Bloomberg — President Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump began their first presidential debate facing off over the economy, with Each candidate blaming the other for the rising cost of food and housing.
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Voters have cast the economy as one of the defining issues of the campaign. Polls show voters skeptical of Biden’s record, even with solid job growth and investments in manufacturing and infrastructure, as historically high inflation has wreaked havoc on American households.
“We had an economy in free fall. The pandemic was very poorly managed,” Biden said, pointing to the former president’s record. “What we needed to do was try to get things back on track, and that’s exactly what we started to do.”
Biden promised more measures to address the high costs of household goods and housingwhich have been one of the drivers of his weak voter ratings on the economy.
Trump defended his tax cuts, which expire next yearsaying they paved the way for a stock market boom.
“I gave them the biggest tax cut in history. I also gave them the biggest regulatory cut in history,” he said.
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For Biden, who needs the debate to calm widespread concern about his age – at 81, he is the oldest person to ever serve as president – the first minutes of the debate offered some shaky moments. Biden stumbled for a while when talking about the coronavirus pandemic, and got two key numbers wrong in his speech opening statement: He said that 15,000 jobs had been created during his presidency, instead of 15 million, and that some seniors now have an annual limit of $200 on out-of-pocket medication costs, instead of $2,000.
The Atlanta debate – the earliest in a modern presidential election – is an opportunity for Trump and Biden to reframe the race as a referendum on their rival. Trump has promised to criticize Biden for the border and inflation, while the president has indicated that he will call his Republican opponent a criminal. and will attack his positions on tax cuts for the wealthy and the wave of abortion restrictions across the US following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The debate is presented as a crucial moment in the electoral race. Polls show Biden and Trump in a dead heat, plagued by low approval ratings and struggling to win over a significant group of voters who dislike both candidates. In addition to concerns about Biden’s age, Trump, 78, risks alienating independent voters with some of the bellicose rhetoric aimed at his base and his refusal to accept the election results, which was evident during his presidency. with the attack by his supporters on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Restrictions on abortion
Later in the debate, both spoke about abortion, and Biden called Trump’s role in the wave of restrictions on the procedure “a terrible thing”. Trump named three of the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn federal abortion protections from Roe v. Wade.
“This gives him the vote of the people and that’s where they wanted him,” Trump said.
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Biden later found his footing when talking about care for veterans, attacking Trump for his comments calling fallen American soldiers “stupid” and “losers”.
“I was with your four-star general and he told me that you said: I don’t want to go in there because you are a bunch of losers and fools. My son was not a loser. He wasn’t a fool. You are the fool. “You are the loser,” Biden said.
Trump fired back, denying the quote and saying Biden should apologize to him. Biden mocked that, saying he has “done more for veterans than any president in American history.”
It was not a given that the two candidates would meet on the debate stage, something the major presidential candidates have done in every election in the television era. After weeks of pressure from Trump, the president’s campaign issued a letter in May saying he would agree to two debates starting in late June but would not participate in contests sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a nonpartisan entity that has controlled affairs since 1988. Both campaigns argued that the commission’s scheduled debates, which began in September, were too late, since many voters might have already cast early ballots by then.
The Trump campaign quickly agreed to the terms. The surprise deal set off a mad dash by television networks to block the hearings.
Along the way, Trump complained about some of the rules set by CNN and attempted to disparage the network’s moderators, saying he would be unfairly disadvantaged. There will be no live studio audience and each candidate’s microphone will be muted unless it is his or her turn to speak — a rule meant to prevent candidates from talking over each other as they did in the debates last cycle.
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