ATLANTA — President Joe Biden was supposed to put the nation’s mind at ease over his physical and mental capacity with his debate showing Thursday night.
But from the onset of the debate, the 81-year-old struggled seemingly even to talk, mostly summoning a weak, raspy voice. In the opening minutes, the president repeatedly tripped over his words, misspoke and lost his train of thought.
In one of the most notable moments, Biden ended a rambling statement that lacked focus by saying, “We finally beat Medicare,” before moderators cut him off and transitioned back to Trump.
While Biden warmed up and gained more of a rhythm as the debate progressed, he struggled to land a punch against Trump.
Trump — unleashing a torrent of bad information — didn’t hesitate to pounce on Biden, saying at one point that he didn’t understand what Biden had just said with regard to the border.
“I don’t know if he knows what he said either,” Trump said.
Nearly an hour into the debate, a Biden aide and others familiar with his situation offered up an explanation for the president’s hoarseness: He has a cold.
Even the Biden campaign acknowledged that the debate would be a critical moment in the election, with officials hoping it could shake up the race to the president’s benefit. Most polls have found the race to be neck and neck, a razor-thin margin that has remained unchanged for months, even after a jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts.
Questions about Biden’s age and frailty have dragged on his polling numbers for months. The public concerns are exacerbated by deceptively edited videos, some of which have gone viral, that cut off relevant portions of an event, making it appear as if Biden is wandering, or confused. This was Biden’s first opportunity — since the State of the Union speech — to dispel that narrative.
Instead of a new beginning, many Democrats saw it as a moment for panic.
“Democrats just committed collective suicide,” said one Democratic strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns. “Biden sounds hoarse, looks tired,and is babbling. He is reaffirming everything voters already perceived. President Biden can’t win. This debate is a nail in the political coffin.“
“It’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t nominate someone else,” a Democratic consultant who works on down-ballot races added.
Biden did ramp up as the debate progressed.
“Only one of us is a convicted felon and I’m looking at him,” Biden said to Trump. That was one moment that tested really well with internal simultaneous Biden campaign polling at the time of the debate, according to a person familiar.
A Biden aide said it was “not an ideal start” for the president at the beginning of the debate, but that there was “no mass panic” at the campaign headquarters in Delaware.
Trump, meanwhile, has fended off his own questions over whether he’s diminished by age, including that he struggles to stay on topic and meanders when speaking. Biden has posited that the former president “snapped” after his 2020 election loss and is unstable. Biden, though, had prepped for the possibility of “two Trumps” appearing on the debate stage Thursday, and had planned to try to bait him into revealing “the true Trump.”
The muting of the microphones, a stipulation agreed to before the debate by both campaigns, added a new dimension to the face-off. The two men’s first match-up in 2020 was marked by repeated interruptions by Trump, leading to moments of frustration for Biden.
“Will you shut up, man?” Biden complained in that first Cleveland debate.
“I’m thinking the Democrats are thinking about who the Barry Goldwater is who can walk in tomorrow and tell the president he needs to step aside,” Ben Proto, chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party, said.
In 1974, after key Watergate tapes were made public, then-Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., went to see President Richard Nixon along with other prominent lawmakers and told him that he would be convicted by the Senate and should step aside— which Nixon did.
