Never get into an argument with a zealot or a fool.
Joe Biden would have done well to remember this in his really rather terrible debate with Donald Trump. Those who assert that his performance was a disaster are correct, but what they're failing to see is the path forward, and it's one that involves adopting a very different strategy to the one Biden tried and failed to use the other night.
No one can out-Trump Trump. He cannot be defeated with belligerence or aggression, nor can his lies be countered with facts in the context of a debate because of the sheer volume of them. The mistake Biden made wasn't to try and debate Trump on his own terms, but to try to 'debate' him at all.
This time, Biden needs to speak directly to the American people at every opportunity. He needs to limit his responses to Trump to words to the effect of, "I'm not going to waste time refuting the lies of a raving lunatic". He needs to acknowledge the mistake of trying to do that in the first debate. By treating Trump as an adversary, he gave him the undeserved status of being not only a legitimate opponent but a viable alternative. Everything Biden does from this point onwards needs to be focused on being calm in the face of lunacy, benevolent to all Americans regardless of their political views, and utterly indifferent to the rantings of the desperate criminal alongside him.
Biden can directly and simply repeat the key facts of his Presidential successes, the specifics of his vision, and the key strategies for how to achieve them. He must accept that he cannot convey them all; he needs to repeat the most potent of his objectives: to grow wages, build infrastructure, and maintain the rights of women.
And most of all, he needs to challenge all viewers to seek out facts; to bypass media sources such as Fox News and CNN and NBC, and head straight to the websites that publish the statistics and facts required to be politically informed. He must challenge all Americans to be politically informed, not by the media but through access to the facts themselves. He needs to actually name websites. In doing so, he can challenge those who've been duped into despising him to prove to themselves that they are intellectually capable of objectivity. He needs to credit his Trump-supporting voters with intelligence. He needs to empower them to look beyond Trump and even beyond himself.
Biden's great weakness is his age. He needs to re-frame it as his greatest asset. A life in politics is now culminating in his last chance to make a lasting difference. The America he wants to create isn't for himself, as he won't be around to experience it. The America he wants to create is for his grandchildren, and for their grandchildren. He needs to assert - quite truthfully - that he has nothing to gain from being President, and in the best possible sense, nothing to lose. He must argue that integrity is ageless, and wisdom requires it. And he needs to pivot back to humbly asserting - whilst Trump raves and rages alongside him - that he is an honest man with friends on both sides of the political aisle, a church-going man, and a proud American.
Nothing will cause Trump to become increasingly unhinged than the feeling that Biden is treating him as an irrelevance. If Biden calmly ignores his attacks, and lies in the next debate, Trump will inevitably attack even more wildly, maximising the chance of an overreach that leads to a stumble. Directly engaging with a man who feeds on attention in any form is doomed to fail.
Biden is a smart man and has repeatedly demonstrated that he can be a courageous one. The courage needed here is to be who he is: an old man, a decent man, and the President of the United States of America.
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