There’s Actually One Biden Debate Zinger That’s Had Some Staying Power

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“How many billions of dollars do you owe in civil penalties? For—for molesting a woman in public, for doing a whole range of things, of having sex with a porn star … while your wife was pregnant. What are you talking about? You have the morals of an alley cat.” —President Joe Biden, speaking to former President Donald Trump during last Thursday’s debate on CNN

Less than a day after the first presidential debate of 2024, mere hours into my attempt to cleanse the haunting memory of Thursday’s televised slow-motion political car crash from my mind, I received a text. “Hey folks, it’s Joe,” the headline read. “On Thursday, I spent 90 minutes debating on a stage with a guy who has all the morals of an alleycat.”

It was a callback to an insult from the debate stage, one that Biden used again at a campaign rally in North Carolina last Friday. I’ll admit it has a certain ring to it, but it was curious to see the alley cat line from Biden three times in one week. “I don’t walk as easily as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to,” the text from the president continued. But, the reasoning went, at least Biden wasn’t anything like his opponent Donald Trump, the apparent alley cat.

It’s an interesting window into one of the many problems with this Biden-Trump rematch. During the debate, Trump told about one lie every 100 seconds, according to multiple Democratic officials (claiming at one point that “they [doctors] will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth,” with zero pushback or fact-checking from CNN’s debate moderators), but Biden’s halting, frail, and just plain odd responses stuck with viewers more than Trump’s wildest absurdities. Vice President Kamala Harris (among other top officials in Biden’s circle) predictably attempted to defend Biden, stating to Georgia voters on Friday that “in a real leader, character matters more than style.”

For Biden at least, that’s true; he has the record of more than five decades in politics to prove it. And yet, are we trying to pretend that the current president doesn’t have a certain … style? The alley cat comment was one of few stylistic flourishes from last week’s debate that were reminiscent of what Biden used to be known for—a debate style that is aggressive and full of folksy, old-fashioned witticisms like “malarkey.” A day before the debate, the New York Times even published a whole interactive story about it.

Voters like myself didn’t walk away from Thursday’s debate comparing Biden’s style to his character; we’re just terrified that his style has been replaced with very visible physical and cognitive decline—and that he won’t be able to appropriately lead the country, let alone win his reelection campaign in November.

It’s probably why that alley cat quip actually stuck—it was one of the few lighthearted, meme-able moments of the debate. It immediately trended on Twitter and spiked on Google search. And as expected, internet denizens everywhere started making jokes.

A quick search for a dictionary definition will tell you that an “alley cat” refers to “a person of loose morals; also, a promiscuous woman,” which, yes, makes the insult funnier. Biden was attempting a swipe at Trump over his sleazy sexual encounters with Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, and various other women over the years. Yet as Bloomberg Television’s Joe Mathieu put it in a post-debate segment, “I’m not sure how many twentysomethings have ever heard that word—alley cat—used in that way.”

Fellow twentysomething here: No, I have never heard that specific phrase before. However, I will confess that I understood where Biden was going with it, deducing from context clues and a lifelong love of Disney’s The Aristocats (featuring Thomas O’Malley as the alley cat) and Frank Loesser’s classic 1950s musical Guys and Dolls (featuring the ladies of the suggestive Hot Box Club dancing as black cats in, yes, an alley). Biden’s quip entertained me. It also reminded me just how old he is.

Because the insult—the one vestige of Biden’s formidable and disarming debating style—made me feel like a patron in a Texas saloon circa 1843. For all the campaign’s increased ad presence on Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok—for all the talk about inviting a slew of left-leaning Gen-Z “influencers” to the Democratic National Convention in August for promotional purposes—Joe Biden’s style simply isn’t current. Or at the very least, it simply isn’t current enough.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; after all, sometimes a folksy style of politicking can appeal to audiences if projected successfully. Remember Bernie Sanders in his mittens during Biden’s inauguration? Yet what makes Biden’s style in particular fall flat is how it fails to meet the moment. After all, “alley cat” is a weirdly sedate way to refer to a convicted felon who tried to orchestrate a literal coup. That it was Biden’s best quip of the night is extremely telling. And if that’s all the Biden campaign can offer up in terms of style—to the point of repeating it over and over again, in ads and via text—no amount of character can make up the difference.

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