this coming Thursday, President Joe Biden and the man he defeated in 2020, former President Donald Trump, will make their respective cases to the American people.
Neither would want to hear this, but they actually have much in common.
Both are unpopular.
They are more or less tied in recent polls, and both are older than our previous oldest president, Ronald Reagan.
Only one is a convicted felon, however, and yet the pressure is somehow on Joe Biden to prove that he has what it takes to continue in office.
Donald Trump will obviously try to highlight what he and his supporters see as Biden's frailty.
Biden will undoubtedly highlight the fact that Trump led an anti-constitutional insurrection.
Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, and Applebaum is my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the forthcoming book autocracy, Inc The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
Zoglin Colonel Young's is a white House correspondent for The New York Times.
Jonathan Karl is the chief white House chief Washington correspondent.
Excuse me for ABC news and the author of Tired of Winning Donald Trump and the end of the Grand Old Party.
And Vivian Salama is a national politics reporter at the Wall Street Journal.
Jon, I didn't mean to demote or promote.
I don't know, promote, demote, I don't know.
I thought it was a good title.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
Everybody here has great titles.
so welcome to our new table.
Very proud of it.
I want to focus our our attention really on the debate tonight.
It's something that I didn't think, was going to happen.
I'm still not 100% sure it's going to happen.
We'll get to that.
But I've been thinking a lot about the particular weaknesses that both men bring to Atlanta next week.
and actually watch this, watch this short clip and you'll see what I'm referring to.
That's only what I know.
I bet you I don't want love.
No fight with you.
I don't want to have nobody love nobody but you.
You love nobody but me.
And it must be because of Mitt.
My relationship to Mitt.
Very smart.
He goes.
I say, what would happen if the boat sank from its weight?
And you're in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater.
So I said, so there's a shark ten yards away from the boat, ten yards over here.
Do I get electrocuted?
If the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery.
The boat is sinking.
Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted?
Or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?
Because I will tell you, he didn't know the answer.
He said, you know, nobody's ever asked me that question.
So, okay, so one man in that little sequence has some frailty issues.
It just seems that way.
I know his people are telling us, the journalists in Washington, that Joe Biden is like the Hulk.
He's all, like muscle and vigor, but our eyes are telling us something else.
The other man is only three years younger, actually, and he doesn't seem very frail physically.
But, you know, in matters of cognition and coherence and storytelling, you know, it's something else entirely.
So, I mean, I, you know, I don't want to I don't want to overstate it.
But often Donald Trump doesn't make any sense.
Right.
So, John, I how does Trump come into this debate and prove that he's cognitively competent?
Well, well, you did something important there, which is you played an extended clip of Donald Trump.
And by the way, you could have kept on going.
and I think it's something that people haven't seen much of.
Donald Trump is omnipresent in our lives.
The criminal cases, all this.
But there has been not much coverage of what he is actually saying since he was in the white House.
I mean, people have largely tuned out.
So here you will have, you know, an extended period of time where we actually hear Donald Trump have to respond to real basic questions, give answers, have to have rebuttals, and to hear what he's actually talking about.
And it's it's but he's been out there.
I mean, this is actually the case I've, I've been making based on my reporting is he's this is not even the same Donald Trump of of of the of the Trump presidency.
he wanders all over the place.
His ideas, have gotten funny.
He's never been linear.
No, he's never in particular.
But but I mean, I think this is the first extended look that that a mass group of the American people will have of Donald Trump since he was in the white.
And that was the thinking to when sort of the Biden campaign, when President Biden first sort of challenged him this early, I, like you, was surprised when the news of this popped this early in what is normally the debate schedule, that it's happening this early.
But if you're when you talk to Democrats and Biden's top aides, they think that by being able to put Trump out there in the spotlight can sort of help them accomplish what they've been trying to do for now, the past couple of years, and have thus far failed to really convey to voters.
And that's the contrast.
Right.
Vivian, I want to ask you two questions.
The first is, would you rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark?
You don't have to answer that one right now.
The second question is, how does Joe Biden come into this debate and prove that he's not too old for the job?
Well, first of all, to your first question, I'm terrified of sharks.
So definitely electrocuted.
That's just something you have in common with Donald Trump.
There you go.
as far as, President Biden, you know, typically when you go into a debate like this is a referendum, when there's an incumbent, it's a referendum on their presidency.
Of course, now we have a very unusual situation where both men have served as president.
And so both of them have a record.
That's one of the big differences between Donald Trump of today versus Donald Trump back in 16, where he didn't have that.
But then you have two presidents who are older, and Donald Trump has really fixated on this idea of Joe Biden's age.
They've been playing those clips over and over again on, you know, everything from Fox News to any other Republican, or conservative, networks to show that he is either, too frail or kind of wandering off.
Trump talks at his rallies about Biden's cognitive abilities, ironically, at one of his, rallies a few days ago, he talked about Biden's cognitive abilities, and then he messed up the name of the former white House doctor, Congressman Ronny Jackson.
He called him Ronny Johnson.
Immediately after talking about Biden's cognitive abilities.
So obviously, the two men come in here with, you know, challenges.
They are both older at this point.
Trump himself, you know, not the man he was in 16. you just played a clip of him kind of rambling a little bit, and that's one of his, issues as well.
And so one of them is going to have issues of coming out there and appearing strong, and the other one is going to have kind of that that be on the offense to corner him on everything from his age and his frailty to his record on the economy, and other things as well.
And it's it's going to be a challenge for president and just your opinion on this, but who's in greater danger, in this debate in the sense of, oh, my goodness, I didn't realize he was like that.
I mean, they both face a certain kind of danger.
I think, in a way, Joe Biden has the advantage, partly because the that clip that you just showed, plus the other clips that have been circulating, there's one of him appearing to wander off at a G7 meeting when in fact, he was going to that was edited, that was edited to make it look like that.
But that means the bar for him is very low.
You know, all he has to do is prove that he's not senile and clearly he isn't senile.
And so he has a he has a chance of doing very well.
Whereas I think actually the expectations for Trump are higher.
and so it will be harder for Trump to appear coherent, to sound coherent.
Trump doesn't seem to me any more capable of making a coherent argument or making a case.
and in a way, the difficulty is also going to be for the for those who are running the debate, because Trump is going to lie, you know, that's what he does now.
He just goes off on these rants.
He makes stuff up.
I mean, I want to get how do you actually manage this debate in a second?
But I just want to come to this question.
I sort of foreshadowed a bit at the beginning.
Do you think that the debate is going to happen at this point?
I mean, just based off of my reporting, what I'm hearing?
Yeah, Trump's fully in.
I is not going to look for, not going to look for a Trump.
Trump is fully.
Yeah.
And look Biden and Biden fully and he's going to camp David.
He's at Camp David right now.
Ron Klain will be helping out with moderating as well.
They are going through mock debates.
I, I'm I'm of the position the reporting basically says thus far that so right.
But I agree with that that the expectations game is is favoring Biden.
But but I think this is a potentially perilous moment for, for Joe Biden.
I mean, his people will have you believe that the problem that he faces is the is basically the media hasn't been covering how great and, you know, strong he is.
And there's been you know, and then and then his enemies have taken clips out of context.
But in reality, I mean, the people, Democrats who are not inside the Biden campaign, but very much want him to win, are deeply concerned about his ability to make it through this campaign and are worried about, the at least the perception of him being so old and not able to make it through four years of a second term.
Yeah, stay on that for a little bit.
How much of that anxiety is related to the fact that at the end of his prospective theoretical second term, he'd be 86 years old?
How much of the worry is like, even if he can get through to next year, is Kamala Harris going to be president?
Are you voting essentially for Kamala?
I, I think that's that's that is the concern.
And I look, I went back and I know you've done this too.
And I went back and rewatch the debates from four years ago, particularly the second debate, which was the more the first debate was a bunch of shouting and they both looked awful.
Trump looked a little worse than than Biden, but Biden was was was sharp in that second debate.
And when you look at it, you're struck at how much younger he looks.
It was four years ago, it looks like more than four years ago.
And, you know, I think one of the significance, the significance of this debate coming so early is it is coming before the Democratic convention and that dream that, you know, fever dream of Republicans and some Democrats, that there will be some change at the at the Democratic convention will not be over until Biden speaks and accepts the nomination.
But there's also so much riding on this debate because of that.
You have the conventions coming right afterward, and then we don't have another debate until September, so they are going to be there.
It's the first time that these two see each other since the last time they debated, and for them at this point, to be able to come out there and actually have an exchange, a policy discussion, that's why so many rules have been put into place.
Everything from cutting the mics while they're speaking to having them on opposite ends of the stage so that you don't have an incident like that first debate where they're just shouting over each other.
I'm sure there's still going to be opportunities for them to do that.
But also remember that both of these men, when they are not scripted, they tend to say things that can be a little bit off the cuff and or, you know, not what their aides would like.
President Biden has been doing these mock debates, trying to really kind of soak in all the talking points where they're trying to get him to really memorize and stick to certain policy framings.
But President Obama, former President Trump, is not he.
They say he's having policy discussions.
So whether or not they're really getting into the nitty gritty of specific policy talking points, or if he's just going to go out there and riff, that could really make a difference for him.
Well, John, you've written a whole book on this, the idea that Donald Trump oh, my.
Going to read the briefing book is not is it not historically grounded?
No, no, no, not on and policy is not Trump's thing as of.
Right.
You know.
Right.
But but if I can just say so I think just to finish the Biden point is this is a moment where he can either answer those concerns, particularly the concerns among Democrats, that he can do this.
Like here he is.
Hi, big moment.
He sees it.
He he looks like he can handle it.
He can take on Donald Trump.
Or if it's a disaster, there will be questions about whether or not he should continue to be the nominee.
And no, I was just going to say that the you know, one of the things that's at stake in this election is, are do we vote on policy?
Do we vote on what's really happening in the economy, or do we vote on bombast and identity politics and, you know, essentially lies and the that suit whatever biases you have.
And, and the debate might show that, I mean, we might have a contest between one person who's trying to talk about policy on the one hand, and another person who's riffing about sharks on the other end.
But but, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a constituency that likes the sharks.
I mean, he's funny, he's a showman.
I can identify with someone who says wacky stuff, you know, that just like me is like my uncle, you know, and that and that's one of the things that we'll we'll discover.
