American presidential election: what to remember from the first debate between Trump and Biden

US President Joe Biden and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump faced off on Thursday in the first debate of a very high-tension presidential election. The two men sat upright, each behind a desk, without exchanging a handshake. This first face-to-face meeting, organized by the CNN channel and hosted by two of its journalists, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, was held in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the states most likely to weigh for November election.

On stage, the Democratic leader often appeared confused, mincing his words and getting confused more than once. Donald Trump, convicted in criminal proceedings at the end of May, largely imposed his style, multiplying exaggerations and untruths, particularly on immigration, without intervention from the two CNN journalists hosting the evening.

“Inflation is killing our country”

Rising prices was the first topic both men were asked about, as the topic is one of the main ones American voters will think about when it comes time to vote. “Inflation is killing our country”, Donald Trump said Thursday to his Democratic rival Joe Biden. “didn’t do a good job. He did a bad job,” the billionaire said as inflation reached 9.1% in the United States in June 2022, its highest level since the early 1980s, before slowing down since then, to settle at 3.3% in May, according to the CPI index, on which pensions are indexed.

The Republican candidate was also very critical of the billions of dollars spent by the United States to support kyiv in its war against Moscow. The war in Ukraine would never have happened if the United States had a “leader”, Donald Trump thus launched at President Joe Biden. The former Republican president then accused his Democratic rival of behaving “like a Palestinian” in the context of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. “He has become like a Palestinian, but they don’t like him because he is a very bad Palestinian. A weak (Palestinian),” he said.

“You’re the poor guy.”

The American president, for his part, criticized Donald Trump for his actions. “terrible” against the right to abortion. The Democratic leader argued that Donald Trump would be willing to enact legislation, if passed by a future Republican Congress, to ban abortion nationally or restrict it to “six, seven, eight or ten weeks” pregnancy, “something very conservative.”

“You’re the poor guy, you’re the loser” Earlier in the debate, Joe Biden launched an attack on Donald Trump, referring to comments attributed to the former Republican president about American soldiers killed in combat, whom Donald Trump allegedly called “poor guys” and of “losers”which the billionaire defended himself against on Thursday, assuring that it was a quote “invented”.

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Joe Biden also accused Donald Trump “to exaggerate” and of “to lie” on the migration crisis in the United States. “There is no data to support what he says,” said Joe Biden, while immigration is one of the main issues of this presidential campaign. After 44 minutes of their debate, the Democratic leader finally called his predecessor a ““repeat offender”in reference to his recent criminal conviction in New York. “The only person who is a convict is the man I’m watching on stage now,” he told her.

If their impact on the vote often remains limited, these meetings are a reminder of the highlights of the electoral campaign, since the first televised tête-à-tête organized more than 60 years ago, in Chicago, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Usually, candidates for the White House wait until the fall to debate, but the Democrat challenged his rival to face him before the summer.

Counter-performance of Biden, measured Trump

For Joe Biden, 81, the whole point of this first debate was to reassure America about his ability to ensure a new mandate despite his advanced age and concerns about his fitness. However, the American president, with a hoarse voice, frequently correcting himself or getting lost in confused sentences, has often lacked confidence to the point of disappointing even within his own camp. “Joe Biden’s performance during the debate was disappointing, there’s no other way to say it,” acknowledged Kate Bedingfield, former White House communications director during his early years in office. As if to partly justify this poor performance, the Democrat’s campaign team announced that he was suffering from a cold. Joe Biden has been “slow to start, but finished strong”, defended his vice-president Kamala Harris.

Donald Trump, whose outings are highly appreciated by his supporters at meetings, on the contrary had to control his verbal aggressiveness during the debate and not lose his composure if he wanted to be able to convince the undecided. Result: throughout the debate, the Republican candidate largely succeeded in containing the tone of his attacks and remained disciplined. From this point of view, the rules of the debate, with a microphone cut for the candidate not speaking “may have helped Trump because they stopped him from yelling about Biden’s responses,” said Robert Rowland, professor of communications at the University of Kansas.