Joe Biden mumbles and drags Democrats into crisis

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 response, Biden launched Donald Trump tackle.

Biden blamed the former president for increasing the national debt more than any other president in a single term. But Biden rambled, saying he wanted to make sure “every single person” was eligible for “what I've been able to do with COVID – excuse me, with everything we've had to do, look… we finally beat Medicare.”

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

The first presidential debate of 2024, the first in American history between an outgoing president and a convicted felon, opened with Biden, 81, and Trump, 78, looking as old as they did. 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 more to do.” Working class people are still struggling. With trembling lips, he promised to bring down real estate prices.

Trump maintained a sleepy frown. When it was his turn, he praised the economic boom the country had experienced under his administration before the COVID pandemic, but offered no 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.

“It’s just going to cost the countries that have been defrauding us for years. It’s just going to force them to pay us a lot of money,” Trump said.

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

As the debate wore on, Biden continued to clear his throat. When Trump denounced the government’s policies as “absolutely criminal,” Biden appeared to struggle to breathe, his shoulders rising and falling in exaggerated motions. Meanwhile, Trump’s signature blond hair looked comically flat and arranged like an embarrassing 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.”

Unlike Biden, however, Trump seemed focused.

When the moderators brought up the rise in illegal immigration and the waves of desperate migrants fleeing troubled nations toward the U.S. southern border, the two candidates exchanged the most vicious 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, putting them in cages. »

But Trump took advantage of the president's inability to finish his response coherently, pointing out that Biden had mumbled something about a “total initiative” and “more border patrols.”

“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 moderators 40 minutes to allude to the elephant in the room: Trump's attempt in 2020 and 2021 to stay in power after losing the election and the way he encouraged a mob of his MAGA supporters on January 6, 2021 to attack. the U.S. Capitol in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the certification of the election results.

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

“The idea that these people are patriots? Come on, Biden replied.

When Trump suggested that members of the Jan. 6 House Committee should be imprisoned, Biden ultimately brought up Trump's recent vulnerability (34 criminal charges for his money-trafficking and election interference in New York) 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 mild support for the racists who attended it.

Biden, however, didn't capitalize on one of Trump's biggest gaffes of the night, when the former president talked about policies to slow man-made global warming, instead praising his own past administration for keeping water clean, saying, “We had H2O.”

Four years ago, the first debate between these two men opened with a question about the future of the US Supreme Court and Trump's decision to move forward with the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, its third right-wing justice, on the eve of the 2020 election.

It was a prescient topic, and in Atlanta it once again cast a shadow over a presidential debate, given that the high court – and Barrett's presence on it – could this time determine the fate of Trump. The nine justices are currently deciding whether to grant Trump immunity from one, or possibly two, of the criminal cases he will face in the coming months.

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