This week’s debate between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump will be the most important moment of the rematch, pitting the two presidents in an unusually early showdown in front of a divided and angry nation.
For Mr. Biden, the debate in Atlanta offers an opportunity to remind voters of the chaos of his predecessor’s leadership and his criminal convictions and to warn them of an even darker future if he wins a second term. For Mr. Trump, this is an opportunity to make the case that America has become more expensive, weaker and more dangerous under his successor.
But Thursday’s showdown also poses significant stakes for the two men – both the oldest candidates to compete in a presidential primary – who have been locked in a contentious rivalry defined by mutual hatred for more than four years. That hostility further heightens the unpredictability of the evening. Any glaring mistakes – physical, mental or a barrage of too-personal insults – could reverberate for months as it will be an unusually long time until they meet again for a second debate in September.
“This is a huge inflection point,” said Karl Rove, a leading Republican strategist who led George W. Bush’s two successful presidential runs. “Can Biden be consistently persuasive and make people say, ‘Well, maybe the old man could do that?’ And will Trump restrain himself to the point where people say, ‘This is really about us and not about Trump?’”
This presidential debate will be the earliest in American history and will be markedly different from the debates many Americans are familiar with. Hosted by CNN rather than a nonpartisan committee, the program is simulcast on five or more networks without a live audience or public statements. Each candidate will have two minutes to answer questions, one minute for rebuttals and responses, and their microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak.
The two are taking distinctly different approaches to the preparation process. Mr. Biden He huddled with his aides at Camp David for the official debate, and the role of Trump was expected to be played by the president’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer. Despite the former president’s loose approach, he attends more ‘policy meetings’ than he does. In 2020.
Mr. Trump’s aides will continue to focus on inflation and immigration, widely seen as Mr. Biden’s biggest vulnerabilities, and hope to avoid being baited for dialogue by his false claims that the 2020 election and his criminal justice system were stolen. there is. It was rigged against him.
Mr. Biden’s team sees an opportunity to focus Democratic and independent voters, and even some moderate Republicans, on how a second Trump administration will be more radical than the first. But they are also bracing for a more disciplined performance than the first debate of 2020, when Trump gave a chaotic display that has been likened to a “dumpster fire.”
“This debate is an opportunity to show the American people what those who watch Donald Trump professionally all day are seeing: that he is more unstable, more dangerous, out for revenge, and all the things he can do to harm America. These interests that directly concern the American people are a net positive for us,” said Rob Flaherty, Biden’s deputy campaign manager.
President Trump is preparing to answer questions about threats to American democracy and his promise to pardon rioters involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He told his colleagues on January 6 that he would handle pardons ‘on a case-by-case basis’ and would emphasize that a distinction would be made between those who committed violence and those who did not.
And after months of questioning Mr. Biden’s ability to withstand a 90-minute debate at all, let alone perform at the highest level, Mr. Trump has shifted his stance to try to reset expectations higher.
“I don’t want to underestimate him,” Trump said on a recent podcast. He went back 12 years to Biden’s 2012 vice presidential debate and praised the president’s abilities. “I don’t underestimate him because he beat Paul Ryan,” Trump said.
Stephen Cheng, Trump’s communications director, accused the media of setting low expectations for the president.
“The real benchmark of Thursday’s debate should be whether Joe Biden can defend his disastrous record on inflation and out-of-control border incursions compared to President Trump’s unquestionable record of primary success,” he said. Mr. Cheung said.
This event will be the first time that American voters will meet Candidate Biden and President Trump face-to-face since October 2020, when they met for the final debate of the last primary. This is the first time the two have been in the same room since then.
A lot has changed in that time. The country has endured a pandemic, an uncertain economy, a siege on the Capitol, the fall of federal abortion rights and being embroiled in two bloody global conflicts. Mr. Trump is now a felon, having been convicted on 34 counts by a New York jury. And Mr. Biden has become an unpopular president, facing severe opposition not only from the Republican Party but also from the party’s own base.
However, opinion polls showed little movement between President Trump and President Biden. President Trump was narrowly ahead in national opinion polls earlier this year, but both men are widely disliked across the country and are locked in a tight race.
Rep. James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and Biden ally, described the debate as a potentially “critical moment” in the president’s primary trajectory.
“He’s starting to move the needle,” Mr. Clyburn said, pointing to a slight increase in the president’s approval ratings in recent national polls. “This debate could be very important as to whether we keep the momentum going or whether we hit an impasse.”
Almost no one, including Mr. Biden’s top strategists, expects the debate to immediately upend the race between the two very clearly defined candidates. Biden aides see the debate as the opening bell to the general election, an event that will provide a high-profile opportunity to define the landscape of the primary. They tried to successfully stage a debate several months ago to stimulate further public interest.
“This is going to be a long, tight race,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster for the Biden campaign. “Discipline of message, persistence and always being in front of voters will ultimately be what matters,” she said.
Both candidates are incumbents in their own ways. But the debate reverses their positions from 2020 onwards. Four years ago, it was Mr. Trump who was forced to defend his record amid a raging pandemic. Now, it is Mr. Biden who will face attacks on his management of an economy that is strong by some standards but defined for many voters by high prices and a tight housing market.
Trump is focusing on three developments in particular that he believes paint his administration in a more favorable light: high inflation, America’s entanglement in two new foreign wars and a surge in border crossings since he left office. President Trump has regularly criticized President Biden’s border policies for domestic crime.
Rep. Juan Ciscomani, an Arizona Republican running for re-election in one of the most competitive districts in the country, said such a concentrated contrast could work to President Trump’s advantage. He said voters in his district in the Tucson area can easily compare what their lives were like over two four-year periods.
“You can ignore the news, but you can’t ignore the fact that you can’t afford groceries,” Ciscomani said. “From borders to inflation, people feel like things are worse today than they were three or four years ago..”
Biden’s aides say the president plans to highlight some of the more divisive proposals the former president and his allies have embraced, including the possibility of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and imposing a new 10% tax on imported goods. . It’s a grim picture of what will happen if President Trump wins his re-election.
As Democrats have been doing for months, Mr. Biden plans to frame Mr. Trump as a threat to basic American freedoms like abortion and voting rights. They plan to combine these attacks with economic arguments that President Trump will choose big corporations and billionaires over helping ordinary Americans. Mr. Biden has recently signaled his willingness to link his economic arguments to Mr. Trump’s criminal record, with one ad presenting the race as “a choice between a convicted criminal who only cares for himself and a president who fights for his family.” I did. .”
Mr. Biden also wants to blame Mr. Trump for the downfall of Roe v. Wade, which the former president helped appoint to the Supreme Court. Four years ago, Mr. Biden warned voters that Roe was on the ballot. “Why is it on the ballot?” Mr. Trump said in his first debate. “It’s not on the ballot.”
Mr. Trump is unlikely to shy away from the issue this year after nearly two years of steadily louder efforts by conservative Christians not only to ban abortion but also to restrict in vitro fertilization and other widely popular procedures. President Trump has consulted with his former adviser Kellyanne Conway, who has polled for decades on the issue, and is likely to repeat positions he has recently adopted. In other words, abortion should be left to the state’s decision.
Democrats have signaled that Biden will push back against Trump by claiming he would go one step further by imposing sweeping federal restrictions on abortion access if he is re-elected to the White House.
Gail Gitcho, a Republican strategist, argued that given voters’ experiences living under both Biden and Trump administrations, on-stage rhetorical clashes may be less important than usual.
“What voters are considering is what my life was like under President Trump and what my life was like under President Biden,” she said. “They are choosing either the presidency or the person, and they are more likely to choose the presidency.”
