Cut his mic, don't kill the debates: What Trump's terrible night taught us

There is, so far as we know, only one moment in Donald Trump's long and privileged life in which he was actually made to shut up: the mashed potato incident.

When Trump was 7, his elder brother Fred dumped a warm bowl of mash on Donald's head at the dinner table "because he was being such a brat" towards their younger siblings and wouldn't listen to his mother, according to Mary Trump's family tell-all Too Much and Never Enough. "Everybody laughed, and they couldn't stop laughing," she wrote. "It was the first time Donald had been humiliated ... from then on, he would never allow himself to feel that feeling again." The incident still stings: Trump glowered at the family when they brought it up during a White House lunch in 2017, Mary wrote.

When, in all the long years since, has Trump ever faced actual consequences for running his mouth off? Certainly not in the 2016 presidential debates, where Trump repeatedly talked over Hillary Clinton with impunity. I'll leave you to decide what it says that the outrage only really arrived when Trump did the same to a male candidate, Joe Biden, in Tuesday night's debate. Clinton did reveal that she had longed to say what Biden made the signature line of a difficult night: "Will you shut up, man?"

One of the defects of the American political system is that the president never faces anything like Prime Minister's Questions in the UK, where the PM is routinely hectored by his or her opposition in Parliament and has to sit still until it's his or her turn. The media can't perform the same function. Rare is the hardball question from an interviewer or reporter at a press conference that Trump doesn't interrupt with his trademark "excuse me, excuse me," always said in a tone that suggests he has never understood what those words actually mean.

So it was a major leap forward for common sense when the Commission on Presidential Debates said Wednesday it would adopt "additional tools to maintain order" at the second Biden-Trump face-off. According to CBS, this includes "cutting off a candidate's microphone if they violate the rules" — like speaking after your allotted two minutes is up or interrupting your opponent. Such a rule is long overdue, and it doesn't only apply to Republicans, either. I may be one of the few who remembers the Tim Kaine-Mike Pence debate in 2016, where Kaine embarrassed himself by talking over Pence repeatedly, making the latter look almost reasonable.

Giving the moderator mic-cutting privileges may seem like the smallest concession to order that the commission could possibly make; it may seem like nowhere near enough. After all, Trump has adopted the strategy of one of the former campaign managers he disavows, Steve Bannon, who once advised his boss to "flood the zone with shit." Trump lied so often on Tuesday night, it would take an army of fact-checkers to correct the record in real time. You may have decided after the Tuesday night debacle that you have debate PTSD and cannot watch any more of this crap; having refused to watch Trump on live TV since 2017, I'm right there with you.

That doesn't mean the debates should be abandoned altogether, even though anti-Trump pundits quickly clustered around that opinion Monday night. Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, April Ryan and Bill Kristol all tweeted to the effect that Biden should treat the proceedings as beneath contempt and refuse to debate again. The Atlantic and Slate both ran stories stating exactly that. Nancy Pelosi has been saying since August that Biden shouldn't share the stage with someone who routinely flouts all rules. Doesn't it normalize Trump's nonsense to stick him on a stage like he has any interest in discussing actual issues?

But the tale of Tuesday night tells us something different. First of all, it reminds us that there are actually undecided voters out there. Yes, I know, and I'm going to pause here for whatever comment you'd like to make about these rare beasts, but they are less endangered than you think. According to one recent poll, they make up 11 percent of the electorate. Yes, that's lower than normal; yes, people are unusually engaged this year. Not everyone is as engaged as you are, however. And if all of those 11 percent are actually shy Trump voters, Biden's remarkably stable 7 percent lead looks way less assured.

For many of the 65 million TV viewers, the first debate was their first glimpse of Joe Biden the man, not the dementia-addled caricature the Trump campaign has been drawing. They also saw a different Trump than the one shown at his rallies: confident, unbounded by time, riffing off the top of his head like a stand-up act. Here was a grown man with the inept fury of a toddler: ranting, red-faced, waving his arms, pouring forth deep rivulets of orange-colored sweat. In one of the most memorable responses of the night, a 2016 Trump voter named Ruthie from Pennsylvania told GOP pollster Frank Luntz that Trump looked and sounded like "a crackhead;" she was now switching to Biden.

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Add in the fact that the Biden campaign had its best fundraising haul ever on Tuesday night — $4 million in one hour, almost $10 million over the course of the debate — and you can see why the Vice President isn't keen to do any canceling. Biden told the press he was "looking forward" to the second debate, in Miami on October 15. Official "Shut up, man" shirts were doing brisk business at $30 apiece. Post-debate polls saw a modest amount of movement among undecideds, and one found that even voters without a college degree — Trump's base — thought that Biden had won, 52 percent to 38 percent.

So much for a debate that allowed Trump unfettered access to his microphone. How would he respond if it is shut off after every two minutes of speaking time on October 15 — which is, by the way, a town hall with undecided voters asking the questions directly? Would he suddenly become the model of comportment and grace, or at least sit on his stool and look sulky?

Your guess is as good as mine. But when it comes to a 74-year narcissist who has never been reined in his entire career, is not being told the truth by his advisors, and has demonstrable problems with impulse control, my guess is that Trump will go into meltdown the first or second time his mic is cut. He will try to talk over Biden anyway — something that would clearly be heard by the voters in the studio, but not broadcast to the viewers at home. That's the best of all worlds for Biden, who now has two weeks to craft a raft of you-love-to-see-it zingers along the lines of "will you shut up, man?" And if we're lucky, Trump may storm off the stage altogether.

Let us hope, therefore, that the commission sticks to its guns on microphone-cutting. But if we really want to keep the yapper-in-chief in line, perhaps it's worth considering a more drastic measure: Refuse to shut your trap enough times and you get a bowl of mashed potatoes dropped on your head.