Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, coming at you with a special Friday edition breaking down Joe Biden’s ghastly debate performance in Atlanta, an incoherent and rambling mess that let Donald Trump walk away with an easy victory and a likely bump in the polls that could change the trajectory of the presidential race for good. None of what you saw on cable news panels last night about Democratic panic was hyperbole—a rare feat indeed for cable news.

Believe me, Democrats of all stripes are now in full-blown freak-out mode, angry that an obviously-aging Biden stubbornly sought a second term, frantically Googling how to replace him on the ticket before or during the Democratic National Convention, and blitzing reporters with texts like the ones I received from a longtime donor just as I was writing this: “Talk to me! Are we fucked?” Everyone wants answers and no one has them.

The truth is that there is no Great Replacement Theory for Biden, there is no master backup plan for Chicago, no Wizard of Oz at the D.N.C. who can magically swap in Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom at this late moment. Only Biden himself can make the call to step aside and free his delegates—and the only people he would listen to are Jill, his sister Valerie, and his coterie of longtime trusted aides, confidantes like Mike Donilon and Ted Kaufman and Ron Klain. It’s hard to imagine Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi pressuring him to drop out, and it’s hard to believe Biden would listen to them even if they did.

The Biden campaign insists that he has weathered doubts many times before, and returned from the dead many times to dance on his rivals—and his critics in the press. Their message right now is essentially what Kamala Harris told Anderson Cooper last night on CNN: “People can debate on style points, but ultimately this election and who is the President of the United States has to be about substance. And the contrast is clear.”

But whatever the assurances coming out of Washington and Wilmington, this moment does feel different. After the debate, Dylan Byers and I joined our Puck colleague John Heileman for a conversation on our podcasts about the Democrats’ debate from hell—and where Biden goes from here. You can listen to the full episode here. A transcribed, shortened version of our conversation is below.

Moderator: Thank you, President Biden. President Trump.

Donald Trump: He’s right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.

John Heilemann: So that exchange took place pretty early in this debate. Biden came out tonight and I spent the first few minutes going, I can’t understand him. His voice was so faint and weak. The beginning of the debate was horrible for Biden. There’s no question about it. Give us your sense of the whole night.

Peter Hamby: I know we were all getting texts from panicked Democrats. My first text was from an anti-Trump person saying, I’m going to be calling my accountant tomorrow to make sure I don’t have any problems with an audit.

Right after that, eight minutes into the debate, Jesus Christ, where can we move? This is a disaster. I mean, this was within the first five minutes of the debate, and then Biden had that Rick Perry “oops” moment. I think most people who tune into this debate watch the first 20, 30 minutes, and then zone out. And it was over in the first 10 minutes. It was a Titanic-level disaster for Biden.

John: I won’t play his closing statement, but it was utterly terrible. It’s hard to believe you could give a prepared closing statement as bad as that.

Peter: He didn’t even use the full time.

Dylan Byers: Just to pick up on Peter, you can’t contextualize this debate relative to previous performances, because what happened is he confirmed the worst suspicions everyone had about his age and his ability to step up to the plate in a pivotal moment. And the reaction is unanimous: No self-respecting person on the Democratic side of the aisle in the media certainly sees any way to spin this. So the moment that debate ends, you go to Van Jones, you go to Axelrod, you go even to Kate Bedingfield, his former communications director—

John: They’re all long-time, long-time loyalists—

Dylan: One hundred percent. And all the way down the line, everyone is saying this is bad. I look forward to an effort on the part of the really, really, diehard supporters who try to remind us that Trump lied through his teeth and it was just falsehood after falsehood. And by the way, Biden had some falsehoods as well. I look forward to the people who try to pin this on CNN and say, “If only Jake Tapper and Dana Bash had fact-checked Trump.” I’m sorry, but Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are not running for president. We all know how this narrative and these news cycles go. It’s going to be a conversation about whether or not he should step down and let someone else take his place.

John: This is a guy for whom the question of “Is he too old to serve?” has always been at the core of it. Peter, you talked about text messages you’re receiving.

Peter: I’ll read one. He has to drop out. He should have fucking dropped out a long time ago when every fucking person said that he should have. That was 30 minutes into the debate. Then the conversation moved to whether he should drop out before the convention, whether he should freeze delegates committed to him from the primaries. And then: What if it’s Kamala? Kamala can’t win. There’s a total rabbit hole of panic among Democratic professionals.

We’ve all seen the clips that the R.N.C. puts out on Twitter of Biden wandering off and mumbling. And a lot of them, yes, are out of context, but this was a mass media moment, a monoculture Super Bowl moment, where so many people are tuning in and maybe seeing these questions arise for the first time. And those questions were being validated within the first minutes.

Dylan: There’s an audience out there that is probably just waking up to how real the Biden age and acuity issue is. Back in February, when the Robert Hur report came out, I talked to members of the White House Press Corps and I said, “You guys have had a front-row seat to the president. What are you thinking now?” And what they told me for that story, I’ve got quotes right here: “It was something that we felt indelicate to talk about.” They felt a lot of pressure not to write any more stories than they had to. One reporter told me, “The amount of time we spent talking about it, versus the time we spent reporting on it, was not the same.”

There should have been tougher, scrutinizing coverage of his age earlier. And yet from February until now, every time people talked about Biden’s age or every time the R.N.C. put out those videos, the issue was that it was unfair and the wrong thing to focus on. Well, I’m sorry, but you can’t make that argument after tonight’s debate.

He lied a lot. He always lies a lot. I’m not dismissing that, but as a matter of affect, he was more presidential looking—if you watch with the sound off as Alex Castellanos used to say. He kept his cool to a degree that a lot of people didn’t expect he would.

Peter: That’s the thing. A media executive texted me and said, People forget television debates are emotional. And Trump is a great emotional communicator. I’m interested to hear why you think Don Jr. was right about the format, and why the guidelines helped Trump. My warmed-over conventional wisdom take before the debate was probably like everyone else’s, which is that we’ve seen Trump so many times feed off his studio audience, like in that CNN forum last year where he talked all over Kaitlan Collins and the crowd was cheering him on.

So I thought he would be a little neutered. Instead he just had to sort of sit there and let Biden talk—because Biden was so bad, and it felt like Trump understood that. At one point he was like, I don’t even know what he said. I don’t think he even knows what he said. And he just let Biden keep talking while he sat there, and he kept to his time. There were a couple points when he couldn’t resist being Trump. He went back to the suckers and losers thing three times, but for the most part he stayed on topic on the issues he wanted to talk about.

John: People will hate us for grading on a curve, but you’ve got to with Trump, because we’ve seen him be so self-destructive and so terrible as a debater, as a public performer. Tonight you saw Biden more often try to talk over the mute button than Trump did. Again, it’s not like I’m trying to say that Trump was a model citizen up there, but you think about what we’ve seen from him in presidential debates in the past, and his motor was not running super hot tonight.

Dylan: He kept it together. In fact, the moments that felt most Trumpian was when you had Biden calling Trump a loser or a sucker or a whiner. That name-calling, to me, actually feels very reminiscent of Trump.

Peter: I thought that felt very out of place for Biden too, it felt like he diminished himself a little.

Dylan: Going back to the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960: Style matters, optics matter, visuals matter. Your demeanor matters and your ability to carry on a debate and look strong. Axelrod brought up a point on the postgame on CNN, where he said if someone else had been up there against Trump, it might not have been such a great night for Trump, because he did say a lot of things that weren’t true. And if you had someone who could have kept pace with him, then that would’ve been a very different night for Trump. But the fundamental problem with tonight’s debate is that Biden wasn’t capable of doing that—and it came through with the volume on or the volume off.

Tonight in my text messages, a very senior strategist said the panic will start tomorrow. And I texted that to another very senior strategist, who texted back, Wrong, the panic is starting now. I texted one of the richest people in America, a huge Biden supporter, who has had Biden to his house relatively recently. I asked, How many Democrats, elected Democrats or people in your category of wealth, are texting you tonight talking about needing another nominee? And he said, Everyone. It’s beyond anything I’ve ever seen before. I’m on the floor. If we don’t change the nominee, the race is over.

Now, you can say that’s hair on fire. But I have at least a half-dozen Democratic senators in my text threads, and about 15 members of the House, and a bunch of really, really rich Democratic donors, and all of them are asking, What options do we have? How would this work? This is a complete calamity. The Daily Mail wrote a piece a few weeks ago that said the Clintons, the Obamas, Nancy, and Chuck had a conversation about going to Biden to try to get him to step down if he shit the bed in the debate. I don’t regard the Daily Mail as a credible media outlet, but four or five sources tell me that at least part of that is true. I think it mostly revolves around Nancy and Chuck, who are starting to freak out about what might happen to Democrats in the Senate and the House.

Peter: What’s striking is the level of anger coming from normal Democrats, not professional Democrats, people who just want to vote against Trump and get this over with, even if they’re not in love with Biden, who are texting me their anger. It’s because so much feels at stake. Biden, by the way, never said, “I will be a transitional president.” He hinted at it. A lot of people took that to heart, and after the midterms he could have walked away like Michael Jordan after hitting that shot against the Jazz and been a hero forever to Democrats. After the midterms, Jill and Valerie Biden, and Ron Klain and Mike Donilon and Ted Kaufman should have been like, Hey man, you did your duty. You’re a historic figure. Time to pass the torch.

But is J.B. Pritzker going to go to him and say, Time to step aside, sir? The problem is that the people he would listen to in this scenario are his family. It’s Jill, Mike, Ted, Val, maybe Anita Dunn—this very inner circle group of people that he relies on, and that have been his core group for decades. Unless one of them, or a group of them, comes and says, Hey man, you got to pull the plug, I don’t see it happening.

There will be some members of the House who will go on cable news this weekend and on Meet The Press and say he should step aside. They’ll tweet it. Julián Castro, who doesn’t like Biden very much anyway, tweeted tonight that this was a disaster. The problem is, it has to happen now. The convention is in August. Okay, you’re right. Biden would have to say, I am stepping aside, I’m freeing my delegates. Then there would be this very interesting jousting between all the wannabes, the Kamalas and the Newsoms and the Whitmers, etcetera, to somehow wrangle delegates. Or the D.N.C. could put together some kind of sprint caucus system in a bunch of states over the next couple months before the convention. I remember when there was talk about Biden stepping aside, or being pushed out, or an open convention, all the 1968 stuff, a few months ago. I did my best to understand the Siamese twinning of the D.N.C. rules and bylaws. If Biden is the nominee after the convention, there’s nothing you can do. There’s really nothing you can do. If he dies, if there’s a health issue—

John: If he’s incapacitated—

Peter: Yes. The D.G.A. and congressional leadership, they have to figure something out. In that case, it’s probably Kamala Harris. But the starting moment would be his inner circle of advisors and family responding to what is a very different level of pressure right now and making it happen between now and August. And that’s a very tight window.

John: I will end by saying one thing—and this is a time before social media and it shows how old I am or whatever—but Bill Clinton, in 1995, after the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1940, Clinton did an hour and 20 minute State of the Union. He talked about school uniforms, cell phones in urban neighborhoods, and everybody who watched it in Washington, D.C.—media people like us, political people, reporters, pundits, electeds, donors—they all said, This is the most boring, tedious State of the Union in the history of the world. And then they polled it, and it turned out the public loved it, and it turned out to be the launching pad of Clinton’s reelection.

I’m not saying that’s going to happen here, but if you’re on the Biden campaign, you’re thinking about what your strategy is to get through the next week. And maybe you get some polling that says Biden’s numbers didn’t change very much. And even say the polls do move—and say they lose a point in Michigan—they can say, “We can make that up. He didn’t lose any ground in Wisconsin. You guys are all just insiders. The American people don’t care, or among the small slice of the electorate who are going to make the difference, the polls haven’t moved. So we’re in exactly the same place we were before the debate. Everyone just calm down.” And if they have data on their side, that’s a strategy for getting through. But man, it is going to be an ugly fucking weekend in Biden town.