Analysis: Biden, Trump trade barbs at debate; RFK Jr. responds

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The presidential motorcade arrived at Waffle House in Atlanta at 12:13 a.m. ET following a caustic debate. The White House says they stopped to pick up food for staff and press before heading to Raleigh, North Carolina.

NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo said the debate was an embarrassment to the country and we need to do better.

Trump and Biden both appealed to Americans feeling squeezed by inflation and high prices, pitching contrasting visions for the economy.

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responds to the Trump-Biden debate. He told NewsNation it was depressing to think this was the best Americans can come up with.

Immigration and the border crisis was a recurring theme during Thursday’s debate as Trump and Biden repeatedly turned back to the issue.

President Biden and former President Trump duked it out in Atlanta in their first and perhaps only debate of the 2024 presidential election Thursday night.

The high-stakes event was defined early on by a halting performance by Biden, while Trump also leaned into some positions that risk turning off swing voters.

Here are five takeaways from the debate:

1. Disastrous opening for Biden sets tone

The president stumbled repeatedly in the opening minutes of the debate, tripping over his words and sounding hoarse, apparently from a cold.

In one answer early on, he ended by unwittingly declaring, “We finally beat Medicare.”

Trump immediately pounced.

“He’s right. He did beat Medicare, he beat it to death,” Trump said.

Later in the debate, Trump mocked Biden for his rambling answers.

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either,” Trump said.

Biden eventually found his voice and confronted Trump over a litany of issues, including his positions on abortion and NATO amid Ukraine’s war with Russia.

“This guy has no sense for American democracy,” Biden said.

Still, the president was caught wide-eyed in the debate split screen, often seen staring off-camera as his opponent rattled through attack lines and giving the impression he was struggling to follow.

2. Sparks over abortion, immigration signal attacks ahead

Biden, in one of his strongest moments of the debate, vowed to restore Roe v. Wade and laid into Trump for appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn it.

Trump retorted by claiming Biden and Democrats want to “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby.”

“That’s simply not true,” Biden fired back. “We are not for late-term abortion. Period, period, period.”

Democrats found success focusing on abortion in the 2022 elections and are hoping to fire up voters on the topic again this year.

For his part, Trump’s answers about sending the issue back to states and touting his judicial appointments will only serve as fodder for Democrats.

In a particularly salient attack of his own, Trump laced into Biden over the crisis at the southern border, asserting the president was allowing people into the U.S. from “prisons, jails and mental institutions.”

“They call it migrant crime. I call it Biden migrant crime,” Trump said.

3. Trump dodges on Jan. 6, parries “losers” attack

Trump initially sidestepped when confronted about his comments seeking to undermine the results of the 2020 election leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and whether it violated his oath of office.

“On Jan. 6, we had a great border, nobody coming through. On Jan. 6, we were energy independent,” he said, touting lower taxes and fewer regulations.

Gesturing toward Biden, Trump added, “And then he comes in, and we’re laughed at, we’re a bunch of stupid people.”

Pressed to answer the question, Trump maintained, “I said peacefully and patriotically.”

Trump World is bracing for a decision any day from the Supreme Court on whether the former president is immune from federal prosecution over his efforts to undermine the election results before Jan. 6.

When asked Thursday night whether he would accept the results of the 2024 election, Trump responded, “If it’s a fair and legal and good election, absolutely.”

Biden has made a concerted effort to portray Trump as unmoored with no respect for democratic institutions or law enforcement, pointing to Jan. 6 as a prime example.

During another segment of the debate Thursday, Trump was put on the defensive when Biden brought up his reported comments from 2018 characterizing dead soldiers buried in France as “losers” and “suckers.”

Trump has repeatedly denied making the remarks, but Biden showed he is sharpening his line of attack, telling Trump, “You’re the sucker, you’re the loser.”

4. Age questions linger for Biden; legal challenges loom for Trump

Biden’s performance in Thursday’s debate will supercharge chatter among Democrats about whether he should continue carrying the party’s mantle heading into the party’s convention and leading up to November.

“I think you are going to hear discussions, that I don’t know will lead to anything … there are going to be discussions about whether he should continue,” former Obama strategist David Axelrod said in a CNN panel discussion immediately after the debate.

While age questions will consume talk about Biden in the coming days, the debate also underscored the reality that the other major party candidate remains engulfed in legal issues that aren’t going away anytime soon.

Biden swiped at Trump as the only person on stage who had been convicted of a felony and forced Trump to deny salacious allegations from his hush money case.

In a signal of potential lingering damage from Thursday’s debate, Vice President Kamala Harris went on CNN late Thursday to defend Biden’s performance.

“Yes, there was a slow start, but it was a strong finish,” she said.

5. A win for debate moderators

Thursday’s debate was the first in more than three decades to be put on without input from the commission that has organized presidential debates going back to 1988.

Concerns about rampant mic-muting largely fell by the wayside, and candidates mostly stuck to allowing each other to get out complete thoughts without interruption. Several times moderators even noted candidates had more speaking time available.

It was a marked contrast from Trump and Biden’s first debate in 2020 and put extra emphasis on the content of the candidates’ remarks.

In his closing argument, Kennedy said that “an entire generation has lost pride in their country” and is seeing the destruction of the environment.

He urges voters to vote for him if they want change, saying that they will “see more of the same” from Biden and Trump.

If you want things to change, you’re going to support me, he said.

“I’m going to change everything,” he said. “This is a moral battle for the soul of our nation.”

Kennedy said on his first day in office that he would create an executive order that says that “any federal official who tells lies to the American public will lose his job.”

He promises to stop the “surveillance” and “propagandizing” of our agencies and that he will “unravel the war machine and unravel corporate power.”

“I want you to vote out of hope and inspiration and pride in your country, out of restoring the moral backbone of our people,” he said.

Kennedy put out a grave warning if the U.S. doesn’t pull out of Ukraine, saying that we are “closer to a nuclear war for the first time since 1962.”

He said that the U.S. fired a missile in coordination with Ukraine, killing civilians.

The U.S. must accept that Russia won’t relent about keeping NATO out of Ukraine, and “we have to recognize that.”

He expressed concern that the U.S. is pushing toward a world war with its stance in Ukraine.

On the issue of reproductive rights, Biden and Trump took starkly different positions.

NewsNation’s Leland Vittert said after the debate, there’s a possibility Biden isn’t the nominee after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this summer.

NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, Elizabeth Vargas and Dan Abrams give their analysis of how Trump and Biden performed in the first debate of the election.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi said Trump didn’t want to address abortion, calling the issue one of Biden’s strongest moments in the debate.

He also pointed to post-debate coverage that will fact-check Trump’s comments as a plus for Biden.

The Trump campaign issued a statement calling Trump’s performance a “historic” debate victory.

“Tonight President Trump delivered the greatest debate performance and victory in history to the largest voter audience in history, making clear exactly how he will improve the lives of every American,” the statement said.

“I hope they let me on the stage for that contest,” he said when addressing Trump and Biden’s age. Kennedy is 70 years old.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said the contrast was “undeniably powerful” for Trump and an “unmitigated disaster” for Biden.

Scott, who is rumored to be in the running for Trump’s vice presidential nominee, talked up Trump’s statements on tax cuts. He said Trump had stood up for military members.

When asked about Trump’s message of hope, Scott said success begets success and did not mention Trump’s repeated remarks that America is a failing nation.

With regard to the opioid crisis, Kennedy said that people who are “alienated, depressed, suicidal, and disconnected from community” are “turning to drugs, and we need to deal with that.”

He said he wants to deschedule marijuana so the federal government can start collecting taxes on it. With that money, he will build “drug rehabilitation farms, wellness farms, restoration farms and rural areas of this country.”

Kennedy said that there is a child care crisis in the country because “the middle class is gone.”

He said that the middle class is getting crushed and that neither Biden nor Trump are offering them any help.

Kennedy said that the first thing he will do is balance the budget in order to get funding for child care.

He said that the nation must build the GDP, and the way to do that is with child care.

He reiterated that he would cut military budgets for that funding.

“Every billion dollars we spend on military weapons creates two jobs; every billion dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs,” he said.

NewsNation political editor Chris Stirewalt said things are going to get weird at the Democratic National Convention as Democrats face fears that Biden will hurt down-ballot races.

“The trajectory of this race has certainly changed,” Stirewalt said.

In a question about the state of Social Security, RFK Jr. says that it’s “not an entitlement” and instead is a “contractual obligation” that the government must live up to.

Kennedy said that in order to create more money for Social Security, he will cut the military budget in half and that he will eliminate the chronic disease epidemic, which “will save a lot of money.”

NewsNation political editor Chris Stirewalt called the Trump-Biden debate the worst in history.

Stirewalt unfavorably compared Biden’s performance to Gerald Ford’s 1976 gaffe, in which he claimed there was no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe.

NewsNation’s Dan Abrams says he believes Trump won, while Biden appeared “weak.” Meanwhile, Chris Cuomo weighed in, saying if either of his co-presenters had performed the way the two candidates did, they’d be out of a job.

“We’re looking at a sick man, and arguably a bad man,” Cuomo said of Biden and Trump respectively. About an hour into the debate, NewsNation learned Biden’s hoarse voice was a result of a cold.

The candidates are quickening their general election sprint after Thursday’s debate.

Biden flies next to Raleigh, North Carolina for a campaign rally Friday, while Trump heads to Virginia for a rally in Chesapeake.

Both candidates are visiting states that lean toward their opponent, with each side seeking to put the other on defense while trying to expand their path to 270 electoral votes in November.

North Carolina, where Biden is visiting, has been won by the Republican presidential candidate in every election going back to 1980, except in 2008 when Barack Obama won the Tarheel State.

Still, Trump narrowly won the state in 2020 and the Biden team is hoping to put it in play this year. Trump is currently leading by 5 points in North Carolina in the Decision Desk HQ/The Hill polling index.

Virginia, where Trump is traveling, is viewed as much more favorable for Biden. He he won the state by 10 points in the last election, yet the state elected a Republican governor the following year in Glenn Youngkin.

Biden and Trump are essentially tied in Virginia in the Decision Desk/The Hill polling index, though Biden is still viewed as maintaining an edge in the state.

Kennedy had an opportunity to discuss climate change, saying that no politician has shown a “larger commitment to the environment” than him.

“It’s what I’ve done for 40 years,” he said.

He believes “climate change is existential” but says he doesn’t “insist” that other people believe that.

Kennedy said we must eliminate subsidies from carbon industries and create a “robust” national grid.

He said that we should focus on restoring our soils to regenerative agriculture, “protecting our air or water wildlife, stopping the carbon discharge from coal-burning power plants.”

VIVEK: “The only times he came alive was when he was talking about January 6th or when he was talking about Trump’s convictions.”

VIVEK on Biden: “I have deep concerns for our own country, even these next six months, with this man in charge.”

Trump called Biden a complainer and scoffed at Biden’s promise and said he doesn’t do anything. He returned to his earlier talking points, pointing to immigration and claiming the U.S. is not respected abroad. He blamed Biden for the invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attack on Israel.

Trump said that Biden talks about policies but doesn’t do them and said, “We are living in hell.” He claimed Palestinians are rioting, a reference to protests on college campuses against the war in Gaza. Trump pointed to his tax cuts and cuts to regulation, as well as the “right to try” medical legislation. He closed by calling the U.S. a failing nation.

Biden gave the first closing statement, the order of which was decided by a coin toss. Biden said the country needs a fair tax system, no taxes would increase for anyone making under $400,000, and Trump has increased taxes. He blamed Trump for increasing inflation as a result of poor handling of the pandemic. He again attacked Trump’s proposed tariffs on China, which he says would drive up consumer costs.

Biden pointed to his record on reducing medical costs for seniors and said those efforts have saved the government money because Medicare no longer has to pay high prescription prices on some drugs.

Trump said he shouldn’t have to say that and said he believes violence is unacceptable and said the statements he made on Jan. 6 were one of the best ever made. He called Jan. 6 rioters a small group of people. He again referenced the debunked claim that Pelosi said she was responsible.

Trump said he would accept the election if it were free and fair and again called America a failing nation because of Biden. He claimed Biden would drive the country into World War III.

Biden said Trump would cause WWIII by allowing Putin to do what he wants against NATO, referencing comments Trump has made previously. He said the U.S. is a powerful nation because of the American people and said the U.S. is needed to protect the world.

Trump did not respond when asked if he would accept the results of the election regardless of who wins before once again claiming Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if he were president. Trump said Biden put the U.S. in a bad position because Ukraine is not winning, which he blamed on Biden.

Asked a third time about the election, Trump refused to give a yes-or-no answer and again said only if it were a fair, free and legal election. He repeated his claim that the 2020 election was unfair, though there has been no evidence of any fraud or interference.

Biden called Trump a whiner and pointed that no court in America found merit to Trump’s claims the election was not fair.

RFK Jr. said he believes that inflation is disproportionately hurting Black people and that the border crisis is disproportionately hurting Black and Hispanic Americans by taking away jobs from those communities.

He also said schools attended by Black students are crumbling and that we must give them “choices and charter schools.”

RFK Jr. also addressed mass incarceration of Black Americans, saying Biden’s past drug policies have contributed to them.

“Biden’s bills doubled the amount of Blacks in prison,” he said.