President Joe Biden got off to a bumpy start in the first 2024 presidential debate Thursday night, appearing to lose his train of thought and leaving awkward silences as he reached the end of his time.
With his second answer, Biden teed up Donald Trump to attack.
Biden was calling out the former president for running up the national debt more than any other president in a single term. But Biden rambled, saying he wanted to make sure “every single solitary person” eligible for “what I’ve been able to do with the COVID—excuse me, with, dealing with everything we had to do with, look… we finally beat Medicare.”
“Well he’s right,” Trump said with a grin, “he did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”
The first presidential debate of 2024—the first in American history between an incumbent and a convicted felon—had kicked off with Biden, 81, and Trump, 78, looking just as old as they are. But Biden looked older.
CNN host Jake Tapper started by asking about relentless inflation and rising prices.
Biden, his voice hoarse and difficult to hear, cleared his throat and said, “There’s more to be done. Working class people are still in trouble.” With his lips shaking, he promised to bring down housing prices.
Trump maintained a sleepy frown. When it was his turn, he praised the soaring economy the country experienced during his administration before the COVID pandemic—but didn’t offer new ideas.
“We had given them back a country where the stock market was higher than it was pre-COVID,” he said with a smirk.
When Tapper questioned Trump’s plan to impose a massive 10 percent tariff on goods from less-than-friendly foreign countries like China, Trump assured the measure wouldn’t drive up prices for everyday Americans.
“It’s just going to cost countries that have been ripping us off for years. It’s just going to force them to pay us a lot of money,” Trump said.
Neither Tapper nor Biden pointed out how that notion would violate the basic economic theories that show imported products will indeed cost more domestically and the costs will be borne by buyers, not producers.
As the debate went on, Biden continued to clear his throat. When Trump railed against government policies as “absolutely criminal,” Biden seemed to struggle to breathe, his shoulders rising and falling with exaggerated movements. Meanwhile, Trump’s signature blonde coif appeared comically flat and arranged as an embarrassing combover.
CNN’s strict rules for this one-of-a-kind debate—no audience, muted mics for the candidate not answering a question—kept things far more civil than the last time these two men argued face-to-face, four years ago. Each candidate took turns answering the questions and abiding by the time limits. And more importantly, Trump didn’t yell over his opponent.
However, Tapper and co-host Dana Bash didn’t do what other moderators have done: counter answers and provide on-the-spot fact checks. When Trump repeated the false assertion that abortion rights would allow women to “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month,” neither moderator took him to task. It was up to Biden to assert “that’s not true.”
In contrast to Biden, though, Trump appeared focused.
Joe Biden delivers remarks during the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta, Georgia.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
When the moderators brought up the rise in undocumented immigration and the waves of desperate migrants fleeing troubled nations for the U.S. southern border, both candidates took the sharpest jabs.
Biden defended his administration’s handling of the crisis but pointed out one of the darkest and inhumane chapters of the Trump years: “He was separating babies from their mothers, putting them in cages.”
But Trump seized on the president’s inability to finish his answer in a coherent way, pointing out how Biden mumbled something about a “total initiative” and “more Border Patrol.”
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows either,” Trump said.
It took 40 minutes for moderators to even hint at the elephant in the room: Trump’s attempt in 2020 and into 2021 to remain in office after losing the election and the way he encouraged a crowd of his MAGA followers on Jan. 6, 2021 to attack the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to halt the certification of election results.
Asked what he would say to voters who thought he violated his oath to defend the Constitution on Jan. 6, Trump blamed former Speaker Nancy Pelosi for turning down his offer to bring in the National Guard. But he also doubled down on the notion that he would use unchecked presidential pardons to give many of the since-convicted felons a ticket out of prison.
“The idea that those people are patriots? Come on,” Biden responded.
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Donald Trump makes a point.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
When Trump suggested that members of the House Jan. 6 committee should go to jail, Biden finally brought up Trump’s recently-incurred vulnerability—guilty verdicts on 34 criminal counts in his hush-money and election interference in New York—replying: “The only person on this stage who’s a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now.”
Continuing the topic of Trump’s support for right-wing extremists, Biden took him to task for claiming that the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally of tiki-torch-wielding white supremacists in Virginia in 2017 was misreported or fake.
Trump called the rally “debunked,” despite the unquestionable fact that it happened—and that Trump at the time expressed mild support for the racists who showed up.
Biden didn’t, however, seize on one of Trump’s biggest gaffes of the night, when the former president spoke about policies meant to slow down human-caused global warming but merely praised his own past administration for keeping water clean, saying, “We had H2O.”
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