President Joe Biden walked onto the debate stage ― the earliest general-election showdown in presidential debate history ― with a mission to reassure the public of his physical and mental fitness for office, and to close some of the polling gap with former President Donald Trump.
The debate was also an opportunity for Biden to put Trump on the defensive over his felony conviction on May 30 in Manhattan.
Though we do not yet have hard survey data, it is hard to imagine Biden, 81, winning over any swing voters who may have tuned into CNN on Thursday night.
Biden looked and sounded like an old man. Especially in the first 20 minutes, Biden’s voice was so hoarse and raspy that his words were often hard to make out. He lacked energy, and he repeatedly trailed off and lost his train of thought.
Trump, 78, came off much sharper, more coherent and more lively. He capitalised on Biden’s worst moments.
In one particularly cringe-inducing exchange, Biden tried to tout his work to empower Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, but he trailed off incoherently.
“We finally beat Medicare,” he eventually concluded.
Trump responded with a lie, claiming Biden was bankrupting Medicare by allowing illegal border crossings to rise. But he got the last word in and sounded crisper.
“Well, he’s right,” Trump responded. “He did beat Medicare ― he beat it to death, he destroyed it.”
Something similar happened when Biden interrupted himself mid-sentence while defending his record on immigration. “I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on ― the total initiative relative to what we can do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers,” Biden said. It was unclear what “ban” he was referring to.
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Here are four more takeaways:
Biden has strong moments on January 6, Trump’s conviction.
One of Biden’s strongest moments in the debate came after a question to Trump about the January 6, 2021, insurrection and whether he had a response for those who say he violated his oath of office by failing to aid Congress during the attack and who worry he will do something similar again.
Trump said he didn’t agree with the premise and instead blamed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser for the U.S. Capitol riot, which resulted in five deaths and left more than 100 police officers injured when hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the building to try to prevent certification of the electoral votes for Biden.
Biden, meanwhile, hammered Trump for sitting idly at the White House while the attack was underway and not telling his supporters to stand down for hours.
“He didn’t do a damn thing,” Biden said. “And these people should be in jail, and they should be the ones who are being held accountable. And he wants to let them all out.”
After defending people convicted for their roles in the January 6 insurrection, Trump then said that former Republican Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, who investigated the Capitol riot, should be in jail.
Biden responded by saying that “the only person who is a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now.”
In another exchange shortly after, Biden again attacked Trump over his felony conviction in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide an October 2016 nondisclosure payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who claims she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied the allegation of an extramarital encounter.
“Think of all the civil penalties you have. How many billions of dollars do you owe in civil penalties?” Biden asked Trump. “Or for molesting a woman in public, for doing a whole range of things, of having sex with a porn star on the night while your wife was pregnant. I mean, what are you talking about? You have the morals of an alley cat.”
Trump responded: “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.”
Trump was evasive and lied – a lot.
Trump may have looked better on the debate stage than Biden on Thursday, but he was untethered from the truth.
Over and over, on issues including the economy, health care and foreign policy, Trump spun lies about Biden’s policies and his administration’s record. He claimed Biden is “going to destroy Social Security” by allowing undocumented immigrants into the program, that Biden would raise taxes on Americans fivefold, that “everyone” wanted to repeal Roe v. Wade, that Biden “made up the Charlottesville story” about inspiring his run for president after Trump defended far-right extemists who rioted in Virginia, and that police officers allowed violent attackers into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to name just a few examples.
At one point, when Trump claimed there were no terrorist attacks around the world during his administration, Biden retorted, “I’ve never heard so much malarkey in my whole life.” The CNN moderators didn’t interject ― at any point in the debate ― and the show quickly moved along.
The former president also dodged substantive questions on climate change, child care and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by offering nonsense responses instead. When asked what actions he would take to combat the harmful effects of global warming, for example, Trump said he wanted clean water.
“I want absolutely immaculate clean water,” Trump said. “And I want absolutely clean air. And we had it! We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever!”
Biden whiffed on what might have been his biggest advantage.
Abortion access is one of the biggest ― if not the biggest ― vulnerabilities for Trump and Republicans in the November election. The party has been twisting itself into knots to make themselves appear moderate on the issue despite the fact that they are responsible for repealing federal abortion rights, which has allowed Republican-led states to enact all sorts of draconian bans on the procedure.
So when an abortion question finally came up about halfway through Thursday’s debate, Biden had a golden opportunity to put Trump on the defensive and pull himself out of a ditch. He started off well enough, noting that many states are putting six-week bans on abortion into place, but then quickly went off the rails by bringing up murders committed by undocumented immigrants ― more favourable ground to Trump that the former president quickly capitalised on.
“There’s so many young women who have been, including the young woman who just was murdered, and [Trump] went to the funeral, and the idea that she was murdered by an immigrant, they talk about that, but here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters, it’s just ridiculous… and they try to arrest them when they cross state lines,” Biden said during the exchange.
“He allowed them to come across the border,” Trump retorted.
Biden eventually recovered somewhat, noting how Trump has danced around the question of whether he would sign a federal abortion ban into law if he becomes president again.
“He takes credit for taking it away. What’s he going to do? Is he going to sign that bill? I’ll veto it. He’ll sign it,” Biden said.
Democrats admit Biden had a bad night.
The reviews from Democrats and left-leaning commentators on television after Biden’s debate performance were brutal.
“It was a really disappointing debate performance from Joe Biden,” said CNN panelist Kate Bedingfield, who had served as a Biden political adviser and White House communications director. “I don’t think there’s any other way to slice it. His biggest issue was to prove to the American people that he had the energy, the stamina ― and he didn’t do that.”
David Plouffe, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, echoed the concerns about Biden’s age and stamina after the debate.
“They’re three years apart. They seemed 30 years apart,” Plouffe said during an interview on MSNBC, referring to the age difference between 81-year-old Biden and 78-year-old Trump.
Even liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow seemed to fault Biden’s showing in his face-off against Trump. After Biden delivered short but more energetic remarks to supporters in Atlanta after the debate, Maddow remarked, “That Joe Biden would have killed in the debate.”
But California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been mentioned as a possible future Democratic presidential contender, defended Biden and urged him not to give up on the debates entirely after Thursday’s debacle.
“We’ve all had those nights,” Newsom said on MSNBC. “Not one person watching hasn’t had those nights. You have good moments, you have bad moments. You wake up the next day, you dust it off and you move forward. It’s all about resilience.”
“He never gives up. He’s never given up,” he added of Biden.