President Joe Biden managed to overshadow the bombastic personality of former President Donald Trump in the first 2024 debate, but not in the way he or his campaign wanted.
Biden stumbled right out of the gate with a hoarse voice and a series of halting answers, eventually ending one healthcare-related exchange by saying, “Look, if … we finally beat Medicare.”
Biden: "Making sure we make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with covid, excuse me, with umm dealing with everything we had to deal with. Look, we finally beat medicare."
Trump: "Well he's right. He did beat medicaid. Beat it to death." pic.twitter.com/FL152ERLiR
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 28, 2024
While Biden recovered somewhat later in the debate, trying to ding Trump on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and his jobs record amid the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the talk when the debate ended was not about who won but whether Biden will even remain the Democratic candidate in November.
Alex Conant, who served as communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) 2016 campaign, gave Biden the lowest possible grade for his debate performance.
“Biden got an F,” Conant, a founding partner of Firehouse Strategies, said. “He failed to clear the basic bar. Democrats are seriously going to consider replacing him.”
Conant was relatively high on Trump following the debate, though not necessarily for his strong performance on the stage.
“Trump gets an A-,” he said. “He mostly let Biden self-implode.”
As the debate wore on and Biden continued to falter, some politicos began openly wondering why Biden was allowed onto the stage by those closest to him.
“Joe Biden’s senior advisors and his family have a lot of explaining to do to their party and this nation,” Scott Jennings, a longtime adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), posted on X. Jennings, who provided analysis on the debate for CNN in Atlanta, said he was in shock after watching Biden’s performance.
“You can’t grade it,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The image of him out there was beyond grading.”
Jennings aside, there was lengthy, open discussion on CNN, which hosted the debate, and on other cable news networks about Biden’s struggles and just how bad they were for his reelection campaign.
“The best thing for Biden is that working people on the east coast must go to bed because they have to work in the morning,” University of New Hampshire professor James Farrell said, “so they can’t watch more of the brutal postmortem on ALL the networks.”
“Biden’s performance was dismal and, in political terms, a signal to the party to invoke the DNR (do not resuscitate),” Farrell added. “I don’t think he comes back from this.”
Some Democratic sources began claiming that Biden had a cold after the debate had already started, which might explain the cold but not his repeated stumbling through his responses to the moderators’ questions.
After Biden struggled through an answer about adding more southern Border Patrol and asylum officers, Trump responded, “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:
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.” pic.twitter.com/dyfQRQ7hjE
— Alexander Sheppard
(@NotAlexSheppard) June 28, 2024
However, Trump earned low marks from Democrats watching the debate, as he repeatedly pivoted away from questions asked by the moderators in order to respond to Biden’s statements.
“It was boring,” south Florida-based Democratic strategist Sasha Tirador said. “Neither guy moved the needle. We had a very low-energy President Biden and a very incoherent ex-President Trump.”
Tirador gave both candidates an “F” for failing to change any minds in the course of the night. However, she rejected the notion that Biden should be replaced.
“Inside baseball players are expressing concern, and this is nothing new,” she said. “They’ve been expressing concern ever since Biden announced that he was going to run again.”
Democratic strategist Brad Bannon agreed.
“I think there will be much talk about replacing him, and I don’t think it will amount to anything,” he said. “Some Democrats will have concerns about the president’s performance. But the only thing that’s going to change the fact of Joe Biden being the Democratic nominee is if Joe Biden decides not to be the nominee.”
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Bannon gave Biden a “C” and Trump an “F” because “he lied from beginning to end.”
“It was a very bad debate and I don’t think either candidate performed well,” he said. “My concern as a Democrat is that if this is going to be a race to the bottom, Trump will win that race because voters don’t expect anything from him. I think it was a bad night for American democracy.”
