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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
The first 2024 US presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was ill-tempered and has already reignited concerns among Democrats about the president’s fitness for another term in office.
He and his Republican rival traded personal jabs. “Let’s not act like children,” Trump said. But the former president repeatedly made false claims about his record — many of which went unchallenged by the moderators. He also hedged his answer to a question on whether he would accept the results of the forthcoming election.
Here are the big moments from the most consequential night of the 2024 race.
Biden forgot his lines . . .
The president was under huge pressure to show he remained fit for office, and the debate was billed as an opportunity to allay concerns about his age and reprise his strong State of the Union delivery from March.
Repeatedly, he stumbled through answers that tried to connect disjointed themes. In one example, he lost his train of thought and called billionaires trillionaires.
. . . and struggled on abortion
Biden had an early opportunity to hit Trump on abortion rights, a strong issue for Democrats and a weak point for the Republican ex-president.
Instead, Biden quickly veered off abortion to immigration — a weakness for the Democrat — meandering through an answer without delivering a forceful line about protecting reproductive rights.
Trump hedged his answer on accepting the election result
Trump minimised the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters who were seeking — as he was — to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.
The former president was asked directly by CNN moderator Dana Bash three times whether he would accept the results of the coming election.
Trump initially ducked the question, before offering a hedged answer that he would accept the result if it was a “fair, legal and good election”, even as he repeated false claims about fraud in the 2020 vote. Biden called him a “whiner”.
The men attacked each other’s character
Things got personal. The president berated Trump for his “crimes” and the “billions of dollars” in civil penalties he owed for “doing a whole range of things [like] having sex with a porn star while your wife was pregnant”. Trump, who is facing penalties in the hundreds of millions of dollars, retorted: “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.”
The men also clashed over veterans and Trump’s alleged comments about dead soldiers being “suckers”. Trump denied saying this.
“My son was not a loser, he was not a sucker,” Biden said, referring to his dead son Beau, who served in Iraq. “You’re the sucker. You’re the loser,” Biden told his rival.
They argued about golf
When the moderators asked the candidates about concerns over their fitness to serve, their responses descended into a squabble over golf. Trump said he took two cognitive tests and “aced” them, and that Biden “can’t hit a ball 50 yards”. Biden mentioned Trump’s weight and said he’d be “happy to play golf if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?” Trump responded: “Let’s not act like children.”
They blamed each other for inflation
Biden and Trump clashed over who was to blame for inflation soaring in recent years. Biden “caused the inflation, and it’s killing Black families and Hispanic families and just about everyone”, Trump claimed. “They can’t buy groceries any more, they look at the cost of food where it’s doubled, tripled and quadrupled.”
Biden pointed to the strength of the economy under his presidency, including rapid job creation, and said he was working to drive down prices.
