Whatever its ultimate effect on the campaign, the first presidential debate of 2024 certainly did not cast the United States in a favorable light.

It featured two elderly men — one 81, one 78 — who insulted each other and who most Americans wished were not the two major-party candidates for president. One candidate told frequent lies and portrayed the country in apocalyptic terms. The other struggled at times to describe his own policies or complete his sentences.

The image of the nation as some combination of unhinged and doddering was especially striking at a time when the U.S. is supposed to be leading the fight against a rising alliance of autocracies that includes China, Russia and Iran. “I am worried about the image projected to the outside world,” Sergey Radchenko, a historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, wrote on social media. “It is not an image of leadership. It is an image of terminal decline.”

Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, seemingly compared President Biden’s performance to Marcus Aurelius’ failure to find a competent successor in ancient Rome, which hastened the empire’s decline. “It’s important to manage one’s ride into the sunset,” Sikorski tweeted.

Russian officials — whose recent online behavior suggests that they are rooting for Donald Trump — portrayed the debate as a sign of American weakness and disarray. The result “is good for us,” Dmitri Novikov, a Russian lawmaker, said on state television. “Destabilization inside an adversary is always a good thing.”

Where does the campaign go from here? That’s the subject of today’s newsletter.

Solid vs. shaky

Most Republicans are committed to Trump, even as he continues to tell lies and reject core principles of democracy. The situation with Democrats and Biden is obviously more uncertain.