Biden vs. Trump: The first 2024 presidential debate

In his first interview since last week’s disastrous debate, President Joe Biden appeared too frail to defeat former President Donald Trump and too delusional to end his campaign.

Far from easing anxieties about his candidacy, the president’s sit-down with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News should further alarm Democratic leaders. Biden’s remarks indicated that his party may be heading toward a worst-case scenario, one in which the president is largely incompetent as a campaigner but not so consistently and flagrantly inept that his incapacity to win reelection becomes undeniable, even to himself.

The controversy concerning President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week has largely focused on the electoral consequences of whether he stays in the presidential race or drops out. But it should also raise the question of whether he is fit to govern right now.

During the debate, Biden — said by aides to be suffering from a cold — seemed at times to be unable to string a sentence together, struggled to communicate Democrats’ message on some of the most important issues in the 2024 presidential election, and repeatedly failed to hold former President Donald Trump accountable for his prolific lies.

If President Joe Biden decides to drop out of the presidential race, it appears likely that his replacement at the top of the ticket would be his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Until last week, that possibility wasn’t really worth pondering too much. But after Biden’s disastrous performance at Thursday night’s debate, Harris becoming the Democratic nominee is suddenly a more serious hypothetical — and the clamor is growing. More Democrats are questioning whether Biden should remain at the top of the ticket; one 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, former Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, called for Biden to drop out and cede the nomination to the vice president. Others, like power broker and Biden ally Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, have defended the president, while backing Harris as his replacement should the need arise.

If the goal of national Democrats is to keep Donald Trump out of the White House to protect democracy — and they’ve largely framed the 2024 election in just those existential terms — who is best equipped to do it? And after a dismal debate performance by President Joe Biden last week, is it possible that there is another Democrat better equipped to beat Trump than the sitting president?

Polling gives us one way to answer that question. But it’s not as simple as looking at the topline numbers and deciding that it’s time to dump Biden. The only timeline for which we know anything, solidly, is the one we’re living in: anything else is purely hypothetical, and requires some suspension of belief, some scrutiny in looking at numbers, and some skepticism in how we might expect the public to react.

Following a disastrous performance in Thursday night’s presidential debate, President Joe Biden is facing a flood of calls from Democratic pundits and strategists to step aside and make way for a different Democratic nominee amid real doubts that he is fit to defeat former President Donald Trump in November.

Biden’s time at the debate was full of nonsequiturs, rhetorical errors, off-topic asides, and extended pauses to gather his thoughts. He spoke quietly and with a scratchy throat — his aides say he had a cold. Overall, his performance only added fuel to existing concerns about his age and ability to perform his duties.

Democrats are increasingly panicked about Joe Biden’s 2024 chances after Thursday’s debate. But what will that panic result in?

The party is in uncharted territory. Doubts about Biden’s ability to defeat Trump have grown and speculation about whether he could be convinced to drop out of the race is mounting. Calls for Biden to quit are suddenly widespread in the media, even among commentators who had previously defended the president. Top Democrats are reportedly having similar discussions behind the scenes, but the extent and seriousness of those discussions is not yet clear.

There is no way to sugarcoat President Joe Biden’s debate performance on Thursday night: It was a disaster. He muttered, babbled, and failed to pounce on Donald Trump’s lies and threats to democracy. By Friday morning, the country’s liberal commentators were telling Biden to step down — and, behind closed doors, many Democrats were saying the same thing.

Amid this gloom, I found a ray of hope from an unusual source: Astead Herndon, the New York Times reporter who has been banging on about the political risks of Biden’s age for months (and taking a lot of Democratic fire for doing so). After being proven spectacularly right on Thursday night, Herndon didn’t take a victory lap — he looked to the future.

So many important issues are at stake in the 2024 election: foreign policy, reproductive rights, immigration, the future of American democracy.

But coming out of the first debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, one topic has crowded all those out: Biden’s performance.

Three separate times during Thursday night’s debate, CNN’s moderators asked Donald Trump if he would commit to accepting the legitimacy of the 2024 election results regardless of who won. He never did.

Instead, Trump said that he’d accept the results if he thought they were “fair and legal and good” — while at the same time repeating the false claim that the 2020 election was shot through with fraud (a claim that the moderators let stand).

A comatose Joe Biden would make a better president than Donald Trump. And the president’s capacity to lead the executive branch is, by most accounts, far greater than his capacity to speak in coherent, extemporaneous sentences on CNN.

But the idea that Joe Biden is the best possible standard-bearer for the Democratic Party this November has lost all plausibility.

That President Joe Biden, age 81, is an elderly man is nothing new.

But the first presidential debate between Biden and former President Donald Trump Thursday night has pushed the question of Biden’s age to the top of the public’s consciousness. His verbal stumbles, weak voice (the campaign has said that he was dealing with a cold) and meandering responses to Trump’s jabs and the moderators’ questions are likely to bring up one question: Is there any way Biden could be replaced as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee?

Two very old, often ineloquent white men will get into a lengthy argument in Atlanta on Thursday night — and, quite possibly, change the course of American history.

Some may doubt that the first debate of the 2024 presidential election has such high stakes. There are indeed many reasons to think that this week’s oratorical showdown between Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be of no real consequence.

Former President Donald Trump could soon make an announcement about his pick for vice president, a choice that could prove to be uniquely consequential this cycle.

In past elections, a nominee’s running mate has been closely watched for a variety of reasons. They may bring experience to balance a nominee’s lack of it (think Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden), or they may appeal to a region or demographic that the nominee would like to reach (think Donald Trump’s pick of Mike Pence), or they may amplify a presidential campaign’s message (think Bill Clinton with Al Gore).

The last time Joe Biden and Donald Trump debated, the country and the world were in a mess.

The coronavirus pandemic was raging, the first vaccines were still months away from being rolled out, and Trump had just recovered from a Covid infection (which he might have had when he debated Biden the first time).

There’s no denying that Americans rely heavily on Social Security benefits. Estimates from the Social Security Administration found that 97 percent of adults over the age of 60 are either collecting or will start collecting Social Security. As of February 2023, about one in every five residents in the US collected benefits from these funds. For such a widely used program, it’s a bit surprising that people in the US know so little about how it works.

To be fair, most of the news around this program over the past decade has been about how it’s doomed in one way or another. Millennials and younger people may see the money being taxed from their paychecks and believe they’ll probably never see it again, but is the program really destined to fail? And what do we stand to lose if it does? Check out the video above to get the most basic facts about Social Security in the United States and what to expect in the coming years.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslim immigration to the United States, the targeted assassination of terrorists’ family members, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and enormous corporate tax cuts.

And voters considered him the most “moderate” Republican candidate in more than four decades.

American economic pessimism has been bafflingly persistent despite major indicators showing that the economy is actually strong. Unemployment is low, inflation is significantly down from its 2022 peak (if sticky and ticking up in the last month), wages are up, the stock market is hitting new all-time highs, and it looks like the Federal Reserve might be able to keep the US out of a recession.

Surveys are beginning to capture growing consumer confidence — but for President Joe Biden, the question is whether it’s rising quickly enough for him to avoid being penalized in the 2024 election.

President Trump has been pushing the lie that his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, called Black people “superpredators” — but there’s no record of him doing so.

During the final presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump repeated this accusation in response to a question about Black Americans having to have “The Talk” with their children about how to safely interact with police. Trump skipped over answering the actual question and went straight to a critique of Biden’s record:

Four reputable news outlets, all citing anonymous sources, report President Donald Trump disparaged US troops, veterans, and missing service members, with several outlets reporting he has called military members “losers.” Yet the president, along with current and former staff on the record, continues to dispute those stories.

The reporting is explosive. The denials are emphatic. And the consequences are potentially enormous.