During Donald Trump‘s first 2024 presidential debate, Joe Biden hurt his own 51-year political career to the point that the president was ultimately cajoled by the Democratic Party into withdrawing from his own re-election bid. During the former president’s second presidential debate of the year, Trump took the bait laid out by the moderators, and the newly coronated Kamala Harris decisively did not implode; but in the long run, nothing will likely change much at all.

The stakes for the first debate should not have been high, if only because both Trump and Biden were such constants in American public life for the past half-century, and it was only because of the exposure of the senility the media so carefully concealed that the debate was of any real consequence. By contrast, the stakes for the second debate — between the Boomer celebrity and the young telegenic woman of color, the man everyone knew far too well and the enigma who has adapted to every political preference from celebrating Trump’s border wall to decriminalizing illegal immigration — seemed high.