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The first presidential debate on Thursday was a disastrous evening for the president Joe Biden.
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Donald Trump has fired off a number of lies and misleading statements about his record.
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But Biden often stumbled over his words, which did little to ease concerns about his age.
Former President Donald Trump, 78, may have lied during the first presidential debate of the 2024 election, but the evening may still have given his campaign a boost as President Joe Biden, 81, struggled to find his footing during the debate.
Trump and Biden had their first confrontation Thursday night, breaking with election norms by holding a debate months before voters went to the polls in November.
Minutes into the event, which was presented by CNN, viewers were confronted with their suspected presidential candidates: a recently convicted criminal and former president with a tendency to lie, and a current president whose gravelly voice and halting words do little to to convince voters that he can survive a second term.
In the end, perhaps facts didn’t matter at all.
“Debates can be lost at any time, but they can only be lost won in the first 20 minutes,” Evan Siegfried, a former Republican strategist and crisis communications specialist, told Business Insider. “Unfortunately, Joe Biden lost all chances to win.”
True to Trump’s style, it wasn’t long before he began spreading misleading or inaccurate information about his own presidential past and that of his opponents.
About the US economy, Trump said it was unlike history during his time in office. In reality, the pandemic led to a major recession and employment plummeted. According to The Associated Press, even without taking into account the impact of COVID-19, economic growth has been stronger under the Biden administration.
At the US-Mexico border: Trump claimed Biden is opening the floodgates to immigrants. In reality, Biden has imposed restrictions on asylum claims and is on track to match the number of deportations Trump carried out during his administration.
On the foreign policy front, Trump also lied about the U.S. trade deficit with China. “We have the largest deficit with China,” he claimed. But the deficit is at its lowest level since 2009, The New York Times reported.
CNN’s fact-checker, Daniel Dale, estimated that Trump made false or misleading statements 30 times during the debate. Biden made misleading or false statements by comparison nine times.
But lying on the record has become normal behavior for Trump, and on Thursday night he vigorously delivered on his promise.
For Biden, the debate could have been a chance to showcase some of the progress he’s made during his administration, and within moments he did just that — but not while convincing viewers that he’s still fit for the job. track.
A persistent narrative circulating around Biden is that the 81-year-old political veteran is too frail for a second term, despite the president’s urgings and assurances from his White House doctor.
A report from special counsel Robert Hur in February said that Biden’s memory and old age were reasons not to charge the president for his handling of classified documents.
As a result, a great deal of responsibility fell on Biden to prove that he is still mentally and physically fit for the job.
During Thursday’s debate, Biden’s voice sounded hoarse as the president occasionally struggled to contain his cough. He stumbled through his answers and rebuttals. In some cases, his statements were incomprehensible.
“We finally defeated Medicare,” Biden said at one point. Trump then struck.
“His voice sounds terrible; he looks terrible,” Siegfried, the former GOP strategist, told BI.
Even prominent Democrats agreed that Thursday was not Biden’s night.
“I think there was actually a sense of shock about the way he came out at the beginning of this debate,” former senior Obama White House adviser David Axelrod said on CNN. “The way his voice sounded — he seemed a little disoriented at the beginning of the debate. He got stronger as the debate went on, but by that point I think the panic had set in.”
Still, it will be difficult to determine the true impact of Thursday’s debate given that the event took place so far before the election, Siegfried said.
“That’s a question we can’t answer because we’ve never had a debate this early,” Siegfried told BI. “Remember, Obama stumbled in the Denver debate against Mitt Romney in 2012, and people started saying it was over, but a few weeks later he got right back on the horse and showed that it was a one-time thing. We’re not going to do that again until the next debate in September.”
“This is a story that will continue for months,” he added. “And it’s a story that’s been going on for the entirety of his presidency.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
