What we learned from the Biden-Trump presidential debate

CNN
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President Joe Biden is three years and seven months older than former President Donald Trump.

During Thursday night’s debate on CNN, the gap between the 81-year-old incumbent president and his 78-year-old challenger seemed much wider.

Biden’s voice was raspy and limited in range and he often struggled to articulate his differences with Trump. At one point, after Biden lowered his voice while defending his record on border security, Trump said, “I have no idea what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said.”

Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly denied the election results at times, saying he would accept the results of the 2024 election if they were “fair and lawful” but then repeating his lies about fraud in the 2020 election.

“You’re a whiner, and you lost last time,” Biden said.

On Thursday night, the two made history as it was the first time the two have debated since 2020, as it marked the first time a sitting president and a former president have debated each other. The two sparred over abortion, immigration, foreign policy, inflation and more.

At the midpoint, their showdown took an intense and personal turn. Mr. Biden highlighted Mr. Trump’s conviction. Mr. Trump responded by bringing up Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, who was also recently convicted. Mr. Biden then accused Mr. Trump of having sex with porn star Stormy Daniels while his wife was pregnant.

“I don’t have sex with porn stars,” Trump insisted.

Here are six takeaways from the CNN debate in Atlanta, moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

Biden’s most important task on Thursday night was to allay voter concerns about his biggest weakness – his age – and turn the election into a referendum on Trump.

He couldn’t do that.

Biden’s voice was raspy and at times unintelligible. He often stuttered, especially when trying to cite statistics or laws. He rarely raised his voice to emphasize a point. He missed opportunities to attack Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his Supreme Court appointments that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion rights protections.

During a discussion of the national debt, Biden praised the “COVID response, no, we’ve dealt with everything that needs to be done, we’ve made sure that everybody gets their benefits, we finally beat Medicare for All.”

“He’s right. He defeated Medicare,” Trump responded. “He defeated it like crazy.”

Two campaign officials said Biden had been suffering from a cold in recent days.

Though the Democratic primary is long over, Biden’s performance is sure to cause further angst among party members about whether giving him the nominal nomination for a second time was the right decision.

It also increases the importance of Sept. 10, when Biden and Trump are scheduled to face off in the second and so far final debate, hosted by ABC.

Throughout the debate, Biden’s attack strategy was to repeatedly deploy one-liners critical of Trump.

Some of the lines were standard Biden fare.

“Everything he said is a lie. Everything,” he blasted at the former president.

In another statement, he said he had “never heard such a ridiculous story in my life.”

And in a potential bright spot for Biden, Trump addressed a 2020 Atlantic magazine article in which he called American combat veterans “morons” and “losers,” referencing his son Beau, who died of brain cancer after a year of exposure to toxic gases in Iraq.

“My son wasn’t stupid. You’re a fool. You’re a loser,” Biden said.

And during a discussion of Trump’s conviction for trying to cover up his affair with Daniels, Biden said, “You have the morals of a wild cat.”

Simply put, Biden was keen to address the events of January 6, 2021 head-on when Trump tried to change the subject, and the difference in the two candidates’ responses was one of the most striking throughout the debate.

As the debate turned to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, Trump did not directly address it.

He said the U.S. at the time “had great borders,” “was energy independent,” “had the lowest taxes in history,” and “had the lowest regulations in history.”

The former president did not mention a speech he gave to his supporters ahead of the riot that day, in which he urged them to “show strength” at the U.S. Capitol.

In contrast, Biden said Trump “urged people to go to the Capitol” and that he “sat there and watched for three hours” as staff pleaded with him to do something while the Capitol was under siege.

Earlier this month, the US Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit that sought to restrict access to the abortion drug mifepristone, and President Trump upheld the court’s decision on Thursday.

“The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill and I support that decision and I’m not going to block it,” he said.

Trump then reiterated his position that abortion regulation should be left to the states, falsely claiming that “all legal scholars” want to eliminate federal abortion protections, and said he supports exceptions for rape, incest and the protection of the mother’s life.

Trump said abortion being restored to the states was a “great thing.”

“That’s terrible,” Biden fired back. “The fact is, when the case was decided, the vast majority of constitutional law scholars upheld Roe.”

But while the abortion issue was meant to be one of the president’s strongest statements of the night, with his campaign focused on restoring abortion access, Biden’s response turned out to be rather confusing and gave Trump an opening to talk about crimes committed by immigrants against Americans.

Biden’s stumbles were particularly striking during the immigration portion of the debate.

But Trump did not directly answer a question about whether his promised tough immigration crackdown would include deporting people who have been in the U.S. for decades, who have jobs or whose spouses are U.S. citizens.

Instead, he turned to attack Biden, claiming the president is responsible for crimes committed by illegal immigrants since he took office.

“We’re in a dangerous situation right now. They’re killing our people,” Trump said. “They’re killing our people at a level we’ve never seen before.”

“Everything he said is a lie,” Biden countered, as he sought to highlight a recent drop in illegal border crossings.

Biden and Trump have one thing in common: They blame the pandemic for inflation

When asked to explain the state of the economy, both Biden and Trump invoked the same scapegoat: the pandemic, and for a moment the coronavirus debate seemed to pick up where 2020 left off.

Asked early in the debate about inflation, one of the most persistent headwinds to his reelection bid, Biden said he inherited an economy that was “in freefall” because of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. Biden said his predecessor’s handling of the pandemic was “so bad.” Biden quoted Trump as saying the coronavirus “wasn’t that bad” when it arrived and mocked Trump’s treatment of injecting disinfectant into the body.

“We got things back on track,” Biden said.

Trump, meanwhile, blamed the pandemic for shutting down what he called “the greatest economy in the history of our country” — a common refrain from the former president.

“We had the coronavirus hit us, and then we put in the money we needed to make sure we didn’t have a major depression,” Trump said.

Trump, who has twice the federal debt as Biden, claimed he was trying to start paying down the national debt when the coronavirus first emerged, according to a new bipartisan report referenced by Tapper. Trump then shifted the conversation to his successor’s response to the pandemic, including criticizing the vaccination mandate put in place by the Biden administration.

In his rebuttal, Biden began to criticize Trump’s tax cuts but then lost his train of thought. “We finally defeated Medicare,” he finished, confused, before running out of time.