Full recap of 2024 presidential debate between Biden and Trump

Asked about his age, Trump, 78, bragged about his performance on cognitive tests and his recent success on the golf course.

“I took two cognitive tests. I aced them, both of them,” he said.

He then added, “I’m in very good health. I just won two club championships.”

Trump seemed to be referring to the cognitive test he took while president in 2018. Rep. Ronny Jackson — who was Trump’s White House physician — said at the time that the former president scored a perfect 30/30 the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.

– Josephine Rozzelle

Biden, 81, and Trump, 78, were asked to respond to concerns about whether they are too old to serve as president for the next four years.

They ended the round by bickering about each other’s golf games.

Biden initially quipped that he was accused of being too young for the first half of his political career, before touting his efforts to bring foreign investment to the U.S.

Trump responded by boasting that he had “aced” cognitive tests. He then defended his physical health by referring to his abilities as a golfer, saying, “You have to be able to hit the ball along the way.”

Trump claimed Biden “can’t hit a ball 50 yards.”

Biden shot back, “I’m happy to play golf with you if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?”

— Kevin Breuninger

Trump claimed that the environment fared the best under his administration.

“I had the best environmental numbers ever,” Trump said “And my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage actually.”

Average U.S. energy-related carbon emissions were in fact higher during the first three years of Trump’s administration than during that of Biden’s, according to April data from the independent U.S. Energy Information Administration.

From 2017 to 2019, when Trump was in office, the U.S. emitted an average of 5.2 billion metric tons of energy-related CO2 emissions versus an average of 4.9 billion metric tons from 2021 to 2023, when Biden was in office.

— Rebecca Picciotto

Biden “has a cold,” two people familiar with the situation told NBC News.

The people clarified that the president does not have Covid-19.

Biden’s quiet, raspy voice and occasional coughing has garnered significant attention throughout the debate.

— Kevin Breuninger

Biden said Trump has “the morals of an alley cat” as he slammed the Republican over the infidelity allegations at the center of Trump’s criminal hush money case.

Biden blasted Trump for having “sex with a porn star while your wife was pregnant.” He was referring to the claim by adult star Stormy Daniels that she had a one-night stand with Trump in the mid-2000s, while he was married to his current wife Melania Trump.

Trump replied, “‘I did not have sex with a porn star.”

A New York jury last month convicted Trump of falsifying business records related to a scheme to silence Daniels from speaking about the alleged sex before the 2016 presidential election.

— Kevin Breuninger

Biden said, “The only person who is a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now,” referring to Trump, who was found guilty last month of crimes related to a hush money payment to a porn star.

Trump quickly retorted, noting that Biden’s son Hunter also is a convicted felon, having recently been found guilty of gun crimes.

– Dan Mangan

Trump and Biden sparred over abortion, their longest back-and-forth of the evening so far.

Trump claimed “everybody wanted” federal abortion protections under Roe v. Wade to be abolished and for the issue to be handed to individual states.

And, referring to a quote from former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, Trump suggested that Biden supported allowing abortions up until the moment of birth.

Biden denied the claim, saying he supported the precedent of Roe, which was in effect in the U.S. for nearly half a century.

Trump’s leave-it-to-the-states position is “like saying you’re going to turn civil rights back to the states,” Biden said.

— Kevin Breuninger

Biden stumbled early in the debate, losing his train of thought at times and pausing for a long moment before CNN moderators cut him off.

Biden got into trouble when he spoke about strengthening the U.S. health care system.

“Making sure that were able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, with the Covid, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, look ….” Biden said, trailing off.

“Look, if, we’ve finally beat Medicare,” Biden said, before moderator Jack Tapper said, “Thank you, President Biden.”

Trump later cracked, “I don’t know what he just said.”

Trump’s Truth Social account quickly posted a video clip of Biden’s garbled answer. “WOW—WHAT IS HE SAYING?!” the post was captioned.

– Dan Mangan

Trump said that Biden inherited “an unbelievable situation” from his administration.

Biden entered office in January 2021 in the throes of the pandemic when thousands were dying from the Covid illness. Americans’ daily lives were massively disrupted by the nationwide lockdown, which also created massive economic disruption that have loomed heavily on the Biden administration.

“I gave him an unbelievable situation with all of the therapeutics and all of the things that we came up with,” Trump said. “We gave him something great. Remember, more people died under his administration, even though we had largely fixed it.”

At the time, Trump said that injecting disinfectants could be a viable cure for Covid illness.

— Rebecca Picciotto

The first question of the night was about the economy, and it went to Biden.

Asked about high inflation, Biden blamed Trump for botching the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving him a badly damaged economy.

Biden said his administration had to “try to put things back together.”

But “there’s more to be done,” Biden acknowledged. “we’re working to bring down the price around the kitchen table, and that’s what we’re going to get done.”

— Kevin Breuninger

Biden poked fun at claims by Republicans that he’s using drugs or other “performance enhancers” to prepare for the debate.

“I don’t know what they’ve got in these performance enhancers, but I’m feeling pretty jacked up,” Biden’s’s official X account tweeted, with a photo of him holding a can with printing on it that said, “Get Real, Jack. It’s Just Water.”

“Try it yourselves, folks,” the post added.

– Dan Mangan

The trophy that Biden and Trump are eyeing tonight: voters still making up their minds.

A two-day Reuters/Ipsos poll published June 13 found about 20% of survey respondents were undecided about who to vote for or whether they will vote at all in November. And a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found that 16% of voters are open to changing their candidate choice.

At the same time, multiple polls have found that a majority of respondents said they planned to tune into tonight’s debate.

Taken together, these results underscore the stakes of the debate in a near dead-heat presidential race that will likely be decided by tight margins.

For Biden and Trump, it means threading a needle to try to appeal to voters in that undecided group, despite their diverse and competing concerns.

— Rebecca Picciotto

The nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates has sponsored every presidential debate since 1988 — until now. Tonight’s debate came about rather untraditionally.

Biden publicly challenged Trump to a debate on May 15, saying in a video, “Make my day, pal.”

By the end of the day, the two candidates had agreed to tonight’s debate hosted by CNN and a Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC News, neither of which would have the involvement of the commission.

Biden’s campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon sent a letter to the commission the same day, informing them that the Democratic incumbent would not be participating in the three CDP-planned debates in September and October. In the letter, O’Malley Dillon called the commission’s long-used model “out of step” with the interests of voters.

Both Biden’s and Trump’s campaigns took issue with the fact that the commission planned the first debate for Sept. 16, by which time a handful of states will have already begun mailing out absentee ballots.

— Josephine Rozzelle

Artificial intelligence products ChatGPT and Copilot repeated a debunked claim that CNN would be delaying its video feed of the presidential debate by up to two minutes, NBC News reported.

CNN earlier Thursday denied a verified X user’s assertion that the network “will implement a 1-2 minute delay for tonight’s presidential debate instead of the standard 7-second delay.”

The user’s post was prefaced with the word “BREAKING” in the style of a breaking news report, but contained no source or evidence to back up the claim.

CNN’s official public relations account on X responded directly to the post: “This is false. The debate will begin live at 9pm ET.”

The user’s post nevertheless spread quickly on social media, and according to X’s tally had racked up more than 4 million views with less than an hour before the start of the debate.

NBC asked five AI chatbots if there will be a delay in the debate broadcast. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot answered incorrectly, while Meta’s AI and X’s Grok answered the question correctly.

— Kevin Breuninger

Biden’s campaign will run ads during the debate targeting Trump on issues ranging from abortion bans, the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, and the Republican challenger’s legal losses in court cases involving hush money payments to a porn star, sexual assault, and financial fraud.

The first ad, titled “Willow’s Box,” features a woman named Amanda Zurawski, who the campaign said nearly died twice after she was denied health care following her miscarriage in Texas, which has a ban on abortions.

Trump has boasted about his appointments as president of three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, who were part of a majority that voted to reverse the half-century-old ruling that first established a constitutional right to abortion.

– Dan Mangan

The Biden campaign said it set a new hour-long record for the campaign of grassroots fundraising late Thursday afternoon, only to break it the following hour.

“The 6-7 pm hour was Team Biden-Harris’ best grassroots fundraising hour of the campaign – besting the 5-6 pm hour which was our prior record hour for grassroots fundraising,” a campaign official told NBC News.

— Dan Mangan

If and when the topic of inflation comes up tonight, expect some routine finger-pointing from the debaters.

Both Biden and Trump have blamed each other for the price spikes that squeezed consumers’ wallets in the wake of the pandemic.

Here are some numbers to keep in mind:

• 1.4%: This was the consumer price index, a key inflation gauge, in January 2021, when Biden took office. Biden has repeatedly claimed that his administration inherited a 9% inflation rate, which is not true.
• 9.1%: This was the CPI in June 2022 when the post-pandemic inflation spike hit its peak. It was the highest rate in 40 years.
• 3.3%: This was the CPI in May, the most recent reading of inflation. Trump has claimed that he would end “the Biden inflation nightmare,” as he put it during a speech on June 22, though inflation has cooled significantly from its highs over the course of the the Biden administration.
• 19.3%: This is the cumulative level that prices have increased in the years since Biden took office.
• 7.8%: This is the cumulative level that prices increased during the Trump administration.

New inflation metrics come out tomorrow, including the Personal Consumption Expenditures index, which is the preferred measure of the Federal Reserve, which is in charge of the highly important decision of adjusting interest rates.

— Rebecca Picciotto

It’s June 27, making tonight’s debate the earliest presidential debate in modern U.S. history by nearly three months.

Before tonight, the earliest presidential debate was on Sept. 21, 1980, when Ronald Reagan debated John Anderson, who was running as an independent, according to the Commission on Presidential Debates.

Last election cycle, the first debate between Biden and Trump was on Sept. 29, 2020. The cycle before that, Hillary Clinton and Trump first faced off on Sept. 26, 2016.

Debates have historically occurred after candidates receive their official nominations from their respective parties. Tonight, Biden and Trump remain presumptive nominees.

The Republican National Convention is set for July 15-18 in Milwaukee. The Democratic National Convention will take place in Chicago on Aug. 19-22.

— Josephine Rozzelle

One of Biden’s biggest financial boosters said he’s hoping to see what he describes as the “real” Trump versus the “real” Biden in Thursday’s debate.

“My hope is that the audience and by extension, the voters will see the real true Trump, as well as the real true Biden,” Haim Saban said in an email to CNBC. He did not respond to follow-up requests for further comment.

But the one-line statement does suggest that Saban, like many other donors, will be carefully watching how the two perform on stage as he tries to raise money for Biden.

— Brian Schwartz