The second that the Trump-Biden debate on CNN ended, Thursday, June 27, the news channel’s commentators took to the set. The general feeling among them was one of dismay, with politics specialist John King making a stark diagnosis: A “dismal” performance for Joe Biden. The veteran political commentator had never received so many despondent messages during a presidential campaign debate. Not a single journalist on the CNN set tried to defend the Democratic president. They were all thinking about how to replace a candidate who was too old, and whose candidacy had been propped up by his wife, Jill, and his entourage at the White House.

The print media echoed this mood: “Biden’s Age Problem Overshadows Any Policy Debate,” said a headline run by the Wall Street Journal, which considered that “President Biden’s hoarse voice and, at times, hard-to-follow responses didn’t help efforts by his campaign to assuage voters’ concerns about his age – and may have made matters worse. He looked all of his 81 years and appeared to blank on some words, while jumping from subject to subject.” The conservative Murdoch group’s tabloids were jubilant: “We just witnessed the end of Joe Biden’s presidency,” wrote the New York Post as the headline of its editorial, as well as another piece, which shows a photo of the president’s wife, titled “Jill leads Joe off stage after calamitous night; Dems [Democrats] freak out.”

There was even greater consternation among the Democratic party. The New York Times immediately began to take stock of the debate’s political consequences. “President Biden hoped to build fresh momentum for his re-election bid by agreeing to debate nearly two months before he is to be formally nominated. Instead, his halting and disjointed performance on Thursday night prompted a wave of panic among Democrats and reopened discussion of whether he should be the nominee at all,” analyzed journalist Peter Baker.

This view was widely shared by the Times’ editorial staff. “Within the first half-hour of the presidential debate, I heard from three veteran Democratic presidential campaign officials, and all of them had the same reaction to President Biden’s performance: This is a disaster,” said Patrick Healy, deputy opinion editor at the New York Times.

‘A little incoherent’

“He stumbled over facts, and occasionally he seemed to lose his train of thought and became a little incoherent. (…) And yet, despite his terrible delivery, Biden was at least telling voters the truth,” commented New York Times editorial board member David Firestone, who harshly concluded: “Biden did nothing to change the minds of those voters who feel he is no longer up to the job, and his performance on Thursday night may mean that many Americans won’t pay attention to whether his thoughts and his actions were the right ones.”

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