President Joe Biden looked old and disoriented during Thursday’s CNN debate with Donald Trump. He spoke in a quiet and hoarse voice, made some incoherent answers, and often stumbled over his own words.
It was a lackluster performance that played directly into Republican depictions of the 81-year-old president – the oldest president in American history – as too old, frail, and cognitively diminished to serve another four years in office. Trump said as much during the debate.
“He’s not equipped to be president,” Trump said. “You know it and I know it.”
The debate was a highly personal affair between two men who made little effort during their nearly two hours on stage to contain their disdain for one another. Biden called Donald Trump a “loser,” and a “whiner” with the “morals of an alley cat.” Trump accused Biden of turning the United States into a “third-world nation” and of being the “worst president in history by far, and everybody knows it.”
Trump turned in a spirited performance, hammering Biden on inflation and the immigration crisis under his watch. But Biden’s struggles seemed to be the major takeaway for CNN’s post-debate panel, which reported that senior Democrats are in an “aggressive panic” over their party leader’s apparent frailty.
Speaking about improvements he’s claiming at the border, Biden at one point seemed lost, saying: “I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on, the total initiative relative what we’re going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers.”
“I don’t really know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump replied. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
At another point, Biden got visibly lost when talking about his plan to raise taxes on the wealthy to wipe out the debt, saying he wanted to make sure “that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with, with, 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, “he did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”
As is typical, Trump told some whoppers and greatly exaggerated his own accomplishments and the struggles that nation has endured under Biden. He claimed responsibility for the “greatest economy in the history of our country,” and blamed Biden of turning the southern border into “the most dangerous place anywhere in the world” and being willing to rip babies “out of the womb in the ninth month.”
During the night, Trump took multiple opportunities to attack Biden’s record on immigration. Biden, he said, “allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails, and mental institutions, to come into our country and destroy our country.” He accused Biden of allowing illegal immigrants to take “black jobs.”
Biden often seemed to struggle with Trump’s barrage. “Every single thing he said is a lie. Every single one,” Biden said after Trump accused him of responsibility for killing “so many people at our border.” He said Trump has “no idea what he’s talking about” regarding foreign policy. He said he’s “never heard so much malarky in my whole life.”
On abortion, Trump made a clear move to the center, clearly stating that he will not block access to the abortion pill after the Supreme Court declined to do so last week. “The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill, and I agree with their decision.”
He insisted that overturning Roe v. Wade and returning abortion policy to the states is “something everybody wanted.” On the issue of abortion, Trump said you you have to “follow your heart,” but he also noted that “you’ve to get elected.”
Regarding appointing three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe, Biden said “it’s been a terrible thing what you’ve done.”
At one point, Trump attempted to dodge a question about whether he violated his oath of office by encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“I don’t believe too many believe that,” he said of the charge. “And let me tell you about January 6. On January 6, we had a great border. Nobody coming in, very few. On January 6, we were energy independent. On January 6, we had the lowest taxes ever, we had the lowest regulations ever. On January 6, we were respected all over the world. All over the world we were respected.”
“And then he comes in and we’re laughed at like a bunch of stupid people.”
Biden took aim, saying that Trump is “the only person on this stage who is a convicted felon” and “there was no effort on his part to stoop what was going on on Capitol Hill.”
Biden’s performance on the stage clearly rattled Democrats. In a post-debate interview, Vice President Kamala Harris was defensive and clearly frustrated when CNN’s Anderson Cooper questioned if she was concerned. “I’m not going to spend all night with you talking about the last 90 minutes when I’ve been watching the last 3 ½ years of performance,” she said.
“It was a slow start. That’s obvious to everyone,” she added.
But holding a debate in June, particularly early in a presidential cycle, appears to have been Biden’s idea in the first place. In mid-May, he taunted Trump in a video on X, urging Trump to debate him and to “make my day, pal.”
Biden’s camp saw an early debate in June as an opportunity to show voters, who may not yet be paying close attention to the race, that the 81-year-old has the stamina to continue as president. It seems unlikely that Thursday’s performance is going to help him.
Polls show Biden narrowly trailing Trump nationally and in most of the critical swing states, though he has seen some improvement since Trump’s criminal conviction on 34 felonies in New York in May. Real Clear Politics polling averages show Trump up in Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, and the candidates tied in Wisconsin. Polls also show Biden losing support among black voters, a key Democratic constituency.
Only about 40 percent of voters approve of Biden’s job performance more than three years into his first term, according to Real Clear Politics.
Biden’s team looked at Thursday’s debate as a possible turning point, and an opportunity to remind voters about Trump’s flaws as a leader and about the chaos that inevitably follows him. The president spent most of the last week at Camp David practicing in mock debates.
Trump’s supporters have spent the weeks leading up to the debate urging him to focus on Biden’s record on key issues like inflation, crime, and the immigration crisis that are important to voters, and to avoid relitigating the 2020 election, which Trump still insists was stolen from him. Trump was also tasked with dispelling concerns about his temperament.
Trump’s camp tried to tamp down expectations, claiming that unlike Biden, Trump hasn’t engaged in intensive debate prep. They also attempted to raise expectations for Biden. “Joe Biden has been doing this successfully for 50 years,” a Trump adviser told reporters this week. “After taking an entire week off, he’s going to be ready for this.”
Trump has suggested that Biden takes performance-enhancing drugs to appear lucid, and he called for pre-debate drug testing.
Ahead of the debate, Trump’s team launched a website, factcheckbiden.com, which says that in his five decades in politics Biden’s debate performances “are often filled with lies — about himself, about statistics, about his record, and about events that never took place.”