Takeaways from CNN’s presidential debate with Biden and Trump
In their debate Thursday night on CNN, the gap between the 81-year-old incumbent and his 78-year-old challenger seemed much larger.
Biden, hoarse and displaying little vocal range, was often unable to express his differences with Trump with clarity. At one point, after Biden had trailed off as he defended his record on border security, Trump said: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
Trump, meanwhile, at times repeated his frequent election denialism. He said he’d accept the results of the 2024 election if it’s “fair and legal,” but then repeated his lies about fraud in the 2020 election.
“You’re a whiner, and you lost the first time,” Biden said.
It was the first time either man had debated since 2020, and they made history Thursday night: It was the first time a sitting president and a former president had ever debated. The two clashed over abortion, immigration, foreign policy, inflation and more.
At the halfway point, their showdown took a bitter and personal turn. Biden highlighted Trump’s criminal convictions. Trump responded by invoking Biden’s son, Hunter, who was also recently convicted. Then Biden accused Trump of having sex with porn star Stormy Daniels while Trump’s wife was pregnant.
“I didn’t have sex with a porn star,” Trump said.
Here are six takeaways from the CNN debate in Atlanta, moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash:
Biden’s age problem just got a lot worse
The most important job for Biden on Thursday night was to put to rest voters’ concerns about his biggest vulnerability — his age — and turn the election into a referendum on Trump.
He failed to do so.
Biden was hoarse and at times unintelligible. Words often ran together. He stumbled, particularly when he tried to cite statistics and legislation. He rarely raised his voice to hammer home points of emphasis — missing opportunities to attack Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his Supreme Court appointments that led to the reversal of Roe v. Wade’s abortion rights protections and more.
During a discussion of the national debt, Biden claimed credit for “making sure we make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the — with the Covid, excuse me, with dealing with everything we had to do with, look. We finally beat Medicare.”
“He’s right, he did beat Medicare,” Trump responded. “He beat it to death.”
Two campaign sources said Biden has had a cold in recent days.
Though the Democratic primary is long over, his performance is sure to lead to more hand-wringing among party members over whether handing Biden a second nomination with only nominal opposition was the right move.
It also raises the stakes for September 10, when Biden and Trump are set to meet for their second and, as of now, final, debate, hosted by ABC.
Biden’s one-liner offense
Throughout the debate, Biden’s offensive strategy was to again and again deploy one-liners to ding Trump.
Some of the lines were standard Biden fare.
“Every single thing he’s said is a lie. Every single one,” he shot at the former president at one point.
In another, he said, “I’ve never heard so much malarky in my life.”
And in a potentially bright spot for Biden, the president highlighted a 2020 report by The Atlantic that Trump had referred to American war dead as “suckers” and “losers.” He invoked his son Beau, who died of brain cancer after a year in Iraq in which he was exposed to toxic fumes.
“My son was not a sucker. You’re a sucker. You’re the loser,” Biden said.
And during a riff about Trump being convicted for trying to cover up having an affair with Daniels, Biden said, “You have the morals of an alleycat.”
The stark difference in addressing January 6
Put simply: Biden was eager to address the events of January 6, 2021, head on as Trump moved to change the subject, and the difference in the responses between the two candidates were some of the starkest during the entire debate.
When the debate veered toward the attack of the US Capitol, Trump didn’t address themit directly.
He described how the country, at the time, “had a great border,” that “we were energy independent,” and that the United States had “the lowest taxes ever. We had the lowest regulations ever.”
The former president did not address the speech he delivered to supporters ahead of the riot that day, during which he encouraged supporters to “show strength” at the US Capitol.
Biden, by contrast, said Trump “encouraged those folks to go to Capitol Hill” and that while the Capitol was under siege, Trump “sat there for three hours watching” while staffers begged him to do something.
Trump makes news with abortion pill stance
Earlier this month, the US Supreme Court dismissed a case that would have rolled back access to the abortion pill mifepristone. And Trump on Thursday backed the high court’s ruling.
“The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill, and I agree with their decision to have done that and I will not block it,” he said.
From there, Trump reiterated his stance that regulating abortion should be left to the states, and repeated his false assertion that “every legal scholar” wanted to end federal abortion protections. He said he supports exceptions for rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother.
“It’s been a great thing,” Trump said of abortion returning to the states.
“It’s been a terrible thing,” Biden shot back. “The fact is that the vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe when it was decided.”
But while abortion should have been one of the president’s strongest moments of the night, given the emphasis his campaign has placed on restoring access, Biden’s answer instead took a confusing turn and gave Trump an opening to talk about crimes committed against Americans by migrants.
Trump ducks on deportations
The immigration section of the debate was mostly memorable for Biden’s stumble.
But Trump did not directly answer a question about whether the severe immigration crackdown he has promised would involve deporting those who have been in the United States for decades, those with jobs and those whose spouses are US citizens.
Instead, he pivoted into an attack on Biden, arguing that the president bears the blame for crime committed by undocumented immigrants since he took office.
“We’re living right now in a rat’s nest. They’re killing our people,” Trump said. “They’re killing our citizens at a level we’ve never seen before.”
Biden, who had sought to emphasize that illegal border crossings have dropped recently, shot back: “Every single thing he said was a lie.”
What Biden and Trump have in common: blaming inflation on the pandemic
Biden and Trump landed on the same scapegoat when asked to explain their economic records: the pandemic. The back and forth over coronavirus for a moment made it feel like they were picking up where they left off in 2020.
Asked at the top of the debate about one of the most persistent headwinds facing his reelection bid – inflation – Biden said he inherited an economy that was “in freefall” caused by Trump’s stewardship of Covid-19.Biden said the pandemic was “so badly handled” by his predecessor. He quoted Trump saying the coronavirus was “not that serious” when it arrived and poked fun at Trump’s suggested remedy of injecting disinfectant into the body.
“We put things back together,” Biden said.
Trump, for his part, blamed the pandemic for halting an economy he said was “the greatest economy in the history of our country” – a familiar refrain from the former president.
“We got hit with Covid and when we did we spent the money necessary so we didn’t get hit with the great depression,” Trump said.
Trump – who racked up twice as much federal debt than Biden, according to a new nonpartisan report referenced by Tapper – went on to claim that he was about to start paying down the country’s debt when the coronavirus first appeared. He then shifted the conversation to his successor’s handling of the pandemic, including criticizing the vaccine mandates instituted by the Biden administration.
In his retort, Biden began by criticizing Trump’s tax cuts before losing his train of thought. “We finally beat Medicare,” he ended confusingly before his time cut out.
In the discussion of the national debt, Biden claimed credit for improving healthcare services during the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump, however, countered by stating that Biden had essentially "beaten Medicare to death" due to the burden on the system.
During the debate, Biden frequently used one-liners to criticize Trump's policies and actions. One such jab was when he accused Trump of having low morals, likening him to an alley cat.
These sentences contain the word 'politics' as they refer to the political discussions, debates, and criticisms that occurred between Biden and Trump during the debate.
