the latest chapter of her new book Never Say You Can’t Survive on Tor.com. The book is a how-to guide for storytellers and also contains bits about ways to flourish "in the present emergency." The latest chapter relishes the necessity of weirdness. Sharing it on Twitter, Anders noted “the trick the people in power always like to do is to gaslight you and make you think their weird shit is ‘normal’ and ‘sensible.’ Which makes you feel even weirder for not seeing how much sense their garbage clearly makes. Weird stories can help protect us from that nonsense.” The point, she said, was that, for years, writing weird stories was a way of standing up to oppressive structures. Now, they’re a form of comfort, a way of knowing that “you can still be yourself without being smashed like a bug.” Put another way, out-weirding the chaos may be the only way to stay sane.

If all of this is true—if everyone is spending quarantine watching a good portion of public life play out solely via devices, gleaning what they want to glean—then maybe it does help to embrace the bizarreness of this moment. During the 2016 election cycle, I would write columns collecting all the best tweets and memes that came out of the presidential debates. This piece is an attempt to reboot that. There’s too much at stake to just do this for the LOLs, particularly following a debate where the American president, when asked, refused to condemn white supremacists. Instead, this is an attempt to embrace the first face-off between Biden and Trump with maximum seriousness and maximum weirdness. These are the best responses we saw to the first presidential debate of 2020.