ATLANTA — “President Biden just looks and sounds old.”
That was the immediate reaction from Charlie Comfort, an Iowa Democrat, just 14 minutes into the first debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump of the 2024 general election.
“Can you hear my alarm bells?” Comfort wrote. “So far, he just doesn’t meet the bar.”
Unlike this year’s State of the Union, Biden’s debate performance may have exacerbated concerns about his age and mental acuity with his halting appearance on CNN in Atlanta on Thursday.
Biden’s first impression for the millions of people who turned on the earliest debate in presidential history, unprecedented in that it also showcased a president and a former commander in chief, was of him moving stiffly onto the studio set to take his place behind his podium and coughing twice within the first two minutes, which did not help his raspy voice. The president then lost his train of thought while answering a question about the care economy and drug prices, with the split screen underscoring his tendency to listen and think with his mouth agape.
“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,” Biden said. “Look, we finally beat Medicare.”
“He’s right, he did beat Medicare, he beat it to death,” Trump replied.
“I don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I’m not sure he did either,” the former president said later.
For Comfort, two of Biden’s best exchanges with Trump were on abortion and defending veterans, including his late son Beau, but Trump was “slaughtering the incumbent on delivery and appearance alone.”
“I just can’t shake the fact that President Biden just looks old and not quite there,” Comfort said. “He looks like he’s zoned out and not concentrating when President Trump is talking.”
“That said, does it change who I will vote for?” he added. “No. Could it impact those swing voters? I think the cognitive argument about President Biden is corrosive and he’s not helping himself tonight. This race should be a slam dunk for the incumbent administration, but it’s not and I would even says leans Trump right now.”
Trump’s campaign contended expectations for Biden and the debate were low, but, in fact, there was more pressure on the president to do well.
During the debate, a source familiar confirmed to the Washington Examiner Biden had a cold amid social media chatter about his voice.
“Despite President Biden’s cold impacting his voice, the message in this debate was clear,” the Biden friendly the Progressive Change Campaign Committee wrote in a statement. “Donald Trump is a convicted felon who killed Roe vs. Wade, cut taxes for billionaires, proposed cuts to Social Security, and failed to fight corporate price gougers during the pandemic.”
“President Biden is fighting greedy corporations that jack up prices on families, wants to restore abortion rights, and will tax the wealthy to save Social Security,” the political action committee said. “The choice is clear.”
Georgia state Sen. Sonya Halpern, vice chairwoman of her chamber’s Democratic caucus in this battleground state, similarly emphasized the importance of fact-checking Trump’s answers.
“The questions illuminate the differences in candidates’ values and vision,” Halpern told the Washington Examiner. “What is clear from tonight is that President Biden has a strong grasp on the policies of his administration and why they have been prioritized and how they’ve made a difference in the lives of Americans.”
Halpern’s Georgia state House colleague, Rep. Phil Olayleye, echoed that “the choice has never been clearer,” and although “the president’s energy wasn’t great at points,” “again substance over flash.”
“You have a lifelong servant of the people in Biden,” Olayleye told the Washington Examiner. “A decent man who cares, who wants to help make life better for others. Someone with real plans and a vision. He’s older, which you can see, but experienced and focused on you, not himself.”
“And Trump — a convicted felon who only cares about advancing the privileged few,” he said. “Just zero substance and an endless stream of lies all night long. I can’t believe the moderators didn’t follow up on any of the nonsense he was spewing. No real solutions for what families care about most.”
Despite his State of the Union address in March easing concerns about his age and mental acuity, particularly among elected Democrats, those concerns persist among members of the public, even Democratic voters who have supported Biden in the past.
It was “a pretty poor night and result” for Biden, according to University of Michigan debate director Aaron Kall.
“He was especially poor at the start, which is the time of the maximum television audience size,” Kall told the Washington Examiner. “He eventually improved and got into the groove of things, but he’s running out of time and there is only one debate left months away. President Biden had low expectations coming into tonight and a pretty low bar to clear. Unfortunately he was unable to do this.”
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Prior to the debate, the Biden campaign decided against having a traditional spin room operation, but aides pre-spun the moment, its significance to Biden’s election against Trump, and what they hoped to achieve from it.
“The June debate is not a moment that we expect to define the trajectory of the election or move poll numbers in the near-term,” a Biden campaign senior adviser told the Washington Examiner. “We have a largely locked-in electorate and two well-defined candidates — and the voters who will decide this election are going to require consistent time and effort to win for November.