‘God Help Us’: 12 Writers Rate Biden’s Performance at the First Presidential Debate

Times Opinion asked 12 of our columnists and contributors to watch the presidential debate on Thursday night, assess who won and who lost and distill what stood out to them. They rated the candidates on a scale of 0 to 5: 0 means the night didn’t change anything; 5 means one man triumphed. Here’s what our columnists and contributors thought of the event.

Who won and why

Josh Barro Joe Biden failed at his key task: showing voters he’s still cut out for the presidency. In the first 20 minutes he was especially disastrous: mumbling, at times incoherent, and seeming really, really old. Trump seemed more normal than usual — enough for a clear win.

Jamelle Bouie Well, we had a raspy and stumbling President Biden and a deranged and incoherent Donald Trump, who spent two hours unleashing a stream of lies. Is there a winner here? Nah.

David French Trump won, but not because of Trump. The best that can be said about his comprehensively dishonest performance is that he didn’t seem unhinged. The lower-information voters who are propping up his campaign won’t know how much he lied. Biden lost this debate for a simple reason: He acted his age in a way that can’t be spun and can’t be explained away.

Michelle Goldberg Trump, God help us. He spouted a fire hose of preposterous lies, but Biden was too incoherent to capitalize on any of it. Biden looked ancient and sounded lost. There will now be a new chorus of cries for him to drop out, and I’ll be joining it.

Jean Guerrero Trump. He relied on anti-immigrant hatemongering to cast himself as a defender of Black and brown communities. “They’re taking Black jobs, and they’re taking Hispanic jobs,” he said. It was deceptive and degenerate, but Biden had no strategy against it, and nobody fact-checked Trump. His scapegoating will resonate with many struggling people.

Matt Labash Trump was everything he always is, even if a much-restrained, lesser version of it: Trump is still crazy, largely fact-free and dishonest. But Biden needed to convince doubters he was hale and hearty, and he sounded like a dying humidifier or my great-grandfather giving his last will and testament.

Carlos Lozada Despite his multiple falsehoods, particularly regarding Jan. 6 and the state of the economy, Trump won the debate. He won it by forfeit. The Biden of 2020, even the Biden of this year’s State of the Union, did not show up.

Katherine Mangu-Ward Trump won. Obviously. But the message that came across most clearly in this debate is that far too much power resides with the presidency and it’s long past time to rethink the extent of executive authority. (Bonus score of 5 for Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who kept order, politely reiterated questions where appropriate and, above all, functioned as moderators, not arbitrators.)

Dan McCarthy Trump won as the more commanding presence, with a tighter focus on his themes, particularly immigration. He struck a sharp contrast with Biden, who sounded hoarse and seemed to be campaigning from some other century, with his attacks on tax cuts. The president seemed to think he was Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Lydia Polgreen No one won this debate, but there is no question who lost: anyone who plans to cast a ballot for president in November. It was a debacle for Biden. He was barely audible at times. He flubbed answers on his strongest issues, from abortion to democracy. Trump just lied, lied and lied, and no one — certainly not the moderators and, worse, not even Biden — rebutted him in the smallest way. Trump blustered and glowered. He attacked Biden viciously and looked like a bully. This is the choice Americans are facing. This was a disaster for America.

Kristen Soltis Anderson Biden’s demeanor and performance were so unsettling that they overwhelmed nearly every other factor. True debate on substance was rendered nearly impossible.

Bret Stephens Trump, decisively. He evaded questions, made false statements and preposterous claims and was bombastic from the first moment to the last. But he was forceful, confident and energetic against an opponent who just seemed like a very old and very feeble 81-year-old.

Most pivotal moment

Anderson “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.” That is the clip that will make the rounds for the next four months and beyond.

Barro Biden lost the debate with his rambling early answer that ended with him bragging that, under his leadership, we “finally beat Medicare.”

Bouie If by “pivotal” we mean something that meaningfully changed the debate, I’m not sure there was one. Biden gained a little more footing as time went on, and Trump became more agitated, but no matter when you tuned in, it was basically the same.

French The first five minutes. Biden got stronger as the debate went on, but from the moment he began to speak, he did not seem up to the job. Even the split-screen visuals were deeply damaging to Biden. All Americans have experience with age, either their own or their parents’ or grandparents’. You simply can’t persuade them to stop believing the evidence of their own eyes and ears.

Goldberg Trump teed up Biden to talk about abortion with his outrageous falsehood about “everybody” wanting Roe overturned. And Biden responded with an incomprehensible word salad that included, “There’s a lot of young women being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters.”

Guerrero At one point, Biden almost mentioned that immigrants are the reason we aren’t in a recession. But he didn’t finish the thought; he sounded weak and confused. It was devastating. He failed to reshape the immigration narrative as he must do to defeat Trump.

Labash Biden’s brain freezes and non sequiturs. He had more command of the facts. He prepped diligently. But since when do voters care about facts? They tend to vote viscerally. And even if he grew stronger as the night wore on, Biden seemed like he was auditioning for the glue factory.

Lozada The first moment Biden spoke.

Mangu-Ward Asked about their respective advanced ages, the candidates responded by squabbling about who had the lower golf handicap. This was not reassuring.

McCarthy Biden lost his train of thought more than once when discussing Medicare, which, together with his rasping voice, will confirm for many voters that he is mentally and physically unfit for a second term.

Polgreen Trump was absolutely prepared for the Jan. 6 question and seemed to know he could get away with basically anything in his answer. He said: Everything was great, and regardless of what happened that day, Biden has made the country much worse. In a debate in which moderators did not engage in any fact-checking, facing an opponent who simply could not muster a coherent response, Trump just got away with something close to murder.

Stephens Early in the debate, Biden stumbled over his words and lost his train of thought after a question about the national debt. He lost the debate then and there. His very presence on the stage felt like a form of elder abuse.

Something small but revealing …

Anderson Biden claimed to be “the only president” this decade not to “have any troops dying anywhere in the world.” This seems to erase the 13 U.S. soldiers who died in the Kabul airport attack during our withdrawal from Afghanistan while Biden was president. I expect this will be raised repeatedly by the Trump team in the days and weeks ahead.

Barro Trump said he would not block access to abortion medication — something a president could try to do through the F.D.A. or the Justice Department. Who knows if he’d keep that promise? But it’s another example of Trump trying to run away from the unpopular abortion policies his judicial appointees made possible.

Bouie This is not small, but it is revealing: Both campaigns wanted this debate.

French Biden couldn’t effectively make even the easiest arguments. When Trump called America a failing nation, the most mediocre candidate could and should have pounced. He could and should have responded with a rousing, patriotic rebuttal. He couldn’t do it. Even when he got stronger as the debate wore on, he couldn’t make his case.

Goldberg The one true thing Trump said: “We’re living in hell.”

Guerrero Biden was the first person in the debate to bring up a woman who was killed by an immigrant. It was mind-boggling. He contributed to Trump’s vision of immigrants as murderers, when statistics show they’re far less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.

Labash The big loser tonight was my sobriety. The only way to face the awful choice before us is stone-cold plastered. Thanks for nothing, primary voters. This is your fault. The unspoken winner was Jake Tapper’s vest. Vests are elegant and slimming and deserve to make a comeback.

Lozada Given the chance to say that he would not use the presidency to go after political opponents, Trump didn’t really take it. He said that “my retribution is going to be success,” but he finished by calling Biden a “criminal’ who might be convicted as soon as he leaves office.

Mangu-Ward Despite their posturing, the candidates agree on increasing tariffs — even though more trade barriers with China and other nations could raise already high U.S. prices. Trump said the quiet part loud when he asked, “Do you notice he never took out my tariffs?”

McCarthy Biden’s reliance on numbered lists made him sound like a specimen of an earlier era’s rhetoric. It emphasized his age and undercut any impression of authenticity or dynamism. Trump has perhaps permanently changed the way politicians will talk.

Polgreen On substance, Biden had the right answers and sensible policies but struggled to articulate them. But his best lines and most convincing delivery were in response to personal attacks — “My son was not a loser, was not a sucker. You’re the sucker. You’re the loser,” he said of his son Beau, a veteran who died of brain cancer. Biden also came alive in taunts about trivial matters. In an exchange about golf, of all things, saying, “I’m happy to play golf if you carry your own bag.” I couldn’t help asking myself: Where was that passion and focus on the stuff that really matters in this election?

Stephens The golf debate was a moment of inadvertent hilarity.

Jamelle Bouie, David French, Michelle Goldberg, Carlos Lozada, Lydia Polgreen and Bret Stephens are Times columnists.

Kristen Soltis Anderson is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. She is a Republican pollster and a speaker, a commentator and the author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up).”

Josh Barro writes the newsletter Very Serious and is the host of the podcast “Serious Trouble.”

Jean Guerrero is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda” and “Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir” and a senior fellow at the U.C.L.A. Latina Futures 2050 Lab.

Matt Labash, formerly a national correspondent at The Weekly Standard, is the author of “Fly Fishing With Darth Vader” and writes the newsletter Slack Tide.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.

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Additional production by Aileen Clarke.