Episode Transcript
Transcripts are displayed as originally observed. Some content, including advertisements may have changed.
Use Ctrl + F to search
0:00
What if AI could help save wildlife? We're
0:02
trying to help conserve the wildlife
0:05
that lives alongside Britain's railways. That's
0:08
Anthony Dancer of the Zoological Society of
0:10
London. ZSL partnered with Network Rail, which
0:12
maintains all 20,000 miles of
0:14
Britain's railway. Together, they use Google Cloud AI to
0:16
get a clearer picture of the animals living near
0:18
the lines. Here's Network Rail's Neil
0:20
Strong. Using Google Cloud AI, we're
0:22
able to interpret a lot more data than
0:25
we would have been able to with our
0:27
ecologist sitting behind a computer looking at images
0:29
or listening to sound files. Learn
0:31
more at g.co/cloud. From
0:35
the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This
0:38
is The Daily. Today,
0:42
in the first debate of the 2024 presidentories, Joe
0:46
Biden hoped to make the case that
0:48
Donald Trump was unfit to return to
0:50
the White House. Instead,
0:54
Biden's weak performance deepened
0:56
doubts about his own fitness for the job.
1:03
My colleague, Asted Herndon, a
1:05
political reporter and host of The
1:08
Run-Up, explains what happened. It's
1:17
Friday, June 28. Asted,
1:23
good evening, almost good morning.
1:25
By the time we're done talking, it is definitely going to
1:27
be Friday morning. Thank you
1:30
for joining us at what is clearly a
1:32
very tender hour. No, thank you for
1:34
having me. Okay. This
1:36
was always going to be
1:38
a historic debate. Two single-term
1:40
presidents debating each other for
1:42
a chance at a second
1:44
term, both choosing
1:47
to opt out of
1:49
the traditional presidential commission-authorized
1:51
debates. We've never had
1:53
any of this before, but that's not,
1:56
I would wager, what people are going
1:58
to remember about. this debate,
2:00
I suspect they're going
2:03
to remember just how much one
2:05
of these candidates openly
2:07
struggled, struggled mightily
2:09
on the biggest possible stage. Yeah,
2:12
I mean, there were some things
2:14
I was expecting for tonight's debate.
2:16
Bitter insults, an incumbent defending a
2:19
policy record, a challenger really attacking
2:21
it. But one thing I didn't
2:23
expect was for President Biden to
2:26
kind of live up to the
2:28
caricature of him that has
2:30
been really been created over the last
2:33
six months by Republicans. In the first
2:35
10 minutes, he was not
2:37
even just a poor debater. He
2:39
seems like a struggling old man
2:41
in a way that I
2:44
think for a lot of people was
2:47
alarming, not even just
2:49
in a political sense, but in a
2:51
personal sense. And I think
2:53
then the low bar that had been
2:55
created for him for tonight's performance, it
2:58
immediately raised alarm flags that he
3:00
was not even clearing it. Hmm.
3:02
Well, let's talk about what both
3:05
Biden and Trump were
3:07
trying to do
3:10
in this debate before we return to
3:12
the question of how
3:15
Biden did or didn't do and how Trump did
3:18
or didn't do tonight. You know, for Trump,
3:20
there is an electoral opening right now for
3:22
him to really create a coalition that's unique
3:24
for a Republican candidate. If you believe the
3:27
polling or the kind of trend lines that
3:29
we have seen in polling over the last
3:31
six months, Donald Trump is not
3:33
winning back the kind of traditional Republicans he's
3:36
lost over the last four years. He's
3:38
winning over people who were considered
3:41
more traditionally Democratic groups or just
3:43
more diseffective voters in general, younger
3:45
people, people of color, a low
3:48
income folks, black folks. There has
3:50
been a kind of growth among those
3:52
margins that's provided Trump with this ability to
3:54
say that if he can put that
3:56
together in November, there's a real unique path
3:58
for him to. to beat Joe Biden. But
4:01
that path requires a candidate who's kind of
4:03
speaking in more disciplined, controlled tones that I
4:06
think we're used to Trump talking. And the
4:08
Trump campaign was eager to put that best
4:10
foot forward. Now, on the
4:12
Biden side, they have a fundamental problem,
4:14
which is that the majority of Americans
4:16
think the president is too old to
4:18
serve. And the prospect of an 86-year-old
4:20
Joe Biden at the end of a
4:22
second term, frankly, freaks folks out. And
4:24
the Biden campaign's response to that problem
4:26
has been, frankly, to diminish it, but
4:28
also say to watch him. And the
4:30
idea was that if they had an
4:32
earlier debate before the conventions and before
4:34
the race really kicked off, they can
4:36
put some of those concerns to bed,
4:38
as we saw him slightly due at
4:41
the State of the Union earlier this
4:43
year. But as we just talked
4:45
about, Biden provided his party
4:47
no reassurance tonight. OK,
4:49
well, take us into
4:52
the meat of this debate.
4:54
And let's explore why this
4:56
night ended up being so
4:58
problematic for Biden. And let's
5:00
try to understand whether Trump
5:02
did achieve his goal of
5:05
being the kind of candidate
5:07
who can assemble this theoretical,
5:09
broad coalition. Well, let me
5:11
set the scene. We're
5:14
live from Georgia, a key battleground state in
5:17
the race for the White House. Good
5:19
evening. I'm Dana Bash, anchor of
5:22
CNN. Dana Bash and Jake Tapper,
5:24
the moderators, introduced both candidates. Now,
5:27
please welcome the 46th president of
5:29
the United States, Joe Biden. And
5:35
when Biden walked onto the stage, I mean,
5:38
it's generous to call it a walk. He,
5:40
frankly, shuffled in a way that was only
5:42
a visual reminder of the
5:44
advanced age of this president. Gentlemen,
5:47
thanks so much for being here. Let's begin the
5:49
debate. And let's start with the issue that voters
5:51
consistently is their top
5:54
concern, the economy. And
5:56
within the first couple answers, what do you
5:58
say to voters who feel they are worse?
6:00
off under your presidency than they were under
6:02
President Trump. We got to take a look
6:04
at what I was left when I became
6:06
president and what Mr. Trump left me. The
6:09
immediate thing that was noticeable was not
6:11
about what he was saying, but about
6:13
how he sounded. The economy collapsed. There
6:16
were no jobs. Unemployment rate rose to
6:18
15 percent. Biden's voice
6:20
was really raspy. We created 15,000 new
6:22
jobs and we brought out another position
6:24
where. It sounded as if he needed
6:26
to clear his throat. He was talking
6:28
really softly. There's more to be done.
6:30
Working class people are still in trouble.
6:33
And it made his first couple of answers
6:35
almost incoherent. What I'm going to do is
6:37
fix the tax system. For example, we
6:40
have a thousand billionaires in America. I
6:42
mean, billionaires in America. And what's happening?
6:45
And then we got to one answer
6:47
that was literally incoherent. Making sure that
6:50
we're able to make every single solitary
6:52
person eligible
6:54
for what I've been able to do with the
6:58
COVID, excuse me, with dealing
7:00
with everything we have to do with. Look,
7:06
if we finally
7:08
beat Medicare. Thank you,
7:10
President Biden. President Trump eventually ended up
7:13
trailing off such that it became clear
7:15
that this was not someone who was
7:17
fully in command of their
7:19
presence at the moment. And
7:21
that really set the tone for Biden's
7:24
performance throughout the whole debate. Right. This
7:27
was the moment, if we're being
7:29
honest, where everyone in politics and
7:31
political journalism's phones just started exploding
7:33
with text messages. All
7:35
of them saying some version of, oh gosh,
7:39
this debate is going really
7:41
quite badly for President Biden. And
7:44
I said to your point about what he was
7:46
seeking to do and the assurances he was trying
7:48
to give people in his party and beyond his
7:50
party. He was not giving
7:52
those assurances at all. One
8:00
says, I think you have to question seriously whether
8:02
he can even make it to the end of
8:04
this night. Another says, man,
8:06
this just doesn't feel good to watch.
8:09
I mean, it was an immediate sense
8:11
of panic that was spreading among the
8:13
party. And I think it's because, you
8:15
know, typically these debates have an air
8:18
of optics and showmanship, but for Biden
8:20
and his kind of political challenge, it
8:22
was really about that sense of energy
8:24
and about that sense of command of
8:26
stage because the question of age has
8:29
been so circling around his candidacy. And
8:31
so for him to immediately come out
8:33
with a both presentation and
8:35
an answer that was frankly not substantive
8:38
and hard to follow, it sent the
8:40
concerns to the roof. I mean, things
8:42
went from zero to 100 very fast,
8:44
partially because I think that's
8:46
what people were coming in seeing as
8:49
a baseline for him. And he very
8:51
immediately stumbled. I would make an analogy
8:53
to like an Olympic hurdler, right, where
8:55
at the first hurdle, he fell. Donald
8:58
Trump, on the other hand, doesn't seem
9:01
to have lost his edge. That
9:03
becomes very clear from the beginning
9:05
of the debate and instead is
9:08
displaying his usual swagger as well
9:10
as his usual challenges with the
9:12
facts. Yeah, absolutely. To the
9:14
extent that Donald Trump can be focused
9:16
on policy, he came out in that
9:18
mode today. We are the greatest
9:20
economy in the history of our country. We
9:23
have never done so well. We
9:27
know that the campaign really wants to focus on three
9:29
things, inflation, immigration, and
9:37
crime. The only jobs he
9:39
created are for illegal immigrants and bounce back
9:41
jobs that bounce back from the COVID. And
9:44
you could see Trump really returning to those in the early
9:46
kind of 10, 15 minutes. He
9:48
inherited almost no inflation and it stayed that way
9:50
for 14 months. And then
9:53
it blew up under his leadership because they spent
9:55
money like a bunch of people that
9:57
didn't know what they were doing and they don't
9:59
know what they were doing. He repeatedly tied. Biden
10:01
to rising prices and tried to frame the economy
10:03
that he stewarded as president as significantly better than
10:05
the one that we are experiencing now. Migrant
10:08
crime. I call it Biden migrant crime.
10:10
They're killing our citizens at a level
10:12
that we've never seen before. He framed
10:14
the country as safer four years ago
10:16
than what we're experiencing now. And it's
10:18
a shame. What's happened to our country
10:21
in the last four years is not
10:23
to be believed. You could see him
10:25
trying to follow through on the kind of
10:27
classic premise of a reelection campaign where
10:29
the challenger really tries to ask the
10:31
question, are you better off than you were
10:34
four years ago? And so
10:36
we got the Donald Trump version of that
10:38
tonight, but we should be clear. It's infused
10:40
with a lot of his usual set of
10:42
falsehoods as we have come to expect from
10:44
him. And what struck me was for all
10:47
the exaggerations and some of the falsehoods in
10:50
what Trump was saying, the
10:52
contrast between his swagger and
10:55
his presentation and Biden's became
10:58
the most pronounced
11:00
part of this back and forth. Yeah,
11:03
I think you're right that Trump sounded and felt
11:05
a little more, dare we say,
11:08
presidential than Biden in those first
11:10
10 minutes. But the bar was
11:12
on the floor because the president
11:14
came out with such, I think,
11:16
a shocking level of incoherence that
11:18
it made Donald Trump, the
11:21
Donald Trump we have seen spew
11:23
falsehoods, conspiracies, unhingedness at every turn.
11:25
It made him seem like the
11:28
person who kind of had their
11:30
ducks in the row. There's
11:32
40% fewer people coming across the border
11:35
illegally. It's better when he left office.
11:37
And in a kind of crystallizing moment of
11:39
this interaction. And I'm going to continue to
11:41
move until we get the total ban on
11:45
the total initiative
11:47
relative to what we're going to
11:49
do with more border patrol and
11:51
more asogamos. After one
11:53
of Biden's more meandering answers, Trump
11:55
responds with a quip that really
11:57
said what everyone was thinking. President
12:00
Trump. I really don't know what he said
12:02
at the end of their sentence. I don't think he knows what
12:04
he said either. Look, saying that I don't
12:06
know what Biden said at the end of the sentence, and
12:08
I don't know if he does either. This
12:11
is the first presidential election since
12:13
the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
12:15
Wade. It feels like
12:17
a strong topic for Biden in this
12:19
part of the debate was
12:22
going to be abortion. Which returned
12:24
the issue of abortion to the
12:26
states. Correct. And the
12:28
moderators bring it up. It felt
12:30
like low-hanging fruit, an opportunity for
12:32
Biden to blame Trump for the
12:34
fall of Roe v. Wade and
12:37
score some real points on the board.
12:39
But it didn't feel like that's what
12:41
happened. No, it didn't. And I think
12:43
that speaks to the point that came
12:45
through during this debate that was consistently
12:47
not the message, it was the messenger.
12:49
Abortion has been a politically
12:51
potent issue for Democrats and something that
12:53
folks have been looking for Biden to
12:55
speak to directly. Do you support any
12:58
legal limits on how late a woman
13:00
should be able to terminate a pregnancy?
13:02
I support it Roe v. Wade. And
13:04
he kind of botched that framing. Which
13:06
had three trimesters. The first time is
13:09
between the woman and the doctor. Second
13:11
time is between the doctor and an
13:13
extreme situation. The third time is between
13:16
the doctor, I mean between the woman
13:18
and the state. He was trying to
13:20
seemingly make an analogy about trimesters that
13:23
didn't really come through very clearly. And
13:25
so that I think was a
13:27
moment where when the moderator brought it
13:29
up, he would feel Democrats think, okay,
13:32
this is something that might play better
13:34
for us than the economy or
13:36
immigration. But like a lot of
13:38
things in this debate, Biden just didn't seem to
13:40
put it together that well. Eventually,
13:43
in this first half of the debate, things
13:46
start to get a bit more personal.
13:48
They start to get a bit nastier
13:50
between these two candidates who clearly do
13:52
not like each other at all. And
13:55
interestingly, given your framing of, you know,
13:57
would Trump moderate some of his... his
14:00
excesses. It was
14:03
Biden who went there first.
14:06
Yeah, it was. And you know, we
14:08
should put the background here. There was
14:10
previous reporting that Donald Trump had called
14:12
fallen soldiers suckers and losers while touring
14:14
a military grave site. I went to
14:16
the World War Two cemetery, World War
14:18
One cemetery refused to go to. He
14:21
was standing with his four-star general and he
14:23
told me, said, I don't want to go
14:25
in there because there are much of losers
14:27
and suckers. And that's what Biden was referring
14:29
to framing Trump as someone who has consistently
14:31
disrespected veterans. We're also in a situation where
14:33
we have great respect for veterans. My son
14:35
spent a year in Iraq. But
14:39
Biden lands on saying, My son was not
14:41
a loser, he was not a sucker. And
14:43
then looks to Trump and says, you're the
14:45
sucker. You're the loser. You're the sucker. You're
14:47
the loser. And
14:49
I thought for me, this reflected the
14:51
Biden campaign strategy of wanting to draw
14:53
Trump out to kind of bring out,
14:56
let's say, more chaotic version of him
14:58
that was less stuck to the policy
15:00
script. And so I was looking at
15:02
this moment to see, OK, how is
15:04
Trump going to respond to this? First
15:07
of all, that was a made up quote,
15:09
suckers and losers. They made it up. It
15:11
was in a third rate magazine that's failing
15:14
like many of these. He denied kind of
15:16
making the suckers and losers remark about dead
15:18
soldiers, but he didn't kind of respond on
15:20
the personal level in which Biden was trying
15:22
to draw him out to. It was made
15:25
up by him just like Russia, Russia, Russia
15:27
was made up just like he reframed the
15:29
conversation about commander in chief to be about
15:31
the kind of global instability that has happened
15:33
under Biden's watch. I tell you what happened.
15:35
He was so bad with Afghanistan. It was
15:38
such a horrible embarrassment, most embarrassing moment. This
15:40
is when he mentions the kind of Afghanistan withdrawal.
15:43
We lost 13 beautiful soldiers and
15:45
38 soldiers were obliterated. And
15:47
by the way, we left and kind
15:49
of starts framing the world as more
15:51
generally unsafe under Biden than it was
15:53
under Trump. That's why you had no
15:55
terror at all during my administration. This
15:57
place, the whole world is blowing up.
16:00
under him. Now, certainly
16:02
that's done in a kind of Trumpian
16:04
way, but it was an example of
16:06
him, at least at that moment, not
16:08
really meeting Biden in the mud and
16:10
trying to stay focused on what I
16:12
think was his campaign's goal in this
16:14
night, which was to present him as
16:16
someone making a policy first challenge to
16:18
Biden rather than a personal one. Right.
16:21
And what seems to happen for the next 10 or
16:23
15 minutes in the debate is that Biden
16:25
keeps trying to get under Trump's skin
16:27
and really make the case that
16:30
there's nothing about him that
16:33
makes him fit to be president. Yeah.
16:35
You could feel President Biden trying to
16:37
draw out the more crazy, chaotic side
16:39
of Donald Trump. Some of the attacks
16:41
were lighter. And now he says that
16:43
he loses again such a whiner that
16:45
he is, that it could be a
16:48
bloodbath. Things like calling him a whiner,
16:50
for example. For doing a whole range
16:52
of things, of having sex
16:54
with a porn star. At one point, he
16:56
pointed out the allegations that Donald Trump had
16:58
sex with a porn star while his wife
17:00
was pregnant. You have the morals of an
17:02
alley cat. And at another point, the
17:04
only person in this stage is a convicted felon
17:06
as the man I'm looking at right now. He
17:09
mentioned the most serious, I think, of
17:11
the political allegations, which is the idea
17:13
that Donald Trump has convicted felon is
17:15
unfit to be president. And you could
17:17
see Trump physically wince when the words
17:19
felon were set out loud, which I
17:21
think is reflective to just how much
17:23
that label really stings him. I'm
17:26
going to give you a minute, President
17:28
Trump, for a follow up question I have.
17:32
After a jury convicted you of 34 felonies last month,
17:35
you said if reelected, you would quote,
17:37
have every right to go after, unquote,
17:39
your political opponents. You just talked about
17:41
members of the select committee on January
17:43
6 going to jail. Your main
17:45
political opponent is standing on stage with you
17:47
tonight. Can you clarify exactly what it means
17:49
about you feeling you have every right to
17:51
go after your political opponents? And then he
17:53
talks about January 6. Well, I said my
17:55
retribution is going to be success. We're going
17:58
to make this country successful again. because right
18:00
now it's a failing nation. It
18:02
becomes very clear that he's trying to
18:04
obfuscate his own role in what was
18:06
that day. On January 6th, we
18:08
had a great border. Nobody coming through,
18:11
very few. And Trump goes into a
18:13
soliloquy about... On January 6th, we were
18:15
energy independent. On January 6th, we had
18:18
the lowest taxes ever. We had the
18:20
lowest regulations ever. Oh, January 6th, we
18:22
had a good economy. On January 6th,
18:24
we were respected all over the world.
18:27
January 6th, our role was respected in
18:29
the world, completely actually diverting the question
18:31
that was at hand, which is, did
18:33
Donald Trump encourage a mob that struck
18:36
at the heart of democracy? You have
18:38
80 seconds left. My question was, what
18:40
do you say to those voters who
18:42
believe that you violated your constitutional oath
18:45
through your actions and inaction on January
18:47
6th, 2021, and worry that you'll do
18:49
it again? Well, I didn't say that
18:51
to anybody. I said peacefully and patriotically.
18:54
And Nancy Pelosi, if you just watch
18:56
the news. And
18:58
so that's the kind of push
19:01
and pull that we were seeing
19:03
play out on the stage, which
19:05
is that certainly Trump was engaging
19:07
in his normal level of kind
19:09
of dodges and falsehoods. But it
19:11
was coming off, I think, more
19:13
successfully than some expected, partially because
19:15
Biden was just ineffective in landing
19:17
some of those attacks. We'll be
19:19
right back. Google
19:48
Cloud AI allows us to have access
19:50
to huge amounts of computational scale to
19:58
work on really important problems in the world. Learn
20:00
how organizations are building with AI from Google
20:03
Cloud at g.co.com. I'm
20:07
Julian Barnes. I'm an intelligence reporter at
20:09
The New York Times. I try to
20:11
find out what the U.S. government is
20:13
keeping secret. Governments keep
20:16
secrets for all kinds of reasons. They
20:18
might be embarrassed by the information. They
20:20
might think the public can't understand it.
20:22
But we at The New York Times
20:25
think that democracy works best when the
20:27
public is informed. It takes
20:29
a lot of time to find people
20:31
willing to talk about those secrets. Many
20:33
people with information have a certain agenda
20:35
or have a certain angle. And that's
20:37
why it requires talking to a lot
20:39
of people to make sure that we're
20:41
not misled and that we give a
20:44
complete story to our readers. If
20:46
The New York Times was not reporting
20:48
these stories, some of them might never
20:50
come to light. If you want
20:52
to support this kind of work, you can do
20:54
that by subscribing to The New York Times. So
21:01
instead, the second half of the debate starts
21:03
with a question that feels quite
21:05
central to what you described as
21:08
Trump's strategy of trying to build
21:10
this bigger coalition that exists in
21:12
theory that he's trying to make
21:15
real in November. And it's a
21:17
question the moderators ask of Biden
21:20
and why he seems
21:22
to have disappointed
21:24
black America. Yeah,
21:26
and you're right. Biden knows that
21:28
black voters are an overwhelmingly democratic
21:30
constituency. And theoretically, if those folks
21:33
came home to support him, it
21:35
wouldn't be much harder to see
21:37
the path for Donald Trump's victory.
21:39
What do you say to black voters
21:42
who are disappointed with the progress so far?
21:44
So he tries to give a little two
21:46
part answer here. I say I don't blame
21:48
them for being disappointed. Inflation is still hurting
21:50
them badly. For example, I provided for the
21:53
idea that any black family first
21:55
time homebuyer should get a $10,000 tax credit,
21:58
both acknowledging that black
22:00
voters are right to feel some
22:02
disappointment in Democrats while also pointing
22:04
to some things his administration has
22:07
done to provide support for those
22:09
communities. He's blaming inflation, and
22:11
he's right. It's been very bad. He
22:13
caused the inflation, and it's killing
22:15
black families. And do you see
22:17
or Trump saying that none of
22:19
those things are mattering because inflation
22:21
is hurting black communities more? His
22:24
big kill on the black
22:26
people is the millions of people that
22:28
he's allowed to come in through the
22:31
border. They're taking black jobs now. And
22:33
also that immigration is taking what Trump
22:35
dubs, quote unquote, black jobs. Now,
22:38
I'm not exactly sure what black jobs
22:40
are, but we could guess that Trump
22:42
here is trying to mean that influx
22:44
of immigration has hurt specifically black communities
22:47
more than other ones. And you haven't
22:49
seen it yet, but you're going to
22:51
see something that's going to be the
22:54
worst in our history. Thank you. That's,
22:56
again, Trump hitting that three-pong message in
22:58
one, inflation, immigration,
23:02
and crime. And those things are
23:04
all wrapped up in that answer.
23:06
And it's really the pitch that
23:08
Trump is giving to black voters.
23:10
So this is Trump executing on
23:12
the strategy that you
23:15
mentioned him wanting to execute on
23:17
in this debate, which is finding
23:19
a way of appealing
23:21
to this group of voters traditionally
23:23
democratic through and through who are
23:26
intrigued by him and might
23:28
come to him in this election. He is
23:31
threading a complicated needle in seeking
23:33
their votes. He's seeming
23:35
to succeed a bit. Yes and no,
23:37
because I also think this answer was
23:39
a real reminder of how Donald Trump
23:42
is not a natural communicator on these
23:44
issues. There were some moments in this
23:46
debate that definitely reminded us of the
23:48
Donald Trump who lost four years ago,
23:50
frankly, because most of the country did
23:52
find him unacceptable. Will you take any
23:54
action as president to slow the climate
23:56
crisis? Let me just go back to
23:59
what I said. he said about the
24:01
police. When asked
24:03
about climate change, he doesn't answer the question
24:05
at all. 38 seconds left
24:07
of President Trump. Will you take
24:10
any action as president to slow
24:12
the climate crisis? And then after
24:14
a follow up by the moderators,
24:16
he goes on to kind of
24:18
classic Trump soliloquy. So I want
24:20
absolutely immaculate clean water. About how
24:22
I want absolutely immaculate clean water.
24:24
I want absolutely clean air. And
24:27
we had it. We had H2O. We
24:30
had the best numbers ever. We have the
24:32
best H2O. It's
24:34
the Trump of the memes that frankly,
24:36
I think it's him further away from
24:38
who he wants to be if he's
24:40
going to pass his own kind of
24:42
standard in terms of reaching different folks
24:44
for November. Right. What
24:46
kept striking me in this second
24:48
half as in this climate change
24:50
exchange is just how consistently Trump
24:52
is not answering the questions that
24:54
the moderators are asking him. Oh,
24:58
absolutely. Whether it be questions
25:00
about childcare, Medicare, whether it's
25:02
questions about opioids. These are
25:04
core issues people cared about.
25:06
And Trump almost never responded
25:08
to the moderators direct questions
25:10
about those things. He almost
25:12
always stayed in those three
25:14
buckets that were clearly his
25:16
focus to attack Biden. Economy,
25:18
immigration, crime. It's around
25:20
here that the moderators turn
25:23
to a question that has
25:25
been on everyone's mind at
25:27
this point all night, which is the candidate's
25:30
age. And they start with
25:32
Biden, whose age has been quite present
25:36
in this debate. So tell us how that
25:39
unfolds. Yeah, the
25:41
moderators put to the candidates directly the
25:43
question about whether these are people who
25:45
even physically or mentally can lead the
25:47
country for the next four years. And
25:50
Biden, I have to say, didn't inspire
25:52
much confidence. First of all,
25:55
I spent half my career being
25:58
criticized being the youngest person. He
26:00
starts off by saying he spent half his
26:02
career being criticized for how young he was.
26:04
And then he goes on to say that
26:06
you should judge him for the job that
26:08
he's done in office. Look at what I've
26:10
done. Look how I've turned around the horrible
26:12
situation he left me. He's
26:15
saying to judge him by what he
26:17
did rather than how old he is.
26:19
The problem is that the first part
26:21
of the debate was so defined by
26:24
how inarticulate he was that the question
26:26
of age had been subtly already answered
26:28
and he had flunked that test. Now,
26:30
Trump responds in a maybe even more
26:32
ridiculous fashion. What do you say to
26:35
voters who have concerns about your capabilities
26:37
to serve? Well, I took two tests,
26:39
cognitive tests. I aced them, both of
26:41
them, as you know. Talking about the
26:43
mental acuity test that he has taken.
26:45
I just won two club championships, not
26:48
even senior, two regular club championships. I'm
26:50
focusing on his own golf game, saying
26:52
that he can hit a ball 50
26:54
yards and that that's an example of
26:56
how he feels like in physical good
26:58
shape akin to 25 and 30 years
27:01
ago. Right.
27:04
And this is when we enter the strangest
27:06
moment I have to think in presidential debate
27:08
history, two rather old men
27:10
wrangling over who has the better golf game.
27:12
Look, I'd be happy to have a driving
27:14
contest now. I got
27:16
my handicap, which when I was vice
27:18
president, down to a six. And
27:23
by the way, I told you before, I'm happy to play
27:25
golf if you carry your own bag. Think
27:27
you can do it? That's the biggest line
27:30
is a six handicap of all hours.
27:32
Eight handicap. I have to say,
27:34
like this moment personally kind of
27:36
bumped me. There
27:39
was a one minute period
27:41
where the two options to
27:43
leading the country were arguing
27:45
over their golf handicaps. I've
27:47
seen this way. I know you swing. I
27:49
mean, let's see something about
27:51
the debate about whose golf
27:54
handicap was better felt like
27:57
a distillation of the failure.
27:59
this debate to really provide
28:01
the American people with the
28:03
options and the kind of
28:05
serious policy discussion that the
28:07
office warns. Thank you,
28:09
former President Trump, President Biden.
28:12
Stay with us because we have
28:15
full analysis of this debate. Anderson
28:17
Cooper and Aaron Burnett starts now
28:19
on CNN. I said
28:21
by the end of this 90-minute debate,
28:24
it really felt like the
28:26
consuming question that it produced wasn't
28:29
so much about whether Donald Trump
28:31
was going to assemble a coalition
28:35
that won him the presidency.
28:38
The burning question seemed to be
28:40
around President Biden and his weak
28:43
performance. And so I want to
28:45
make sure we end there
28:48
with an understanding of
28:50
what now happens because
28:52
of how Joe Biden performed and
28:56
what it's going to mean for the rest of
28:58
the race. Yeah, I
29:01
had come into the debate thinking
29:03
that the onus was on Donald Trump
29:06
to prove himself as
29:08
a disciplined challenger who could
29:10
take what was a polling
29:12
possibility of a broad
29:14
coalition and make it real. But
29:17
frankly, that belief was based
29:19
on the assumption that Joe
29:21
Biden would clear the baseline
29:24
of coherence that would make
29:26
the age question at least
29:29
neutralized for the night. But
29:31
by the end of the night, it
29:33
became clear that that wasn't where
29:35
the conversation would be. I
29:38
think that Joe Biden's
29:41
performance was frankly so
29:43
disastrous that a
29:45
Democratic party freak out
29:47
that has been bubbling under a
29:50
lid for months now has now
29:52
exploded into the open to the
29:54
point where you have... Look, it
29:56
was a really disappointing debate performance from Joe Biden. I
29:58
don't think there's any way. way, any other way
30:01
to slice it. His former communications director
30:03
on television saying that was a poor
30:05
performance. Right. Kate Bedington, that struck me
30:07
too. His former White House communications director
30:10
went on TV and said that was
30:12
a disappointing debate performance
30:14
from President Biden. Something Democratic
30:16
communications directors don't normally say
30:18
on the record moments after
30:20
a debate ends. Absolutely.
30:23
I mean, also. Some
30:25
within your own party are wondering if
30:28
President Biden should even step aside. What
30:30
do you say to that? Listen, first
30:32
of all, I saw an interview with
30:34
Vice President Kamala Harris and Anderson Cooper
30:36
immediately after debate with the vice president,
30:38
the cheerleader in chief for the president,
30:41
said very explicitly, yes, there was a slow start,
30:43
but it was a strong finish. She would not deny
30:45
he had a rough start, but believes that he
30:47
got better at the end. So I'm not going to
30:50
spend all night with you talking about the last
30:52
90 minutes when
30:54
I've been watching the last three and
30:56
a half years of performance and saying
30:58
the last 90 minutes does not erase
31:00
the last three and a half years,
31:02
a real acknowledgment of the whole that
31:04
Biden frankly put himself in throughout tonight's
31:06
debate. But I got to say, as
31:09
someone who has dedicated the last year and
31:11
a half to asking
31:13
a lot of Democrats questions
31:16
about how we arrived at
31:18
an 81 year old president
31:20
running for reelection, they have
31:22
consistently dismissed the overwhelming evidence
31:25
that most Americans thought Biden was too old to
31:27
run for a second time. I
31:29
brought that question to them at the DNC
31:31
as they were making his path to the
31:34
nomination easier. And the answer
31:36
that frankly, we got at the time was
31:38
that Donald Trump will
31:41
be so inherently invalid. None
31:43
of that would matter. But there
31:45
was no evidence to support that. That was
31:48
their own belief that that would
31:50
just change. And then tonight,
31:52
not only did Donald Trump not seem
31:54
like someone who was completely unfit for
31:57
the office of president, but
31:59
that Biden. Biden was the
32:02
memed version of himself, the
32:04
incoherent falling off a bike
32:06
TikTok caricature of himself. And
32:08
I think now that Democrats
32:11
are openly panicking about what Biden should
32:13
do next, about what the party should
32:15
do next. They have a
32:17
lot fewer options at their disposal.
32:19
Right. There is really no plan
32:21
B because of how Democratic leaders
32:23
handled this situation for so long.
32:26
Yes, there is no plan
32:28
B because they refused to ask the
32:30
questions that would even lead to the
32:32
creation of a plan B in
32:34
the lead up to this. And so
32:37
there aren't really clear solutions as
32:39
to what Democrats should do going
32:41
forward, and that really, I
32:43
think, is going to scare a lot of
32:46
Democrats. Because if you're
32:48
someone who wants Joe Biden to be president,
32:51
a lot of those people believe that
32:53
Donald Trump is a grave danger to this country.
32:56
And the belief was that Joe
32:58
Biden was the person uniquely positioned to
33:00
stop that from happening because he had
33:02
done it four years before, because
33:05
he had done it four years ago. I
33:08
think what's changed from last night to today is
33:11
a realization that actually nominating
33:14
Joe Biden might be the biggest risk for
33:16
the party and be the very thing that
33:19
makes a second term of Donald
33:21
Trump most possible. Well,
33:28
thank you very much. Thanks
33:31
for having me. For
33:38
more in-depth coverage of the 2024 presidential
33:41
race, check out a
33:43
said show The Run-Up, which comes
33:46
out every Thursday. You
33:48
can find The Run-Up wherever you
33:50
listen. We'll
34:03
be right back. How
34:16
can AI help the farmers who are feeding the world? Jiva
34:19
is using AI from Google Cloud to
34:21
help smallholder farms around the world increase
34:24
crop yields by detecting pests and diseases
34:26
using just their smartphone. Here's
34:28
Jiva's CEO, Ram Mahadevan. We take a
34:30
picture of the disease part and
34:33
we thought the backend engine through
34:35
our Vertex AI that is provided
34:37
by Google, validates it with more
34:39
than 90% accuracy and gives them
34:41
an accurate diagnosis and a prognosis
34:44
on what treatment should be applied.
34:46
Learn more at Google Cloud at
34:49
g.co.com/cloud. Here's
34:52
what else you need to know today. On
34:55
Thursday, the Supreme Court blew
34:57
up a landmark legal settlement
34:59
between prosecutors and Purdue Pharma,
35:02
the maker of OxyContin. The
35:05
settlement would have channeled $6 billion
35:07
into alleviating the opioid
35:10
epidemic that Purdue Pharma
35:12
allegedly played a major
35:14
role in creating. But
35:17
the settlement relied on a promise
35:19
to shield members of the Sackler
35:21
family that created Purdue Pharma from
35:23
future lawsuits. And in
35:26
their five to four ruling, the
35:28
Supreme Court found that shield to
35:30
be illegal and invalid. The
35:33
case was one of several major rulings
35:35
on Thursday. In another
35:37
decision, the court temporarily cleared the
35:39
way for women in Idaho to
35:42
receive emergency abortions when their health
35:44
is at risk, despite
35:46
a state law there all but
35:48
banning the procedure. In
35:50
a third decision, the court blocked
35:53
a federal plan to reduce air
35:55
pollution that drifts across state lines,
35:58
a legal defeat for Purdue. President
36:00
Biden. A
36:04
quick reminder about this week's episode of
36:06
The Interview. David Marchese
36:08
talks with Eddie Murphy about
36:10
his long career in comedy,
36:12
his return to the Beverly
36:15
Hills franchise, and about
36:17
what it's like to make his idol,
36:19
Richard Pryor, laugh. I
36:21
could have died right there. You could have
36:23
crashed a plane right there to make Richard
36:25
laugh. I made Richard laugh for real. He
36:28
laughed like this. Today's
36:35
episode was produced by Claire
36:37
Tennisgitter, Nina Feldman, and
36:39
Shannon Lin. It was edited
36:41
by Mark George, contains original
36:43
music by Dan Powell and
36:45
Marion Lozano, and was engineered
36:48
by Chris Wood and Alyssa
36:50
Moxley. Our theme music
36:52
is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lanzferk
36:54
of Wonderly. The
37:05
Daily is made by Rachel
37:07
Kwester, Lindsay Garrison, Claire Tennisgitter,
37:10
Paige Cowett, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad
37:12
Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung,
37:15
Stella Tan, Alexandra Lee
37:17
Young, Lisa Chow, Eric
37:19
Kruppke, Mark George, Luke
37:21
Vanderplug, MJ Davis-Lynn, Dan
37:24
Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael
37:26
Benoit, Liz O'Bailen, Asta
37:28
Chottervedi, Rochelle Banja, Diana
37:30
Nguyen, Marion Lozano,
37:32
Corey Schrepple, Rob
37:34
Zipko, Alicia Butitube, Mooj
37:37
Zaidi, Patricia Willens, Rowan
37:39
Imisto, Jody Becker, Ricky
37:41
Navetsky, Nina Feldman, Will
37:43
Reed, Carlos Prieto, Ben
37:45
Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexi
37:48
Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern,
37:50
Sophia Landman, Shannon Lin,
37:53
Diane Wong, Devin Taylor,
37:55
Alyssa Moxley, Olivia Knatt,
37:57
Daniel Ramirez, and Brendan
37:59
Klink. That's it for the
38:01
Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on
38:03
Monday. Can
38:34
the Earth be protected from space rocks? My
38:37
name is Ed Liu. I'm a former
38:39
NASA astronaut and I'm currently the executive
38:41
director of the Asteroid Institute. Google
38:43
Cloud has enabled a very small team at the
38:46
Asteroid Institute to do the work of what five
38:48
or ten years ago would have been hundreds of
38:50
engineers. And that's what we need
38:52
in order to sort through billions of images of
38:54
the sky, find asteroids in those
38:56
images and figure out where those asteroids
38:59
are going. Learn more
39:01
about the potential of AI at
39:03
Google Cloud at g.co/ cloud.
Podchaser is the ultimate destination for podcast data, search, and discovery. Learn More