Biden's gaffes give Trump a weapon: 'Finally beat Medicare'

President Joe Biden got off to a rocky start in the first 2024 presidential debate Thursday night, appearing to lose his train of thought and trailing off into an awkward silence as he reached the end of his speaking time.

With his second response, Biden prompted Donald Trump to attack.

Biden has criticized the former president for driving up the national debt more than any other president in a single term. But Biden rambled, saying he wanted to make sure “every single person” is eligible for “what I was able to do with COVID — excuse me, with everything we had to do, look … we finally beat Medicare.”

“He’s right,” Trump said with a smile, “he beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”

The first presidential debate of 2024, the first in American history between an incumbent president and a convicted felon, opened with Biden, 81, and Trump, 78, looking as old as they were. But Biden looked older.

CNN host Jake Tapper began by asking about relentless inflation and rising prices.

Biden, his voice hoarse and hard to hear, cleared his throat and said: “There is still much to be done. The working class is still struggling. » With trembling lips, he promised to lower real estate prices.

Trump maintained a sleepy demeanor. When his turn came, he praised the economic growth the country experienced during his tenure before the COVID-19 pandemic, but did not offer new ideas.

“We had given them back a country where the stock market was higher than before COVID,” he said with a smirk.

When Tapper questioned Trump's plan to impose massive 10% tariffs on goods from unfriendly foreign countries like China, Trump assured that the measure would not result in higher prices for Ordinary Americans.

“This will cost countries that have been ripping us off for years. It’s going to force them to pay us a lot of money,” Mr. Trump said.

Neither Tapper nor Biden have pointed out how this idea would violate basic economic theories that show that imported goods will actually cost more domestically and that the costs will be borne by buyers, not producers.

As the debate progressed, Biden continued to clear his throat. And when Trump denounced government policies as “absolutely criminal,” Biden appeared to struggle to breathe, his shoulders rising and falling with exaggerated movements. Meanwhile, Trump's signature blonde hairdo looked comically flat and arranged like an awkward jumpsuit.

CNN’s strict rules for this one-of-a-kind debate — no audience, microphones cut off if the candidate fails to answer a question — made things much more civil than the last time the two men faced off head-to-head, four years ago. Each candidate took turns answering questions and kept to time limits. And, most importantly, Trump didn’t yell at his opponent.

However, Tapper and co-host Dana Bash didn't do what the other moderators did: counter-respond and fact-check on the spot. When Trump repeated the false claim that abortion rights would allow women to “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month,” none of the moderators reprimanded him. It was up to Biden to assert that “it wasn’t true.”

But unlike Biden, Trump seemed focused.

When moderators brought up rising illegal immigration and waves of desperate migrants fleeing troubled countries toward the U.S. southern border, both candidates took the harshest blows.

Biden defended his administration's handling of the crisis, but highlighted one of the darkest and most inhumane chapters of the Trump years: “He was separating babies from their mothers and putting them in cages.”

But Trump took advantage of the president's inability to finish his answer coherently, pointing out that Biden had mumbled something about “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 it either,” Trump said.

It took the moderators 40 minutes to address the elephant in the room: Trump’s attempt in 2020 and 2021 to stay in power after losing the election and how he encouraged a mob of his MAGA supporters on January 6, 2021, to attack the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to stop the certification of the election results.

Asked what he would say to voters who believe he violated his oath to defend the Constitution on Jan. 6, Trump criticized former Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing his offer to call out the National Guard. But he also doubled down on his idea that he would use unchecked presidential pardons to give many convicted felons a get-out-of-prison ticket.

“The idea that these people are patriots? Let’s go,” Biden responded.

When Trump suggested that members of the January 6 House Committee should be imprisoned, Biden ultimately addressed Trump's recent vulnerability (guilty verdicts on 34 criminal charges in New York) by responding: “The only person on this stage who is a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now. »

Continuing on the topic of Trump's support for right-wing extremists, Biden criticized him for claiming that the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, organized by white supremacists armed with tiki torches in Virginia in 2017, was misreported or false .

Trump called the rally “debunked,” despite the indisputable fact that it took place — and that at the time, Trump expressed moderate support for the racists who attended it.