An unprecedented debate: Biden and Trump face each other tonight and it is unprecedented in several aspects

President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump will face off in a CNN studio on Thursday night to debate their vision for how to lead the United States over the next four years in an event that will mark unprecedented circumstances.

The meeting will not only constitute the first presidential debate of the 2024 electoral cycle, but It will also be the first in many other aspectsbreaking with established traditions and becoming an unprecedented debate in the political history of the United States.

These are the points in which the meeting between Biden and Trump this Thursday will mark milestones in the United States presidential debates:

When Biden, 81, debates Trump, 78, both They will become the two oldest candidates who have faced each other in a presidential debate before the nation.

While that was also true the last time they debated in 2020, this time they will be even older, further raising a record that will be hard to beat in the years to come.

Although Trump himself is a septuagenarian, the virtual Republican candidate’s campaign has criticized Biden for his age, calling him old and questioning his cognitive ability.

That line of attack, however, has lowered expectations for Biden, who, by delivering a coherent and error-free presentation, could undo months of efforts by Trump and his campaign to make him look incapable of fulfilling his job as president.

Although Biden’s most recent physical in February shows he exercises regularly “at least five days a week,” he also looks like a man his age, putting him at risk of appearing less energetic than Trump. whose vociferous style masks his own physical limitations.

Although the 2020 presidential debates pitted a sitting president against a former vice president, the candidates facing off on Thursday will be the same ones who debated in the previous cycle — something that has never happened before in American electoral history.

In fact, Thursday’s debate will actually be the third presidential debate between Biden and Trumpwho in 2020 debated two of the three times they had agreed.

In 2020, Biden won both meetings. The first of them agreed with the opinion of 48% of the public against 41% of Trump, according to a survey conducted by CBSNews. The second is clearer, with 53% in favor of Biden against 39% for Trump, according to a poll conducted by CNN.

Both candidates, like never before in a presidential debate, are expected to go on the offensive on the issue of immigration, on which the political parties had had no fundamental differences until Trump used it to launch his candidacy in 2015 by saying that immigrants : “they are bringing drugs, they are bringing crime and they are rapists.”

Trump expected to attack Biden over problems with asylum system, illegal border crossings, and present anecdotal evidence about the alleged wave of violent crime unleashed by immigrants under the Biden administration, even though statistics indicate that crime is declining. The last year the numbers increased was in 2020, during the Trump administration.

Biden is expected to attack Trump over his mass deportation plans (which he failed to deliver on his 2016 campaign promises) and the problems it could create in the labor market, as well as for leading the failure of the bipartisan security bill. border for their political benefit.

One of the rules of this presidential debate prohibits the presence of the public in the studio where it is held.

The lack of an audience will deprive the candidates’ presentations of the emotional reaction of their supporters, which could be detrimental to them, especially in the case of Trump, who is notorious for his interactions with the public.

A calm Trump without the acclaim of his supporters might not be what his public expects of him, nor is he used to seeing.

The rule also deprives candidates of the opportunity to bring guests whose mere presence constitutes a political statement, for example, when Trump invited a group of women who accused former President Bill Clinton of being a sexual abuser to one of his debates with then-candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

According to the rules of the debate, the candidates’ microphones will only be activated when it is each person’s turn to speak and will be turned off when their speaking time expires.

This unprecedented rule in the history of presidential debates presumably seeks to avoid the chaos caused by Trump in the first presidential debate of 2020 when the then-president incessantly interrupted his opponent, prompting Biden to ask him at one point: “Will you shut up, man?”

That year, in response to Trump’s conduct during the first debate, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that one candidate’s microphone would be muted during the other’s initial two-minute response to each question, but that after each candidate gave his or her two-minute response, the microphones would not be muted.

This time the rule will be stricter.

Trump arrives at the debate after having been found guilty of 34 serious crimes by a Manhattan jury, for which he will be sentenced on July 11.

The former president also faces other legal problemsincluding two federal criminal proceedings for illegal manipulation of classified documents and electoral interference and another in Georgia for conspiracy to alter the outcome of the elections in that state in 2020.

Thursday’s debate takes place at an atypically early date for a presidential election, even before the celebration of the party conventions, which are the events in which the candidacies are made official.

Although the impact of a meeting between the candidates at this point in the campaign is unclear, some analysts think the date could set the tone for the rest of the campaign.

This could be important for Biden, who wants to frame the election as an effort “to save American democracy.” and prevent Trump from turning it into a referendum on his management.

However, a debate that occurs five months before the election may have faded from voters’ minds in an environment of fast-paced news cycles and aggressive campaigning.

The Commission on Presidential Debates is a non-profit partisan organization established in 1987 by the parties to organize debates between presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

Since 1988, the commission had produced all presidential debates, until the Biden and Trump campaigns agreed in 2024 to hold two debates outside its jurisdiction.

The Biden and Trump campaigns had not been happy with the commission’s preliminary plans, which included a series of debates that would take place in September and October when voters in several states would have already had the opportunity to vote early by mail.

Being the first debate outside the control of the commission, It will also be the first to be broadcast with commercial interruptions.