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From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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Today, in the first debate of the 2024 presidential race, Joe Biden hoped to make the case that Donald Trump was unfit to return to the White House. Instead, Biden’s weak performance deepened doubts about his own fitness for the job.

My colleague, Astead Herndon, a political reporter and a host of “The Run Up,” explains what happened.

It’s Friday, June 28.

Astead, good evening, almost good morning. By the time we’re done talking, it is definitely going to be Friday morning. Thank you for joining us at what is clearly a very tender hour.

No, thank you for having me.

OK. This was always going to be a historic debate — two single term presidents debating each other for a chance at a second term, both choosing to opt out of the traditional presidential commission authorized debates. We’ve never had any of this before. But that’s not, I would wager, what people are going to remember about this debate. I suspect they’re going to remember just how much one of these candidates openly struggled — struggled mightily on the biggest possible stage.

Yeah, I mean, there were some things I was expecting for tonight’s debate — bitter insults, an incumbent defending a policy record, the challenger really attacking it. But one thing I didn’t expect was for President Biden to kind of live up to the caricature of him that has been really been created over the last six months by Republicans.

And the first 10 minutes, he was not even just a poor debater, he seemed like a struggling old man in a way that, I think for a lot of people, was alarming not even just in a political sense, but in a personal sense. And I think, in the low bar that had been created for him for tonight’s performance, it immediately raised alarm flags that he was not even clearing it.

Well, let’s talk about what both Biden and Trump were trying to do in this debate before we return to the question of how Biden did or didn’t do, and how Trump did or didn’t do tonight.

For Trump, there is an electoral opening right now for him to really create a coalition that’s unique for a Republican candidate. If you believe the polling or the kind of trend lines that we have seen in polling over the last six months, Donald Trump is not winning back the kind of traditional Republicans he’s lost over the last four years. He’s winning over people who were considered more traditionally Democratic groups or just more disaffected voters in general — younger people, people of color, low income folks, Black folks.

There has been a kind of growth among those margins that’s provided Trump with this ability to say that, if he can put that together in November, there’s a real unique path for him to beat Joe Biden. But that path requires a candidate who’s kind of speaking in more disciplined, controlled tones than I think we’re used to Trump talking. And the Trump campaign was eager to put that best foot forward.

Mm-hmm.

Now, on the Biden side, they have a fundamental problem, which is that the majority of Americans think the president is too old to serve. And the prospect of an 86-year-old Joe Biden, at the end of his second term, frankly, freaks folks out. And the Biden campaign’s response to that problem has been, frankly, to diminish it, but also say to watch him. And the idea was that if they had an earlier debate before the conventions, and before the race really kicked off, they can put some of those concerns to bed, as we saw him slightly do at the State of the Union earlier this year.

Mm-hmm.

But as we just talked about, Biden provided his party. No reassurance tonight.

OK. Well, take us into the meat of this debate, and let’s explore why this night ended up being so problematic for Biden. And let’s try to understand whether Trump did achieve his goal of being the kind of candidate who can assemble this theoretical broad coalition.

Well, let me set the scene.

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Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, the moderators, introduced both candidates.

And when Biden walked onto the stage, I mean, it’s generous to call it a walk. He frankly shuffled in a way that was only a visual reminder of the advanced age of this president.

And within the first couple answers —

The immediate thing that was noticeable was not about what he was saying, but about how he sounded.

Biden’s voice was really raspy.

It sounded as if he needed to clear his throat. He was talking really softly.

And it made his first couple of answers almost incoherent.

And then we got to one answer that was literally incoherent —

— and eventually ended up trailing off such that it became clear that this was not someone who was fully in command of their presence at the moment. And that really set the tone for Biden’s performance throughout the whole debate.

Right. This was the moment, if we’re being honest, where everyone in politics and political journalism’s phones just started exploding with text messages, all of them saying some version of, gosh, this debate is going really quite badly for President Biden. And I said, to your point about what he was seeking to do and the assurances he was trying to give people in his party and beyond his party, he was not giving those assurances at all.

Yeah. Let me read you some live text messages I got from Democrats in those first 10 minutes. One says, “I think you have to question seriously whether he can even make it to the end of this night.” Another says, “Man, this just doesn’t feel good to watch.” I mean, it was an immediate sense of panic that was spreading among the party.

And I think it’s because, typically, these debates have an air of optics and showmanship. But for Biden and his kind of political challenge, it was really about that sense of energy and about that sense of command of stage because the question of age has been so circling around his candidacy.

And so for him to immediately come out with a both presentation and an answer that was frankly not substantive and hard to follow, it sent the concerns to the roof. Things went from 0 to 100 very fast, partially because I think that’s what people were coming in seeing as a baseline for him and he very immediately stumbled. I would make an analogy to an Olympic hurdler, where at the first hurdle he fell.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have lost his edge — that becomes very clear from the beginning of the debate — and instead is displaying his usual swagger, as well as his usual challenges with the facts.

Yeah, absolutely. To the extent that Donald Trump can be focused on policy, he came out in that mode today.

We know that the campaign really wants to focus on three things — inflation, immigration, and crime.

And you could see Trump really returning to those in the early kind of 10, 15 minutes.

He repeatedly tied Biden to rising prices, and tried to frame the economy that he stewarded as president as significantly better than the one that we are experiencing now.

He framed the country as safer four years ago than what we’re experiencing now.

You could see him trying to follow through on the kind of classic premise of a re-election campaign where the challenger really tries to ask the question, are you better off than you were four years ago? And so we got the Donald Trump version of that tonight. But we should be clear, it’s infused with a lot of his usual set of falsehoods, as we have come to expect from him.

And what struck me was — for all the exaggerations and some of the falsehoods in what Trump was saying — the contrast between his swagger and his presentation and Biden’s became the most pronounced part of this back and forth.

Yeah. I think you’re right that Trump sounded and felt a little more, dare we say, presidential than Biden in those first 10 minutes. But the bar was on the floor, because the president came out with such, I think, a shocking level of incoherence that it made Donald Trump — the Donald Trump we have seen spew falsehoods, conspiracies, unhingedness at every turn — it made him seem like the person who kind of had their ducks in a row.

And in a kind of crystallizing moment of this interaction —

— after one of Biden’s more meandering answers, Trump responds with a quip that really said what everyone was thinking.

— saying that, I don’t know what Biden said at the end of the sentence and I don’t know if he does either.

Mm-hmm.

It feels like a strong topic for Biden in this part of the debate was going to be abortion —

— and the moderators bring it up. And it felt like low hanging fruit — an opportunity for Biden to blame Trump for the fall of Roe versus Wade and score some real points on the board. But it didn’t feel like that’s what happened.

No, it didn’t. And I think that speaks to the point that came through during this debate, that it was consistently not the message, it was the messenger. Abortion has been a politically potent issue for Democrats, and something that folks have been looking for Biden to speak to directly.

And he kind of botched that framing.

He was trying to seemingly make an analogy about trimesters that didn’t really come through very clearly. And so that, I think, was a moment where, when the moderator brought it up, you would feel Democrats think, OK, this is something that might play better for us than the economy or immigration. But, like a lot of things in this debate, Biden just didn’t seem to put it together that well.

Eventually, in this first half of the debate, things start to get a bit more personal, and they start to get a bit nastier between these two candidates who clearly do not like each other at all. And interestingly, given your framing of would Trump moderate some of his excesses, it was Biden who went there first.

Yeah, it was. And we should put the background here. There was previous reporting that Donald Trump had called fallen soldiers “suckers and losers” while touring a military gravesite.

And that’s what Biden was referring to, framing Trump as someone who has consistently disrespected veterans.

But Biden plans on saying —

And then looks to Trump and says —

— you’re the sucker. You’re the loser.

Mm-hmm.

And I thought, for me, this reflected the Biden campaign strategy of wanting to draw Trump out to kind bring out, let’s say, a more chaotic version of him that was less stuck to the policy script. And so I was looking at this moment to see, OK, how was Trump going to respond to this.

He denied kind of making the “suckers and losers” remark about dead soldiers. But he didn’t kind of respond on the personal level in which Biden was trying to draw him out to.

He reframed the conversation about commander in chief to be about the kind of global instability that has happened under Biden’s watch.

This is when he mentions the kind of Afghanistan withdrawal —

— and kind of starts framing the world is more generally unsafe under Biden than it was under Trump.

Now, certainly, that’s done in a kind of Trumpian way. But it was an example of him, at least at that moment, not really meeting Biden in the mud and trying to stay focused on what I think was his campaign’s goal in this night, which was to present him as someone making a policy first challenge to Biden rather than a personal one.

Right. And what seems to happen for the next 10 or 15 minutes in the debate is that Biden keeps trying to get under Trump’s skin, and really make the case that there’s nothing about him that makes him fit to be president.

Yeah. You could feel President Biden trying to draw out the more crazy, chaotic side of Donald Trump. Some of the attacks were lighter.

Things like calling him a whiner, for example.

At one point, he pointed out the allegations that Donald Trump had sex with a porn star while his wife was pregnant.

And at another point —

— he mentioned the most serious, I think, of the political allegations, which is the idea that Donald Trump, as convicted felon, is unfit to be president. And you could see Trump physically wince when the words felon were said out loud, which I think is reflective to just how much that label really stings him.

When he talks about January 6, it becomes very clear that he’s trying to obfuscate his own role.

Trump goes into a soliloquy about, oh, January 6 —

— completely actually diverting the question that was at hand, which is did Donald Trump encourage a mob that struck at the heart of democracy.

And so that’s the kind of push and pull that we were seeing play out on the stage, which is that certainly Trump was engaging in his normal level of kind of dodges and falsehoods. But it was coming off, I think, more successfully than some expected, partially because Biden was just ineffective in landing some of those attacks.

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We’ll be right back.

So, Astead, the second half of the debate starts with a question that feels quite central to what you described as Trump’s strategy of trying to build this bigger coalition that exists in theory that he’s trying to make real in November. And it’s a question the moderators ask of Biden, and why he seems to have disappointed Black America.

Yeah, and you’re right. Biden knows that Black voters are an overwhelmingly Democratic constituency. And theoretically, if those folks came home to support him, it wouldn’t be much harder to see the path for Donald Trump’s victory.

And so he tries to give a little two-part answer here —

— both acknowledging that Black voters are right to feel some disappointment in Democrats, while also pointing to some things his administration has done to provide support for those communities.

And you hear Trump saying that none of those things are mattering because inflation is hurting Black communities more —

— and also that immigration is taking what Trump dubs, quote unquote, “Black jobs.” Now, I’m not exactly sure what Black jobs are. But we could guess that Trump here is trying to mean that an influx of immigration has hurt specifically Black communities more than other ones.

That’s, again, Trump hitting that three-pronged message in one — inflation, immigration, and crime. And those things are all wrapped up in that answer. And it’s really the pitch that Trump is giving to Black voters.

So this is Trump executing on the strategy that you mentioned him wanting to execute on in this debate, which is finding a way of appealing to this group of voters, traditionally Democratic through and through, who are intrigued by him and might come to him in this election. He is threading a complicated needle in seeking their votes. He’s seeming to succeed a bit.

Yes and no. Because I also think this answer was a real reminder of how Donald Trump is not a natural communicator on these issues, and frankly, often sounds like an unhinged man himself. Whether it be “Black jobs,” quote, unquote, or in his next answer about climate change, there were some moments in this debate that definitely reminded us of the Donald Trump who lost four years ago, frankly, because most of the country did find him unacceptable.

When asked about climate change, he doesn’t answer the question at all.

And then, after a follow-up by the moderators, he goes on a kind of classic Trump soliloquy —

— about how I want absolutely immaculate clean water, and I want absolutely clean air —

— how we have the best h2o. It’s the Trump of the memes that frankly, I think, gets him further away from who he wants to be if he’s going to pass his own kind of standard in terms of reaching different folks for November.

Right. What kept striking me in this second half, as in this climate change exchange, is just how consistently Trump is not answering the questions that the moderators are asking him.

Oh, absolutely. Whether it be questions about child care, Medicare, whether it’s questions about opioids, these are core issues people cared about. And Trump almost never responded to the moderators’ direct questions about those things. He almost always stayed in those three buckets that were clearly his focus to attack Biden — economy, immigration, crime.

It’s around here that the moderators turn to a question that has been on everyone’s mind at this point all night, which is the candidates’ age. And they start with Biden, whose age has been quite present in this debate. So tell us how that unfolds.

Yeah. The moderators put to the candidates directly the question about whether these are people who even physically or mentally can lead the country for the next four years. And Biden, I have to say, didn’t inspire much confidence.

He starts off by saying he spent half his career being criticized for how young he was. And then he goes on to say that you should judge him for the job that he’s done in office.

He’s saying to judge him by what he did rather than how old he is. The problem is that the first part of the debate was so defined by how inarticulate he was, that the question of age had been suddenly already answered and he had flunked that test. Now, Trump responds in a maybe even more ridiculous fashion —

— talking about the mental acuity test that he has taken —

— and focusing on his own golf game —

Right.

— saying that he can hit a ball 50 yards, and that that’s an example of how he feels in physical good shape, akin to 25 and 30 years ago.

Right. And this is when we enter the strangest moment, I have to think, in presidential debate history — two rather old men wrangling over who has the better golf game.

I have to say, this moment personally kind of bummed me out. There was a 1-minute period where the two options to leading the country were arguing over their golf handicaps.

Something about the debate about whose golf handicap was better felt like a distillation of the failure of this debate to really provide the American people with the options and the kind of serious policy discussion that the office warrants.

Astead, by the end of this 90-minute debate, it really felt like the consuming question that it produced wasn’t so much about whether Donald Trump was going to assemble a coalition that won him the presidency. The burning question seemed to be around President Biden and his weak performance. And so I want to make sure we end there, with an understanding of what now happens because of how Joe Biden performed, and what it’s going to mean for the rest of the race.

Yeah. I had come into the debate thinking that the onus was on Donald Trump to prove himself as a disciplined challenger who could take what was a polling possibility of a broad coalition and make it real. But frankly, that belief was based on the assumption that Joe Biden would clear the baseline of coherence that would make the age question at least neutralized for the night. But by the end of the night, it became clear that that wasn’t where the conversation would be.

I think that Joe Biden’s performance was frankly so disastrous that a Democratic party freak out that has been bubbling under a lid for months now has now exploded into the open to the point where you have his former communications director on television saying that was a poor performance.

Right. Kate Bedingfield. That struck me too. His former White House communications director went on TV and said that was a disappointing debate performance from President Biden — something Democratic communications directors don’t normally say on the record moments after a debate ends.

Absolutely. Also, I saw an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and Anderson Cooper immediately after the debate where the Vice President, the cheerleader in chief for the president, said very explicitly that she would not deny he had a rough start, but believes that he got better at the end, and saying the last 90 minutes does not erase the last 3 and 1/2 years — a real acknowledgment of the hole that Biden, frankly, put himself in throughout tonight’s debate.

But I got to say, as someone who has dedicated the last year and a half to asking a lot of Democrats questions about how we arrived at an 81-year-old president running for re-election, they have consistently dismissed the overwhelming evidence that most Americans thought Biden was too old to run for a second term. I brought that question to them at the DNC —

I remember.

— as they were making his path to the nomination easier. And the answer that, frankly, we got at the time was that Donald Trump would be so inherently invalid, none of that would matter. But there was no evidence to support that. That was their own belief that that would just change.

And then tonight, not only did Donald Trump not seem like someone who was completely unfit for the office of president, but that Biden was the memed version of himself, the incoherent, falling off a bike, TikTok caricature of himself. And I think now the Democrats are openly panicking about what Biden should do next, about what the party should do next, they have a lot fewer options at their disposal.

Right. There is really no plan B because of how Democratic leaders handled this situation for so long.

Yes. There is no plan B because they refused to ask the questions that would even lead to the creation of a plan B in the lead up to this. And so there aren’t really clear solutions as to what Democrats should do going forward. And that really, I think, is going to scare a lot of democrats. Because if you’re someone who wants Joe Biden to be president, a lot of those people believe that Donald Trump is a grave danger to this country. And the belief was that Joe Biden was the person uniquely positioned to stop that from happening.

Because he had done it four years before.

Because he had done it four years ago. But I think what’s changed from last night to today is a realization that actually nominating Joe Biden might be the biggest risk for the party, and be the very thing that makes a second term of Donald Trump most possible.

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Well, Astead, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me.

For more in-depth coverage of the 2024 presidential race, check out Astead’s show, “The Run Up,” which comes out every Thursday. You can find ‘The Run Up” wherever you listen.

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We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the Supreme Court blew up a landmark legal settlement between prosecutors and Purdue Pharma the maker of Oxycontin. The settlement would have channeled $6 billion into alleviating the opioid epidemic that Purdue Pharma allegedly played a major role in creating. But the settlement relied on a promise to shield members of the Sackler family, that created Purdue Pharma, from future lawsuits. And in their 5 to 4 ruling, the Supreme Court found that shield to be illegal and invalid.

The case was one of several major rulings on Thursday. In another decision, the court temporarily cleared the way for women in Idaho to receive emergency abortions when their health is at risk, despite a state law there all but banning the procedure. In a third decision, the court blocked a federal plan to reduce air pollution that drifts across state lines — a legal defeat for President Biden.

A quick reminder about this week’s episode of “The Interview.” David Marchese talks with Eddie Murphy about his long career in comedy, his return to the “Beverly Hills” franchise, and about what it’s like to make his idol, Richard Pryor, laugh.

Today’s episode was produced by Clare Toeniskoetter, Nina Feldman and Shannon Lin. It was edited by Marc Georges, contains original music by Dan Powell, Mary Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood and Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

“The Daily” is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg. MJ Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Muge Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jodi Becker, Riki Novetsky, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devin Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez, and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Special thanks to Lisa Tobin, Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moore, Jeffrey Miranda. Maddie Masiello, Isabella Anderson. Nina Lassam, and Nick Pittman.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.

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