Biden 'Lost in the First 15 Minutes'

President Biden's campaign hoped the first presidential debate would push him ahead of Donald Trump in the polls. Instead, some Democrats are calling for him to step aside after a hoarse, faltering performance. His performance "left the field largely clear for Trump, despite the former president displaying his usual tendencies toward hyperbole and belligerence," writes Niall Stanage at the Hill. He writes that for once, "virtually no one outside of the most hardcore partisans" disagreed about who won and lost the debate. David Graham at the Atlantic calls the debate a "disaster" for Biden that was "at times almost physically uncomfortable to watch."

• Biden's "biggest weakness exposed." Hopes that Biden would alleviate concerns about his age "died within minutes," according to Shane Goldmacher and Jonathan Swan at the New York Times. With his voice raspy, Biden "grasped to recall some specifics, and labored to articulate the statistics he could remember," they write. "In one early answer, he confused trillionaires with billionaires. Sometimes, he lost his train of thought entirely."

• Biden "lost in the first 15 minutes." Biden "lost this debate within the first 15 minutes—probably the highest-viewed portion of the debate," according to Elena Schneider at Politico. "Biden landed some strong rebuttals to Trump, particularly on Trump's role during the Jan. 6 insurrection. But voters might've missed it if they turned off the debate after the first 30 minutes."
• A "low-water mark." Biden, who "seemed to embody the right-wing caricature of the president as an old man who has lost the plot," lost the debate, but Trump digressed into "bouts of verbal diarrhea" and showed "flashes of menace," writes Tim Dickson at Rolling Stone. "This debate was a disgrace," he writes. "It will stand as a low-water mark in American electoral politics. Despite profound differences on policy, neither man seemed capable of clearly outlining their intentions for the country's future."
• A failed gambit. Molly Ball at the Wall Street Journal describes the earliest presidential debate in history as "Biden's attempt to shake up a race that has appeared stalemated for months." His campaign "believed Trump was benefiting from being somewhat out of the spotlight and that voters whose view of Trump was unduly colored by nostalgia would recoil when confronted anew with his abrasive persona," Ball writes. "In the end, Biden may have succeeded in jolting the race out of its long stagnation, drawing a sharper contrast with his rival—just not in the way he wished."

• Mutual dislike was evident. The debate was "more personal than policy-focused," and the candidates' "mutual dislike shot through a night filled with invective and name-calling," Goldmacher and Swan write at the Times. "Instead of a steady drumbeat about the stakes, the debate devolved to the point where the two men had a prolonged discussion about golf handicaps."
• False claims from Trump. Trump delivered his "usual stream of false and misleading claims," Aaron Blake writes at the Washington Post, including his "false claim to having capped insulin costs before Biden did; blue states executing babies after birth; there being no terrorist attacks on his watch; Biden's wanting to quadruple people's taxes; and Biden's having indicted him."
• Memorable lines. "We finally beat Medicare," Biden said in a bungled description of healthcare initiatives. Later, talking about Trump's hush-money trial he told him: "You have the morals of an alley cat." The Guardian reports that in a "historical first for a presidential debate," Trump replied: "I didn't have sex with a porn star."
• Other winners and losers. Stanage at the Hill has alternative Democratic candidates alongside Trump in the winners' column, as well as CNN, which "pulled off a coup in getting the debate in the first place." Beyond Biden, another loser was the facts, Stanage writes, noting that the "amount of actual falsehoods uttered was striking," and not all of them came from Trump. After Biden claimed that he had been endorsed by the Border Patrol Union, the union pushed back with a post on X.

(More Election 2024 stories.)