“There is nothing to sugarcoat here: This debate was a disaster for Joe Biden.” That was the verdict of Ines Pohl, bureau chief of DW’s Washington studio, after the first presidential debate of 2024, held in Atlanta on Thursday night, June 27. It was the first time a sitting president and a former one had shared a debate stage, and the question hanging over it was whether Biden, 81, could put the age issue to rest.
He did not, according to DW’s account. His voice sounded brittle from the first minutes. Several campaign sources said afterward that he had a cold, but the effect was to make him seem more frail. J. Miles Coleman, an election analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told DW the team should have disclosed the cough in advance. Expectations would have adjusted, he said, and viewers “would have judged him a little kinder or lighter.”
Pohl said the main goal for Biden was to show he was fit for office, and “he failed miserably.” David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Barack Obama until 2011, said on CNN that Biden lacked energy and at times looked a little disoriented. Trump did not have to point out that some of Biden’s rambling sentences made no sense, though he occasionally did.
A weak hand on strong topics
Subjects that should have favored the Democrat went nowhere, DW reported. He made little of Trump’s criminal convictions. His promise to bring back a nationwide constitutional right to abortion, which the Supreme Court rescinded in 2022, fell flat because of the delivery.
Trump, 78, only a few years younger, came across to Coleman as a decade younger. He interrupted far less than in their 2020 meeting, helped by microphones that were switched off when it was not a candidate’s turn. The most unpresidential moment of the night, DW noted, was Biden mocking Trump’s weight.
Trump did have his own problems. He skipped past questions on childcare and his age to return to immigration, and he claimed the border had been the safest “in the history of our country” on his watch. Fact checkers at the Poynter Institute found irregular migration was higher during his term than during either of Obama’s. Pressed on whether he would accept the November 5 result, he deflected twice, then said he would if it was a “fair and legal and good election,” without saying what that meant.
Panic in the party
As soon as the debate ended, talk turned to whether Democrats could still pick another nominee, either before or at their convention in August. CNN reporters said they had heard “concern” from Democratic politicians, without names attached. Pohl said Biden’s showing “sparked discussions on how the Democratic Party can prevent Biden from running again,” one route being to open the convention so delegates could choose someone else. That would be highly unusual in recent decades. “The Democrats are in a state of panic,” she said.
