President Biden repeatedly froze and misspoke during his first — and possibly only — debate against former President Donald Trump Thursday night, prompting anguish and panic in the Democratic Party fewer than four months before the general election.
In what will be the most-replayed political moment of the night, the week, the month and maybe the year, the 81-year-old incumbent lost his train of thought for about nine seconds, looking down at his lectern before popping up again to say that he “finally beat Medicare”
Biden, who would be 86 if he finishes a second term in January 2029, did not help his cause by speaking in a soft, scratchy voice that anonymous aides attributed to a cold he apparently picked up during his seven days out of the public eye prepping for the Atlanta forum.
The president began to lose his grip as he said he was committed to “making sure we make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with, umm dealing with everything we had to do with” — before sputtering to a halt.
“Look, we finally beat Medicare,” concluded Biden as he looked up again after an agonizing wait.
Not for the last time, the 78-year-old seized upon the gaffe immediately, saying of his rival: “Well, he’s right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death and he’s destroying Medicare because all of these people who are coming in, they’re putting them on Medicare.”
The debate was widely seen as a make-or-break moment for Biden amid voter concern about his mental fitness, concerns that were expected to grow after Thursday night.
Biden said at one point that the US economy had created “15,000” jobs on his watch, that there were “one thousand trillionaires in America,” and that his son Beau “died in Iraq,” rather than — as actually happened — in his hospital bed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
In another instance of Biden seeming to lose himself, the president appeared to suggest he would impose a “total ban” on illegal immigration along the US-Mexico border, despite three years of record annual illegal crossings since he terminated Trump’s hard-line policies such as forcing asylum seekers to await decisions while remaining in Mexico.
Biden has, in recent months, released most illegal border-crossers into the US to await the outcome of a badly backlogged asylum process, but said he would “continue to move until we get the total ban on the — the total initiative relative to what we can do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.”
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” the c”omparatively disciplined and cogent Trump responded, “and I don’t think he knows what he said either.
At another point, Biden claimed “the Border Patrolmen endorsed me” — prompting the Border Patrol’s union to snap back on X: “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.”
It was all too much to bear for former New York state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, a Democrat, who tweeted once the debate was over: “President Biden is a good, honorable man. He has much to be proud of. It is time to step aside and call off this run.”
Other Democrats decided to brief anonymously, with CNN reporter John King opening the network’s post-debate coverage by describing “a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party.”
“It started minutes into the debate — and it continues right now,” he added. “It involves party strategists. It involves elected officials. It involves fundraisers, and they’re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was abysmal, which they think will hurt other people down the party ticket, and they’re having conversations about what they should do about it.”
Republicans responded with both pity and ridicule.
“He’s not equipped to be president,” Trump said. “You know it, and I know it.”
“As a geriatric nurse practitioner who cared for so many older adults with cognitive impairment, this is heartbreaking to watch,” tweeted Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.)
An ABC/Ipsos poll in February found that an overwhelming 86% of prospective voters believe Biden, who is trailing Trump in most swing state surveys, is too old for another term. A Siena College/New York Times poll in March found that 73% of registered voters thought Biden was too old.
The debate did touch on issues that voters consistently rank as their top concerns, including inflation and the economy, abortion rights, immigration and the state of American democracy.
Biden attempted to blame inflation on Trump by saying the ex-president “caused it by his tremendous malfeasance in the way handled the pandemic” — with Trump in turn saying Biden “inherited almost no inflation, and it stayed that way for 14 months. And then, it blew up under his leadership because they spent money like a bunch of people that didn’t know what they were doing.”
On the issue of abortion, Trump said he approved of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to allow the sale of medication abortion nationwide and that states with restrictions should allow exceptions for rape, incest and the life of mothers.
But Biden pounced when Trump claimed that the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 was a “great thing.”
“It’s been a terrible thing, what you’ve done,” Biden said in reference to Trump’s nomination of three conservative court justices. “This is a little like saying, ‘We’re going to turn civil rights back to the states, let each state have a different role.’”
Biden at another point attacked Trump by noting his May 30 conviction in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to former porn star Stormy Daniels.
But when the president refereed to his predecessor as a “convicted felon,” Trump was ready with the retort that Biden’s son Hunter, 54, was convicted June 11 of federal gun crimes and awaits a second federal trial in Los Angeles over $1.4 million in alleged tax fraud from foreign relationships in which he often involved then-Vice President Biden.
“He could be a convicted felon as soon as he gets out of office — Joe could be a convicted felon with all of the things that he’s done. He’s done horrible things,” the former president said, noting that Biden had falsely denied the authenticity of files from Hunter’s laptop that linked him to dealings in China and Ukraine.
Biden “gets paid by China. He’s a Manchurian Candidate. He gets money from China,” Trump said.
The challenger pressed home his advantage in his closing statement, mocking Biden as an ineffective “complainer.”
“He talks about all the stuff, but he didn’t do it for three and a half years,” Trump said. “We’re living in hell. We have the Palestinians, and we have everybody else rioting all over the place.”
“The whole country is exploding because of you, because they don’t respect you, and they have to respect their president, and they don’t respect you throughout the world,” the former president concluded. “We’re in a failing nation, but it’s not going to be failing anymore. We’re going to make it again.”
