ATLANTA — President Joe Biden and his Republican rival Donald Trump will face off Thursday for a debate that offers an unparalleled opportunity for both candidates to try to shape the political narrative.
The Democratic president has a chance to reassure voters that at 81 he is capable of leading America. Meanwhile, Trump, 78, could use the moment to put his guilty verdict in New York behind him and convince millions that his temperament is suited to returning to the Oval Office.
Biden and Trump enter the debate with fierce headwinds. None of them are liked by most Americans, polls show, and they offer starkly different views on virtually every central issue. Trump has promised sweeping plans to remake the government if he returns to the White House, and Biden maintains that his opponent would threaten the nation’s democracy.
With just over four months until Election Day, his actions have the potential to alter the trajectory of the race. Every word and gesture will be analyzed not only for what they say, but also for how they interact with each other and how they resist pressure.
Trump and Biden have not been on the same stage, or even spoken to each other, since their last debate weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Trump skipped Biden’s inauguration after leading an unprecedented and unsuccessful effort to reverse his defeat that culminated in the Capitol insurrection by his supporters on January 6, 2021.
Thursday’s CNN broadcast will be the earliest general election debate in history. It is the first televised presidential debate hosted by a single media outlet after both campaigns left the Commission on Presidential Debates, a bipartisan body that had organized every matchup since 1988.
Under network rules, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not qualify.
Aiming to avoid a repeat of their chaotic 2020 clashes, Biden insisted — and Trump agreed — on holding the debate without an audience and allowing the network to mute the candidates’ microphones when it was not their turn to speak. There will be two commercial breaks. The candidates have agreed not to consult staff or others while the cameras are off.
It is expected that the contrasting opinions of the candidates on issues such as immigration, border security, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the role of the United States in the world and its alliances will be present in the confrontation; as well as inflation, fiscal policy, government investment and climate change.
Coming out of the debate, both Biden and Trump will travel to battleground states. Trump will head to Virginia, which has leaned Democratic in recent years; and Biden is scheduled to travel to North Carolina, where he is expected to hold the largest rally of his campaign to date in a state Trump narrowly won in 2020.
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Miller, Superville and Weissert reported from Washington and Price from New York. Video journalist Nathan Ellgren in Washington contributed to this report.
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