Biden should not get an advantage for being male. But let’s face it: A presidential candidate is more likely to win if she or he is an alpha, and especially so against Trump. However emotionally stunted or insecure he is on the inside, Trump plays the uber-alpha on TV. That energy is going to have be met. As the Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis wrote in defense of Biden’s bravado, borrowing from an old Bill Clinton saying, “It’s better to be strong and wrong” than weak and right.

In the Sanders town hall, the Vermont senator, along with agitprop filmmaker Michael Moore, lamented that the “corporate media” tries to distract viewers with sensationalistic stories about “Russia” and “Stormy Daniels,” instead of covering issues related to poverty and inequality. Certainly this Biden-Trump dust-up would qualify as a similar type of distraction. But complaining, even noble complaining, is not much of an alpha move. Biden probably isn’t thrilled that his big mouth stepped on his rollout of a set of proposals designed to resuscitate the working class, and his Thursday public forum the Biden Institute to discuss them. Yet I don’t see him wringing his hands about it.

The political reality is that getting into a (rhetorical) fight with Trump gives Democratic voters a chance to assess your fight skills, and preview what a general election might look like.