President Joe Biden began the first debate with Donald Trump sounding hoarse.
Everything got worse quickly because he lost his train of thought and was lost in silence.
For three and a half years, the White House has shielded Biden, 81, from questions about his frailty, reducing his schedule before arduous foreign trips, keeping reporters at bay and even swapping the steps of Air Force One for the shortest and easiest. stairs.
But there is no place to hide during a 90-minute debate in front of live television cameras.
When it was his turn to speak, Biden was barely audible at times. When his 78-year-old opponent spoke, Biden stood with his mouth open, his eyes darting back and forth and his jaw slack as if another resident had taken his place at the game room’s puzzle table.
President Joe Biden, 81, had a disastrous performance in the first presidential debate
When Biden was offered the chance to answer questions about his advanced age, he offered a confusing response that veered toward computer chips.
Trump has been reluctant to criticize Biden for his age, given that they were born just three years apart. But he is not a man to ignore an open goal.
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” he said at one point when Biden delivered a word salad about the border.
“I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
The June debate, the first in presidential history, was a gamble driven by Biden’s team.
His advisers believe that most people have not yet tuned into the election and that many had not even realized that Trump was the Republican candidate.
Sharing the stage with the former president, the reasoning went, would wake up audiences to the chaos of the Trump years.
It put Trump and his advisers in a bind. After years of suggesting Biden had dementia or was too frail to stand for 90 minutes, they quickly raised the bar in the two weeks leading up to the debate, talking up the president’s debate skills or suggesting he would be drugged to become a “super soldier.”
They needn’t have bothered.
Donald Trump appeared more vigorous than Biden, although he was only three years younger.
While Biden criticized Trump for his past comments about veterans and the Jan. 6 violence, the televised debates are remembered less for their content than their style.
Especially those moments that occur at the beginning and set the tone for the rest of the debate.
Biden took off within minutes when he confused “billionaire” with “multimillionaire” as he tried to explain that fixing the tax system would allow him to rebuild the country.
“We could help make sure that all those things that we need to do, child care, elder care, make sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system, make sure that we can make every lonely person eligible for what what I’ve been able to do with…COVID,” he said, closing his eyes, his words slowing as if he were fighting the stutter he’s had since childhood.
He lowered his head and tried to continue, but stopped after a few more words.
‘Excuse me… with dealing with everything we have to do with look…’ he said, hesitating again… ‘if we finally beat Medicare.’
Trump looked at Biden with something resembling concern before moderator Jake Tapper stepped in to put the president out of his misery.
Biden greets moderators Dana Bash, left, and Jake Tapper after the debate.
Biden supporters at a watch party in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday night
A television screen shows the debate as the New Hanover County Democratic Party hosts a watch party as former U.S. President Donald Trump takes on U.S. President Joe Biden.
“Well, he’s right. He defeated Medicare,” Trump said. “She killed him”.
That was the pattern for much of the night. Biden stumbled over his words and left the door open for Trump.
If the goal of the appearance was to counter the narrative that an 81-year-old was too old to lead the country, then the night was a disaster.
“It’s not that Trump is doing well; much of what he says is nonsense,” says New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
“But Biden seems to me to be doing a very bad job, not reassuring the skeptics, but rather raising new doubts about his age.”
At times he found his energy, attacking Trump for allegedly calling dead soldiers “losers” and “suckers” when he skipped a planned visit to a World War I cemetery in France.
“My son was not a loser. He was not a fool. You’re the fool. You’re the loser,” she said, in one of the lines of attack that fell flat.
For his part, Trump was reluctant to even say he would accept the results of the November election.
“It’s a fair, legal and good election, absolutely,” he said, but only after being asked a third time.
That will not be remembered from their first debate in 2024.
Biden couldn’t even give a decent answer when moderator Dana Bash asked him to respond to voters’ concerns about his age.
“This guy is three years younger and much less competent,” he said of Trump, before giving a complicated answer about computer chips.
“Those factories, as they call them, to build these chips, those factories pay more than $100,000… you don’t need a college degree for them, and there are billions, about $40 billion that are already being invested and built right now in the United States.” United States,” she stated.
Before the evening began, Biden faced the same challenge as all incumbents: making the election a choice between two candidates rather than a referendum on his time in office.
Now, it appears the race will be nothing more than about Biden’s performance and not about the convicted felon who gave a lukewarm response on whether he would accept the election result.
