Trump and Biden sought to use the debate to highlight their respective successes as president and to criticize the other's policies.
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Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump faced off Thursday night in the first of two announced debates before the Nov. 5 election. CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash acted as moderators at CNN’s studios in Atlanta.
The one-on-one matchup of Biden
and Trump was unique, not only because it pitted a president against his predecessor, but because it had no live audience and the two candidates’ microphones were muted when it wasn’t their time to speak.
Trump and Biden weren’t allowed to bring any notes or props onto the stage, where they traded jabs over such subjects as the economy, illegal immigration, abortion, and foreign policy on China, Iran, Israel, and terrorist groups.
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Both Trump and Biden sought to use the 90-minute debate, well ahead of the
Nov. 5 election, to highlight their respective successes as president and to criticize the other’s policies.
Some claims made from the stage were misleading or lacked adequate context. Here’s a sampling of 16.
1. ‘We Had the Safest Border in History, Now We Have the Worst’
Trump said the
U.S. border was safer during his presidency than at any other time in history, adding that, under Biden, “now we have the worst border in history.”
Under the Biden administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered 9.7 million illegal aliens on America’s borders. An additional 1.8 million “known gotaways” have crossed the border to enter the country under Biden’s presidency.
In fiscal year 2020, the last full year of Trump’s presidency, CBP encountered 458,088 illegal aliens on America’s southern border. So far in fiscal year 2024, which began Oct. 1, more than 1.6 million illegal aliens have been encountered at the southern border.
In fiscal year 2020, a total of 199 illegal aliens on the nation’s
terrorist watch list were encountered on America’s borders. Since the start of fiscal 2024, a total of 316 migrants on the terrorist watch list have been encountered at U.S. borders.
On Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order stopping
border wall construction and rolled back Trump’s border and immigration policies that he called “harsh and extreme.” When he took office in January 2021, Biden suspended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required asylum-seekers to stay outside the country, and formally ended the program in spring 2021.
Former Border Patrol Chief
Rodney Scott has said Mexican drug and criminal cartels are taking advantage of the Biden administration’s
border policies.
2. Biden Accuses Trump of Recommending Drinking Bleach
Biden opened by claiming Trump said Americans should “drink bleach” to battle COVID-19. In July 2020, the left-leaning PolitiFact found this claim to be “mostly false.”
At the time, Trump spoke at a briefing with William Bryan, then-under secretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security. Bryan talked about a study that found that sun exposure and disinfectants such as bleach could kill the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 when it lingers on surfaces.
Trump said at that briefing: “I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with—but it sounds interesting to me.”
3. ‘Everybody’ Supported Overturning Roe v. Wade
When Biden blamed Trump for the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade and
abortion on demand, in part because he appointed three of the nine justices, Trump asserted that “everybody wanted to get it back to the states.”
In July 2022, shortly after the Supreme Court overturned its 1973 ruling that legalized abortion on demand across America and nationalized the issue,
polling found that a
majority of Americans opposed overturning Roe.
The high court’s Dobbs decision gave the abortion question back to the people and their state representatives, conservatives argue.
However, it’s not clear that all Americans were aware it was a national issue.
4. Biden: ‘Constitutional Scholars Supported Roe’
At one point, Biden said of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973: “The fact is the vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe. This idea that they were all against it is ridiculous.”
But the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, noted for being a liberal jurist,
criticized the Roe v. Wade decision and the legal rationale behind it.
Also, numerous other
legal scholars who professed to be pro-choice on abortion criticized Roe v. Wade ruling as bad law, among them law professors Laurence Tribe and John Hart Ely and former Kennedy administration solicitor general and Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
However, the claim could be true that a majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe. Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University,
told PolitiFact: “It’s very obvious that the vast majority of legal scholars support the result in Roe v. Wade and oppose Dobbs.” But Somin added: “Some have issues with the details of Roe’s reasoning.”
5. In Charlottesville, ‘Very Fine People’
Days after one fact-check website called the repeated claim false, Biden again claimed that in 2017 Trump said white nationalist rioters in Charlottesville, Virginia, were “fine people.”
“He said, ‘I think there are fine people on both sides,’” Biden said. “What American president would ever say Nazis coming out of the fields, saying the same antisemitic bile, carrying swastikas, were fine people? This is the guy who says [Adolf] Hitler’s done some good things. I’d like to know what they are. … This guy has no sense of American democracy.”
Trump responded, “He made up the Charlottesville story. … It’s been fully debunked. On Sunday, the liberal website Snopes ran a headline, “
No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People.’”
The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 was protesting the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in the city. But it turned into a riot that included clashes with white nationalists and Antifa.
Trump said in a press conference afterward:
You had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch, but there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the Left. You’ve just called them the Left, that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.
A reporter followed up, saying: “The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.”
Trump replied:
They didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group—excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did—you had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.