Takeaways from CNN’s presidential debate with Biden and Trump

In their debate Thursday night on CNN, the gap between the 81-year-old incumbent and his 78-year-old challenger seemed much larger.

Biden, hoarse and displaying little vocal range, was often unable to express his differences with Trump with clarity. At one point, after Biden had trailed off as he defended his record on border security, Trump said: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

Trump, meanwhile, at times repeated his frequent election denialism. He said he’d accept the results of the 2024 election if it’s “fair and legal,” but then repeated his lies about fraud in the 2020 election.

“You’re a whiner, and you lost the first time,” Biden said.

It was the first time either man had debated since 2020, and they made history Thursday night: It was the first time a sitting president and a former president had ever debated. The two clashed over abortion, immigration, foreign policy, inflation and more.

Their showdown took a bitter and personal turn. Biden highlighted Trump’s criminal convictions. Trump responded by invoking Biden’s son, Hunter, who was also recently convicted. Then Biden accused Trump of having sex with porn star Stormy Daniels while Trump’s wife was pregnant.

“I didn’t have sex with a porn star,” Trump said.

Here are 11 takeaways from the CNN debate in Atlanta, moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash:

Biden’s age problem just got a lot worse
The most important job for Biden on Thursday night was to put to rest voters’ concerns about his biggest vulnerability — his age — and turn the election into a referendum on Trump.

He failed to do so.

Biden was hoarse and at times unintelligible. Words often ran together. He stumbled, particularly when he tried to cite statistics and legislation. He rarely raised his voice to hammer home points of emphasis — missing opportunities to attack Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his Supreme Court appointments that led to the reversal of Roe v. Wade’s abortion rights protections and more.

Two campaign sources said Biden has had a cold in recent days.

Though the Democratic primary is long over, his performance is sure to lead to more hand-wringing among party members over whether handing Biden a second nomination with only nominal opposition was the right move.

It also raises the stakes for September 10, when Biden and Trump are set to meet for their second and, as of now, final, debate, hosted by ABC.

Trump pulls (some of) his punches on Biden
For a candidate who regularly attacks Biden on his age, Trump was fairly restrained during the president’s numerous stumbles.

About 20 minutes into the debate, Trump followed a Biden remark with a quick snipe, saying, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he does either.”

It was the exception that proved the rule – and history suggests it was a kind of self- or campaign-imposed rule on Thursday night for Trump to not be seen taunting or mocking Biden’s difficulties. Four years ago, the first general election debate of the cycle was a mess for Trump, who constantly interrupted Biden and shouted over the moderators. If not exactly a lesson learned, then his tone in Atlanta was a correction designed to erase memory of that damaging, helter-skelter performance.

When Biden stumbled over a question about the national debt, trying to explain the benefits of raising taxes on the super-rich before losing steam and concluding with the declaration that “We finally beat Medicare,” there was a sense that Trump would pounce.

He had his eyes trained on the president and his lips pursed for much of the rambling, difficult-to-discern answer. He almost winced at one point. But Trump then did a most un-Trump-like thing: he responded like a typical politician.

“Well, he’s right: he did beat Medicare,” Trump said, “He beat it to death.”

Then he continued on, railing about Biden’s immigration policy.

“We have 1,000 trillionaires in America, billionaires in America, and what’s happening, they’re in a situation where they in fact, pay 8.2% in taxes. If they just paid 24% or 25% – either one of those numbers when they raise $500 million, billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period. We’d be able to wipe out his debt.”

At another point, he said Trump “is the only president other than Herbert Hoover, who had lost more jobs than he had when he began since Herbert Hoover.”

His canned rejoinders leaned on the collective thought of nameless constitutional scholars, historians and Nobel laureate economists to drive home his points.

Biden is hardly the first incumbent to be tripped up by the initial debate. But his aides were supposedly aware of this curse and had over prepared the president during a week of intense preparation at Camp David.

What was presented Thursday, though, not only failed to quiet concerns about Biden’s capacity to fight on – it left voters with an unclear idea of what he’s fighting for.

Biden’s one-liner offense
Throughout the debate, Biden’s offensive strategy was to again and again deploy one-liners to ding Trump.

Some of the lines were standard Biden fare.

“Every single thing he’s said is a lie. Every single one,” he shot at the former president at one point.

In another, he said, “I’ve never heard so much malarky in my life.”

And in a potentially bright spot for Biden, the president highlighted a 2020 report by The Atlantic that Trump had referred to American war dead as “suckers” and “losers.” He invoked his son Beau, who died of brain cancer after a year in Iraq in which he was exposed to toxic fumes.

“My son was not a sucker. You’re a sucker. You’re the loser,” Biden said.