Biden has shaky debate showing as Trump repeats falsehoods

Former Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who has endorsed President Joe Biden, said if former President Donald Trump had a horrible night at CNN’s presidential debate last night, Republicans would be talking about a different nominee.

He continued, “But he didn’t. He had a great night as far as delivery. Now the content was full of lies and riddles and innuendos.”

Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden attend the CNN Presidential Debate on June 27.

President Joe Biden is three years and seven months older than former President Donald Trump.

But in their debate, the gap between the 81-year-old incumbent and his 78-year-old challenger seemed much larger.

Biden, hoarse and displaying little vocal range, was often unable to express his differences with Trump with clarity. At one point, after Biden had trailed off as he defended his record on border security, Trump said:

Trump, meanwhile, repeated his frequent election denialism. He said he’d accept the results of the 2024 election if it’s “fair and legal,” but then repeated his lies about fraud in the 2020 election.

Here are the debate highlights:

Biden’s age problem just got a lot worse:

Biden’s one-liner offense:

Trump makes news with abortion pill stance:

Inflation blamed on pandemic:

Read more of the takeaways.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump sparred over the state of the US economy during CNN’s presidential debate.

Watch the moment.

American and Ukrainian flags fly near the U.S. Capitol on April 20.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that the United States has given more in aid to Ukraine than European countries put together.  

“The European nations together have spent $100 billion, or maybe more than that, less than us,” Trump said.   

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. From just before Russia’s invasion in early 2022 through April 2024, European countries contributed more aid to Ukraine than the US, according to data from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany. 

The Kiel Institute, which closely tracks aid to Ukraine, found that from late January 2022 (the month before Russia’s invasion) through April 2024, the European Union and individual European countries had committed a total of about $190 billion to Ukraine in military, financial and humanitarian assistance, compared with about $106 billion committed by the US.

Europe also exceeded the US in aid that had been “allocated” to Ukraine — defined by the institute as aid either delivered or specified for delivery — at about $109 billion for Europe compared with about $79 billion for the US. 

Additionally, Europe had committed more total military aid to Ukraine, at about $76 billion to about $69 billion for the US. The US narrowly led on military aid that had been allocated, at more than $50 billion for the US to less than $48 billion for Europe, but even that was nowhere near the lopsided margin Trump suggested. 

It’s important to note that it’s possible to come up with different totals using different methodologies. And the Kiel Institute found that Ukraine itself was getting only about half of the money in a 2024 US bill that had widely been described as a $61 billion aid bill for Ukraine. The institute said the rest of the funds were mostly going to the Defense Department.

In the first debate matchup between President Biden and former President Donald Trump, Biden turned in a lackluster performance that has some Democrats wondering if concerns about his age might be valid.

Host David Rind and CNN Correspondent Kristen Holmes break down the moments that mattered from the CNN presidential debate and look at where both campaigns go from here.

Listen to the special episode of One Thing here.

Former President Donald Trump at the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta on Thursday.

Former President Donald Trump claimed during the debate that he “funded” historically Black colleges and universities, also known as HBCUs.  

Facts First: Trump is exaggerating here. He did not “fund” HBCUs, as they have received various forms of funding, including federal funds and donations, prior to his presidency. However, he did sign into law legislation that secured permanent funding for HBCUs. 

In 2019, Trump signed the FUTURE Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at strengthening HBCUs as well as other minority-serving institutions by providing $255 million annually.  

“HBCUs have been underfunded for over 150 years, since inception. President Trump did sign measures into law that helped HBCUs tremendously (FUTURE Act and the first two COVID-19 packages). However, he never set out to do it,” Monique LeNoir, vice president of branding, marketing and communications for the United Negro College Fund, told CNN.

Marybeth Gasman, executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions, echoed LeNoir, adding that Congress, during the Obama administration, also allocated funding to HBCUs.  

The Trump administration also had a frayed relationship with HBCUs, and Trump’s views on funding for HBCUs have also not been consistent. In 2017, he questioned the constitutional basis for federal funding for HBCUs, saying, according to NPR, that “it benefits schools on the basis of race.”

President Joe Biden coughs, while former President Donald Trump speaks during the CNN presidential debate on June 27.

If Joe Biden loses November’s election, history will record that it took just 10 minutes to destroy a presidency.

It was clear a political disaster was about to unfold as soon as the 81-year-old commander in chief stiffly shuffled on stage in Atlanta to stand eight feet from ex-President Donald Trump at what may turn into the most fateful presidential debate in history.

Objectively, Biden produced the weakest performance since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon started the tradition of televised debates in 1960 — then, as on Thursday, in a television studio with no audience.

Minutes into the showdown, hosted by CNN, a full-blown Democratic panic was underway at the idea of heading into the election with such a diminished figure at the top of the ticket.

Biden’s chief debate coach, Ron Klain, famously argues that “while you can lose a debate at any time, you can only win it in the first 30 minutes.”

By that standard, the president’s showing was devastating. The tone of the evening was set well before the half hour.

Read the full analysis.

During their debate, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump disagreed over what happened on January 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol.

On that day, Trump supporters broke into the Capitol while Congress certified Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

Watch the moment here: 

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden arrive at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in Morrisville, North Carolina, early on June 28.

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden have arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina as he returns to the campaign trail following Thursday’s high-stakes debate against former President Donald Trump.  

A crowd of Biden supporters gathered at the Raleigh Durham Airport to greet the president upon his arrival.

Biden is expected to participate in a campaign event in Raleigh before heading to New York in the afternoon, where he will speak at the opening ceremony for the Stonewall National Monument visitor center.

In the evening, he will participate in a campaign reception in New York.

Senator JD Vance speaks to reporters in the spin room following the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta, Georgia on June 27.

Republican Ohio Senator J.D. Vance said he has not been told by former President Donald Trump whether or not he has been selected as his running mate.

Post-debate in the spin room on Thursday, Vance told CNN that he had spoken with Trump the day before about the debate and the election, but that the role of vice president did not come up. 

The Republican told reporters that the debate was a “study in contrast between a guy who has the energy to be president and a guy who clearly doesn’t.”

He argued that Trump was “energetic” while “Biden was sort of meandering. he clearly didn’t know where he was some of the time,” he said.

Asked about the proposal from some Democrats that Biden should be replaced at the top of the ticket, Vance suggested it would be a “threat to democracy” to replace the nominee at the Democratic National Convention. 

Taylor Jane Stimmler, whose had type 1 diabetes since she was a teenager, displays her insulin and needles used for injection, on March 2, 2023 in New York City. 

Former President Donald Trump again tried to take full credit for lowering the cost of insulin for older Americans. 

“I’m the one that got the insulin down for the seniors,” Trump said. 

Facts First: Trump’s claim that he was the one who reduced the cost of insulin for seniors is exaggerated. The former president did get a $35-per-month out-of-pocket cap on insulin for some seniors through a voluntary program that Medicare prescription drug plans could choose to participate in. But President Joe Biden ensured that all 3.4 million-plus insulin users on Medicare got $35-per-month insulin — through a mandatory cap that not only covers more people than Trump’s voluntary cap but also applies to a greater number of insulin products and stays in effect at a level of individual drug spending at which Trump’s cap disappeared. 

Trump could fairly say he played a role in lowering insulin costs and that Biden does not deserve sole credit. The Biden-era federal government has acknowledged that his mandatory $35 monthly cap, signed into law in his Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, “closely aligns with” the voluntary $35 monthly cap in the Trump-created model that was announced in 2020 and launched in the final month of the Trump presidency in 2021. 

But Biden’s policy does more than Trump’s in several substantive ways:

In this 2018 photo, then-President Donald Trump holds up the Veterans Affairs Mission Act he signed during a ceremony with members of Congress, including House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Phil Roe and veterans in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC. The new law continued funding for the Veterans Choice Program for an additional year.

Former President Donald Trump took credit for the Veterans Choice health care law, claiming that President Joe Biden has “gotten rid of all the things that I approved.”  

“Choice, that I got through Congress. All of the different things I approved, they abandoned,” Trump said. 

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The Veterans Choice program was signed into law in 2014 by his predecessor, President Barack Obama. Trump signed a law in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, that expanded and modified the program established under Obama, and, as Trump has said, made the initiative permanent.  

During Trump’s presidency, he falsely took credit for the Veterans Choice law more than 150 times.

In a debate performance filled with halting moments, President Joe Biden struggled to articulate one of his key policy accomplishments that he has touted repeatedly on the campaign trail — his efforts to lower prescription drug costs.

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats pushed through Congress and Biden signed, contained several measures aimed at reducing drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries.

They include giving Medicare the historic power to negotiate the prices of certain prescription medications, placing a $35 monthly cap for each insulin prescription and adding a cap on Medicare Part D drug plans so that enrollees won’t pay more than $2,000 a year in out-of-pocket costs, starting in 2025. 

In his initial remarks, Biden said the insulin cap was $15 and described the annual cap on out-of-pocket Part D drug costs as a $200 limit for any drug – both of which were inaccurate.

His closing statement was even more garbled, with Biden skipping from Medicare drug price negotiations to the insulin cap to the Part D out-of-pocket limit without coherently describing any of the proposals. And he then said he would make it available to every senior — though it already is.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he believes President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump’s performances in CNN’s presidential debate on Thursday will “leave a lot of Americans depressed” about the major party nominees heading into November’s election.

Kennedy, who hosted a simultaneous rebuttal event in California during the debate, said his main takeaway was his disapproval of both Biden and Trump and suggested voters who watched the debate may consider his candidacy more seriously.

Kennedy reiterated his argument that the majority of Americans do not want to see a rematch of the 2020 presidential election in November and suggested he may be more appealing to voters who don’t want to decide between Trump and Biden.

“They are tired of choosing the lesser of two evils. They want, you know, another choice and, you know, hopefully, some of them are gonna start looking at me,” Kennedy said.

Roughly 8 in 10 registered voters who watched the debate (81%) say it had no effect on their choice for president, according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS. Another 14% said that it made them reconsider but didn’t change their mind, while 5% said it changed their minds about whom to vote for.

Roughly equal shares of Joe Biden and Donald Trump supporters said the debate had changed their mind.

Debate watchers’ views of Biden did dip slightly following the debate: Just 31% viewed him favorably, compared with 37% in a survey of the same voters taken prior to the debate. By contrast, 43% of debate watchers viewed Trump favorably, similar to the 40% with positive views of him prior to Thursday’s event.

And 48% of debate watchers say Trump better addressed concerns about his ability to handle the presidency, with 23% saying Biden did a better job and 22% that neither candidate did. Another 7% thought both candidates did an equally good job allaying concerns.

The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public – in their demographics, their political preferences or the level of attention they pay to politics. Debate watchers in the poll were 5 points likelier to be Republican-aligned than Democratic-aligned, making for an audience that was slightly more GOP-leaning than all registered voters nationally.

Among those debate watchers, 48% say they’d only consider voting for Trump, 40% that they’d only consider voting for Biden, 2% that they’re considering both candidates, and 11% that they aren’t considering voting for either. 

See other findings from the CNN Flash Poll here.

Methodology: The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 565 registered US voters who said they watched the debate Thursday, and the poll findings are representative of the views of debate-watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the debate and were selected via a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of debate watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.5 percentage points.

President Joe Biden during the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta on Thursday.

President Joe Biden brushed off concerns about his debate performance, telling reporters that he thought he performed well while visiting a Waffle House.

When asked about calls for him to drop out and if he had any concerns about his debate performance, Biden attacked former President Donald Trump. 

“No, it’s hard to debate a liar. New York Times pointed out he lied 26 times, big lies,” Biden said. 

When asked about whether he is sick, Biden said that he has a sore throat, according to the print pool.

A group of undecided voters in Warran, Michigan, had mixed reactions to the presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

One woman said that she was concerned that President Joe Biden “was hesitant, very not cognitive.”

“That’s somebody I don’t think that needs to lead our country,” she told CNN’s Laura Coates.

But another voter said she was looking for a leader who would be able to “uphold policies that will protect me.” She said she got that feeling more from Biden because he spoke about more about specific policy points.

“Whereas on the other side from (Donald) Trump, all I really heard was I’ve done this and it was the best ever, but I never heard what it was,” the voter said.

So while former President Donald Trump “may have appeared like a stronger candidate” there was a lot of substance missing, she said.

Another voter said that, specifically on the issue of Trump’s legal troubles, he believes that the criminal charges against the former president are intended to take him off the campaign trail. But, at the end of the debate, he wasn’t impressed with their candidate.

Watch CNN’s Laura Coates speak with the panel of Michigan voters:

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President Joe Biden during the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta on Thursday

A Biden adviser is responding to the widespread Democratic panic following tonight’s debate by saying that Donald Trump did not give voters any reason to vote for him tonight and that “on the issues,” voters will ultimately be with President Joe Biden. 

“President Biden is the only person who has ever beaten Donald Trump. He will do it again,” the adviser said.

They also insisted that the election was never going to be won or lost over one single moment, including a debate. 

A source close to the campaign told CNN that Biden is someone who is very accustomed to Democratic panic and has practiced ignoring noise. The source said Biden is in the campaign for the long game. They pointed back to the 2020 Democratic primary when Biden was written off by many Democrats before making a comeback in South Carolina. 

Some of Biden’s closest aides have for years now been defensive about Biden being under-estimated, and that sentiment is one that we are starting to see crop up. 

Former President Donald Trump speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate between him and President Joe Biden in Atlanta on Thursday.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that President Joe Biden is proposing to multiply Americans’ taxes by four times.  

“He wants to raise everybody’s taxes by four times,” Trump said.  

Facts First: This is false, just as it was when Trump made the same claim during the 2020 election campaign and in early 2024.  

Biden has not proposed to quadruple Americans’ taxes, and there has never been any indication that he is seeking to do so.

The nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center think tank, which analyzed Biden’s never-implemented budget proposals for fiscal 2024, found this: “His plan would raise average after-tax incomes for low-income households in 2024, leave them effectively unchanged for middle-income households, and lower after-tax incomes significantly for the highest-income taxpayers.” 

The Tax Policy Center found that Biden’s proposal would, on average, have raised taxes by about $2,300 – but that’s about a 2.3% decline in after-tax income, not the massive reduction Trump is suggesting Biden wants. And critically, Tax Policy Center senior fellow Howard Gleckman noted to CNN in May that 95% of the tax hike would have been covered by the highest-income 5% of households. 

The very biggest burden under the Biden plan would have been carried by the very richest households; the Tax Policy Center found that households in the top 0.1% would have seen their after-tax incomes decline by more than 20%.

That’s “a lot,” Gleckman noted, but it’s still nowhere near the quadrupling Trump claims Biden is looking for. And again, even this increase would have been only for a tiny subset of the population. Biden has promised not to raise taxes by even a cent for anyone making under $400,000 per year. 

In defending his record on the economy, President Joe Biden said that when he took office, “the economy was flat on its back. Fifteen percent unemployment. (Trump) decimated the economy… That’s why there was not inflation at the time. There were no jobs.” 

Facts First: Biden’s claim that the US unemployment rate was 15% when he took office is incorrect.  

In January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.  

The unemployment rate did reach nearly 15% during Trump’s presidency, but that occurred during April 2020, when the global and national economies were crushed by the emerging Covid-19 pandemic. In April 2020, the US lost more than 20 million jobs, resulting in unemployment skyrocketing from 4.4% in March 2020 to 14.8% in April 2020.  

After peaking in April 2020, the unemployment rate declined substantially as the nation recovered those lost jobs (reaching pre-pandemic levels in June 2022) and gained millions more. The nation’s jobless rate is in the midst of a 30-month streak of being at or below 4%. 

President Joe Biden speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta on Thursday.

President Joe Biden claimed that there are a thousand billionaires in the US who are paying an 8.2% tax rate and that if they were taxed closer to 25%, it would raise billions of dollars in tax revenue that would help ease the nation’s debt burden and fund welfare programs. 

Facts First: Biden used this figure in a misleading way. As in previous speeches, including the State of the Union address in March, Biden didn’t explain that the figure is the product of an alternative calculation from economists in his own administration that factors in unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the alternative calculation itself; the administration economists who came up with it explained it in detail on the White House website in 2021. But Biden has tended to cite the figure without any context about what it is and isn’t, leaving open the impression that he was talking about what these billionaires pay under current law. 

So, what do billionaires actually pay under current law? The answer is not publicly known, but experts say it’s clearly more than 8%.

“Biden’s numbers are way too low,” Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, told CNN in 2023. Gleckman said that in 2019, University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman “estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23% in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24% for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3,” numbers Biden has used in some previous speeches, “or even 8%.” 

In February 2024, Gleckman provided additional calculations from the Tax Policy Center. The center found that the top 0.1% of households paid an average effective federal tax rate of about 30.3% in 2020, including an average income tax rate of 24.3%. 

Former President Donald Trump claimed that President Joe Biden caused inflation and that it’s “killing” Americans, who “can’t buy groceries anymore” because the cost of food has “doubled and tripled and quadrupled.” 

Facts First: Trump’s claims of food prices doubling, tripling and quadrupling are not entirely factual and could use some context.  

Inflation’s rapid ascent, which began in early 2021, was the result of a confluence of factors, including effects from the Covid-19 pandemic such as snarled supply chains and geopolitical fallout (specifically Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) that triggered food and energy price shocks. Heightened consumer demand boosted in part by fiscal stimulus from both the Trump and Biden administrations also led to higher prices, as did the post-pandemic imbalance in the labor market. 

Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, hitting a 41-year high, and has slowed since (the Consumer Price Index was at 3.3% as of May 2024). But it remains elevated from historical levels. Three-plus years of pervasive and prolonged inflation has weighed considerably on Americans, especially lower-income households trying to afford the necessities (food, shelter and transportation). 

Food prices, specifically grocery prices, did outpace overall inflation. But they didn’t rise to the extent that Trump claims. Annual food and grocery inflation peaked at 11.4% and 13.5% in August 2022, respectively. Through the 12 months ending in May, overall food and grocery prices were up just 2.1% and 1%, respectively. 

Certain food categories saw much greater inflation: Notably, egg prices were up 70% annually in January 2023. However, the underlying cause of that sharp increase was a highly contagious, deadly avian flu.

Food prices are highly volatile and can be influenced by a variety of factors, including disease, extreme weather events, global supply and demand, geopolitical events, and once-in-a-lifetime pandemics. 

Former President Donald Trump speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta on Thursday.

During a dispute over who would do a better job countering Russia’s war in Ukraine, former President Donald Trump criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and how it is funded by its members, claiming he had learned after taking office that “almost 100% of the money was paid by us.” 

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false.  

Official NATO figures show that in 2016, the last year before Trump took office, US defense spending made up about 71% of total defense spending by NATO members – a large majority but not “almost 100%.”

And Trump’s claim is even more inaccurate if he was talking about the direct contributions to NATO that cover the alliance’s organizational expenses and are set based on each country’s national income; the US was responsible for about 22% of those contributions in 2016.   

The US share of total NATO military spending fell to about 65% in 2023. And the US is now responsible for about 16% of direct contributions to NATO, the same as Germany.

Erwan Lagadec, an expert on NATO as a research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and director of its Transatlantic Program, said the US share was reduced from 22% “to placate Trump” and is a “sweetheart deal” given that the US makes up more than half of the alliance’s total GDP. 

Former President Donald Trump claimed that migrants were entering the United States and killing women, saying that “these killers are coming into our country, and they are raping and killing women.” 

Facts First: This needs context. Preliminary statistics show that crime in the US dropped significantly in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, with a steep drop in murders and other violent offenses, even as the number of people crossing the southern border spiked. While some undocumented immigrants have been charged with high-profile crimes during the Biden presidency, some undocumented immigrants committed serious crimes under Trump and previous presidents as well. And research has generally found no connection between immigration levels and crime — and has sometimes found that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than people born in the US.  

Charis Kubrin, co-author of the 2023 book “Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock” and professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, told CNN’s Catherine Shoichet early this year:  

Kubrin’s co-author, Graham Ousey, professor of sociology and criminology at the College of William & Mary, added: “A lot of people when you say that will then say, ‘Oh, well, but what about undocumented immigration?’ And there’s less research on that topic. But that body of research is growing, and it pretty much reaches the same conclusion.” 

A man watches the CNN presidential debate during a watch party at Union Pub in Washington, DC on Thursday.

Registered voters who watched Thursday’s debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump say, 67% to 33%, that Trump turned in a better performance, according to a CNN flash poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS.

Prior to the debate, the same voters said, 55% to 45%, that they expected Trump to turn in a better performance than Biden.

The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public – in their demographics, their political preferences or the level of attention they pay to politics. Debate watchers in the poll were 5 points likelier to be Republican-aligned than Democratic-aligned, making for an audience that was slightly more GOP-leaning than all registered voters nationally.

But the results are a shift from 2020, when Biden was seen by debate watchers as outperforming Trump in their presidential debates. 

A 57% majority of debate-watchers Thursday night say they have no real confidence in Biden’s ability to lead the country, and 44% that they have no real confidence in Trump’s ability to do so. Those numbers are effectively unchanged from the poll taken prior to the debate, in which 55% of those voters said they had no confidence in Biden, and 47% that they lacked confidence in Trump. 

Neither candidate scores highly on this metric, but while just 36% of debate watchers now say they have a lot of confidence in Trump’s ability to lead the country, only 14% say the same of Biden.

The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 565 registered US voters who said they watched the debate Thursday, and the poll findings are representative of the views of debate watchers only.

Respondents were recruited to participate before the debate and were selected via a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of debate watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.5 percentage points.

Read the full story.

Nancy Pelosi speaks during a reconvening of a joint session of Congress, hours after a pro-Trump mob broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Former President Donald Trump once again tried to blame former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, saying that the California Democrat had turned down his offer of 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the Capitol that day and that she had been taped by her own daughter acknowledging what happened was her responsibility. 

Facts First: Trump’s claims about Pelosi’s role in Capitol security and in the deployment of the National Guard are false. The speaker of the House is not in charge of Capitol security; that is overseen by the Capitol Police Board, a body that includes the sergeants at arms of the House and the Senate. And the House speaker does not have power over the District of Columbia National Guard, which is under the command of the president. While there is no evidence Pelosi ever received a Trump offer of 10,000 soldiers on January 6, she would not even have had the power to turn down such an offer even if she had received one. 

Trump also overstated what Pelosi said in a video recorded by her filmmaker daughter Alexandra Pelosi on January 6 and later obtained by House Republicans, who posted a 42-second snippet on social media earlier this month. Pelosi was shown expressing frustration at the inadequate security at the Capitol, and she said at one point, “I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.” But the short video doesn’t show her absolving Trump of responsibility or admitting she was the person in charge of Capitol security. 

After Trump began referring to this clip earlier in June, Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in an email to CNN: “Numerous independent fact-checkers have confirmed again and again that Speaker Pelosi did not plan her own assassination on January 6th. Cherry-picked, out-of-context clips do not change the fact that the Speaker of the House is not in charge of the security of the Capitol Complex — on January 6th or any other day of the week.” 

In fact, another part of the video appears to undermine Trump’s frequent claims that Pelosi was the person who turned down a National Guard presence in advance of January 6. She said: “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” 

The House select committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol found “no evidence” Trump gave any actual order for 10,000 Guard troops to anyone.

Christopher Miller, Trump’s acting defense secretary at the time of the attack on the Capitol, testified to the committee that Trump had, in a phone call on January 5, 2021, briefly and informally floated the idea of having 10,000 troops present on January 6 but did not issue any directive to that effect.

A pro-abortion rights activist holds a box of mifepristone during a rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on March 26.

Donald Trump falsely claimed the US Supreme Court “approved” the abortion pill, mifepristone. 

Facts First: Trump’s claim about the abortion drug is false. The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the case and approve mifepristone, one of the pills used in a medication abortion. It sent the case back to the lower courts for additional proceedings.

The court earlier this month rejected a lawsuit that challenged the US Food and Drug Administration’s approach to regulating mifepristone. 

The court did not “approve” the drug, as Trump claimed. Instead, it ruled that the doctors and the anti-abortion groups that had challenged access to the drug did not have the standing to sue. The reasoning of the court in this decision, scholars say, could encourage other mifepristone challenges in the future.

Medication abortion is now the most common method of abortion in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the formal US health care system — about 63% — were medication abortions in 2023.

In response to a question about his actions – and inaction – on January 6, 2021, while his supporters stormed the US Capitol, Donald Trump defended the incendiary speech he delivered before the attack. 

“I said, ‘Peacefully and patriotically,’” Trump said.  

Facts First: This is highly misleading. He did say those words during his speech on the Ellipse on January 6, but he also told his supporters that they “wouldn’t have a country anymore” if they didn’t march to the US Capitol and “fight like hell” against a “rigged” election. 

CNN has previously fact-checked this self-serving quotation from Trump about his January 6 speech. 

During his speech, Trump said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”  

But on the debate stage Thursday night, Trump omitted the fact that later in his January 6 speech, he told his supporters to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” to give GOP lawmakers the “boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Last year, a civil court in Colorado, and the Colorado Supreme Court, closely examined Trump’s speech as part of a lawsuit that tried to disqualify him from office under the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.”  

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday in Atlanta.

Former President Donald Trump once again claimed that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the biggest tax cut ever. 

“I gave you the largest tax cut in history,” Trump said. 

Facts First: Trump is wrong. Analyses have found that the act was not the largest in history either in percentage of gross domestic product or inflation-adjusted dollars. 

The act made numerous permanent and temporary changes to the tax code, including reducing both corporate and individual income tax rates. 

In a report released earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office looked at the size of past tax cuts enacted between 1981 and 2023. It found that two other tax cut bills have been bigger — former President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 package and legislation signed by former President Barack Obama that extended earlier tax cuts enacted during former President George W. Bush’s administration. 

The CBO measured the sizes of tax cuts by looking at the revenue effects of the bills as a percentage of gross domestic product — in other words, how much federal revenue the bill cuts as a portion of the economy — over five years. Reagan’s 1981 tax cut and Obama’s 2012 tax cut extension were 3.5% and 1.7% of GDP, respectively.  

Trump’s 2017 tax cut, by contrast, was estimated to be about 1% of GDP. 

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found in 2017 that the framework for the tax cuts would be the fourth largest since 1940 in inflation-adjusted dollars and the eighth largest since 1918 as a percentage of gross domestic product.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at CNN's Atlanta studios on June 27.

In discussing the Middle East and Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, former President Donald Trump claimed that there was “no terror at all during my administration.”  

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false, and it remains false even if he was referring specifically to attacks by Islamic extremists. There were various terrorist attacks during the Trump presidency. In fact, in his State of the Union address in 2018, Trump blamed immigration policies for “two terrorist attacks in New York” in “recent weeks.”

Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a mass murder in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was a terrorist attack carried out in support of ISIS; Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. Trump’s Justice Department also alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda. 

In addition, there were a variety of other terrorist attacks during Trump’s presidency. Notably, Trump’s Justice Department said it was a “domestic terrorist attack” when one of Trump’s supporters mailed improvised explosive devices to CNN, prominent Democratic officials and other people in 2018. In 2019, a White supremacist pleaded guilty to multiple charges in New York, including first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism, for killing a Black man in March 2017 to try to start a race war. And Trump’s Justice Department described a 2019 shooting massacre at a Walmart in Texas as an act of domestic terrorism; the gunman who killed 23 people was targeting Latinos.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise released a statement saying former President Donald Trump won the debate, while President Joe Biden “demonstrated he is not fit to be president.”

He said Trump “won the debate by delivering a strong and presidential performance, addressing how he will fix the massive economic and border problems Joe Biden created during three and a half years of failure.”

Biden, on the other hand, “proved how out of touch he is with hardworking families when he denied the border crisis and the problems his inflation crisis is causing to people who are struggling to make ends meet,” the statement read.

Sen. Marco Rubio speaks to reporters in the spin room following the CNN Presidential Debate between President Joe Biden and Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump at the McCamish Pavilion on the Georgia Institute of Technology campus on June 27 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said he thinks more Americans are coming to the conclusion that they were better off when Donald Trump was president following the first debate of the election cycle.

He said he thinks that’s what the 2024 election will come down to: “Were we better off under Trump, or were we better off under Biden? Did I have more money in my pocket? Was the world safer and more secure? Was the country safer, more secure?”

Rubio is a potential pick for Trump’s running mate. He said he doesn’t know who the vice president will be, but he is focused on addressing issues in the country.

The senator said he is worried about how other world leaders will view the United States after President Joe Biden’s debate performance.

“I don’t take glee in it, in saying this, but clearly the president struggled tonight and I do worry about the impact” in places like China, Iran and Russia where “adversaries see that and perhaps feel emboldened to be more adventurous than their attitudes towards the United States,” Rubio said.

“That’s not a good thing for our country,” he added.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that the US currently has its largest trade deficit with China.  

Facts First: This is false. Even if you only count trade in goods and ignore the services trade — in which the US traditionally runs a surplus with China — the deficit with China fell to about $279 billion in 2023, the lowest since 2010.  

In 2018, under Trump, the goods deficit with China hit a new record of about $418 billion before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.  

While Kamala Harris served as vice president in the Biden administration, keeping her “under wraps” was “one of the greatest acts of political malpractice,” CNN’s John King said following her on-air interview after the debate.

The vice president is a “feisty communicator, good on television and they kept her under wraps for three years,” King said.

“In a close competitive race when you need all hands on deck, that is an asset that should have been working for them from day one,” King said. “Again, she’s churned through staff. She has issues. There’s no question about it. But she also has potential star power.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sen. Raphael Warnock speak to reporters in the spin room following the CNN Presidential Debate between US President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump at the McCamish Pavilion on the Georgia Institute of Technology campus on June 27 in Atlanta.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom doubled down in his support of President Joe Biden and said he is not concerned about the presumptive Democratic nominee’s fitness to lead the country after the first presidential debate on Thursday.

“I will never turn my back on President Biden. Never turn my back on President Biden, I don’t know a Democrat in my party that would do so,” he said when asked about a rumbling of Democrats possibly open to replacing Biden as the party’s nominee.

“And especially after tonight, we have his back, we run not the 90 yard dash. We’re all in, we’re going to double down in the next few months. We’re gonna win this election,” he continued.

Asked by CNN if he has any concerns about Biden being fit to lead the country, Newsom said “none.”

Pressed if he would urge Biden to reconsider moving forward in the race, Newsom answered, “absolutely not.”

Assessing Trump’s performance, Newsom called it “weakness masquerading as strength,” and said he was “disgusted by the fact that I heard an ex-President of the United States talk down the American economy, talk down the United States of America to the degree he did tonight.”

Vice President Kamala Harris.

Americans should focus on what President Joe Biden has accomplished for the country during his time in office, not his performance on the debate stage, Vice President Kamala Harris said Thursday night.

“I’m talking about three-and-a-half years of performance in work that has been historic,” Harris told CNN.

Asked directly by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper if “the president that we saw tonight on that stage, is that how he is every day?”

She went on to mention some of Biden’s other accomplishments like strengthening NATO and creating jobs.

Vice President Kamala Harris.

Vice President Kamala Harris admitted that President Joe Biden had a “slow start” at tonight’s CNN debate, but said he had a “strong finish.”

She went on to point out what she claimed were lies pushed by former President Donald Trump during the debate.

President Joe Biden is three years and seven months older than former President Donald Trump.

In their debate Thursday night on CNN, the gap between the 81-year-old incumbent and his 78-year-old challenger seemed much larger.

Biden, hoarse and displaying little vocal range, was often unable to express his differences with Trump with clarity. At one point, after Biden had trailed off as he defended his record on border security, Trump said: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

Trump, meanwhile, at times repeated his frequent election denialism. He said he’d accept the results of the 2024 election if it’s “fair and legal,” but then repeated his lies about fraud in the 2020 election.

“You’re a whiner, and you lost the first time,” Biden said.

Here are some takeaways from tonight’s debate:

Biden’s age problem just got a lot worse:

Biden’s one-liner offense:

The stark difference in addressing January 6:

Read more of the takeaways from tonight’s high-stakes debate

Trump is seen during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday in Atlanta.

Former President Donald Trump said at least twice during the debate that President Joe Biden will destroy Social Security and Medicare by putting migrants entering the US on the benefits. 

“These millions and millions of people coming in, they’re trying to put them on Social Security. He will wipe out Social Security. He will wipe out Medicare,” Trump said. 

Facts First: Trump is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true, particularly in the near term, multiple experts say. Many undocumented immigrants work, which means they pay much-needed payroll taxes, and this bolsters the Social Security and Medicare trust funds and extends their solvency. Immigrants who are working legally typically won’t collect benefits for many years. As for those who are undocumented, some are working under fake Social Security numbers, so they are paying payroll taxes but don’t qualify to collect benefits. 

The Social Security Administration looked at the effects of unauthorized immigration on the Social Security trust funds. It found that in 2010, earnings by unauthorized workers contributed roughly $12 billion on net to the entitlement program’s cash flow. The agency has not updated the analysis since, but this year’s Social Security trustees report noted that increasing average annual total net immigration by 100,000 persons improves the entitlement program’s solvency. 

“We estimate that future years will experience a continuation of this positive impact on the trust funds,” said the report on unauthorized immigration.  

Meanwhile, unauthorized immigrants contributed more than $35 billion on net to Medicare’s trust fund between 2000 and 2011, extending the life of the trust fund by a year, according to a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. 

“Immigrants tend to be younger and employed, which increases the number of workers paying into the system,” said Gary Engelhardt, a Syracuse University economics professor. “Also, they have more children, which helps boost the future workforce that will pay payroll taxes.” 

“Immigrants are good for Social Security,” he said. 

However, undocumented immigrants who gain legal status that includes eligibility for future Social Security and Medicare benefits could ultimately be a drain to the system, according to Jason Richwine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration.    

“Illegal immigration unambiguously benefits the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, but amnesty (legalization) would reverse those gains and add extra costs,” Richwine wrote in a report last year.

President Joe Biden denounced Donald Trump for saying in August 2017 that “very fine people” were among the participants in a hateful “Unite the Right” event days prior in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The event was organized by White nationalists after the city decided to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park. The participants included neo-Nazis, one of whom murdered a counter-protester, and prominent public racists. 

During the debate, Trump claimed that Biden’s recall of his remark was “made up” and a “nonsense story.” 

Facts First: Trump’s claim that Biden’s description of his comments is a “nonsense story” is itself false. Biden fairly characterized Trump’s comments about the events in Charlottesville. 

The claim that Trump’s “fine people” comment is a “hoax” and “nonsense story” is based on the inaccurate premise that there were peaceful non-racists attending an aggressively hateful march that was held in Charlottesville the night before the main daytime protest that featured prominent White nationalists as advertised speakers. 

And supporters of the “hoax” claim had noted that, when Trump told reporters days later that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” he had also said “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally” – and had specified that he was talking about other unnamed people he claimed had been at the nighttime march “protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.” 

But there has never been evidence that such a benign group was present at the march. The march – which testimony in a 2021 civil trial showed was organized by White nationalists – was a bigoted gathering at which participants chanted Nazi and White nationalist slogans targeting Jews and others, and displayed Nazi symbols, while carrying Tiki torches. 

CNN correspondent Elle Reeve, who has extensively reported on the Charlottesville gathering, noted that the torch march was organized quietly in White nationalist “alt-right” online spaces and intended to be a surprise event that was known in advance only to a select group of like-minded people. 

So, it’s not clear how people who were not supportive of White nationalism might have come to be part of the crowd or why such people would have remained there if they had somehow stumbled in. And Trump has never identified any non-racists who participated. 

Former President Donald Trump repeated his frequent claim that Democrats will kill babies in the “eighth month, the ninth month of pregnancy, or even after birth.”

Trump pointed to the former Virginia governor’s support of a bill that would loosen restrictions on late-term abortions as an example.  

Facts First: Trump’s claim about Democrats killing babies after birth is nonsense. That is infanticide and illegal in all 50 states. A very small percentage of abortions happen at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy.   

According to data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 0.9% of reported abortions in 2020 occurred at 21 weeks or later. (Many of these abortions occur because of serious health risks or lethal fetal anomalies.) By contrast, 80.9% of reported abortions in 2020 were conducted before 10 weeks, 93.1% before 14 weeks and 95.8% before 16 weeks. 

Former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, voiced support for a state measure that would significantly loosen restrictions on late-term abortions when the fetus was not viable. Northam was not talking about infanticide. 

There are some cases in which parents decide to choose palliative care for babies who are born with deadly conditions that give them just minutes, hours or days to live. That is simply not the same as killing a baby. 

Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon argued that the president provided a “positive and winning vision” after he delivered a debate performance that has many Democrats panicked.

She also went after the former president over the vision they say he presented on the debate stage. 

“On the other side of the stage was Donald Trump, who offered a dark and backwards window into what America will look like if he steps foot back in the White House: a country where women are forced to beg for the health care they need to stay alive. A country that puts the interests of billionaires over working people. And a former president who not once, not twice, but three times, failed to promise he would accept the results of a free and fair election this November,” she said.

Former President Donald Trump reiterated election lies, claiming that he didn’t accept the results of the 2020 election because of voter fraud.  

“I would’ve much rather accepted these, but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous,” Trump said.  

Facts First: Trump’s election claims remain false.  

The 2020 election was not rigged or stolen. Trump lost to Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232, his opponents did not cheat, and there is no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state. 

President Joe Biden’s was not able to sufficiently “shut down” the various false claims made by former President Donald Trump during their debate Thursday, CNN anchor Abby Phillip said.

“Biden’s job, as the other person on the other side of the stage, is to be the one to very quickly dispense with the lies and to shut them down. And I don’t think that happened enough times in a coherent way,” Phillip said.

CNN is fact-checking both candidates on the claims made throughout the debate.

Nancy Pelosi is firing back against former President Donald Trump’s comments on the debate stage that she was responsible for the January 6 insurrection.

Trump also claimed that Pelosi, who was the Speaker of the House during the riot, turned down 10,000 National Guard troops.

Krager called it “pathetic” that Trump and his allies are “still trying to whitewash the deadly insurrection.”

“The American people saw for themselves the dangers to democracy on January 6th and can see right through Republicans’ revisionist history,” the spokesperson said.

Former Obama Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro criticized President Joe Biden’s debate performance, saying the president “seemed unprepared.”

“He seemed unprepared, lost, and not strong enough to parry effectively with Trump, who lies constantly,” he continued.

Castro served as the 16th secretary of HUD under the Obama-Biden administration, and also ran for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, eventually dropping out and endorsing Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Castro’s criticism comes as some Democrats are despairing over President Joe Biden’s debate performance.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump faced each other in a historic debate on Thursday night.

It was the first time in history that a sitting US president faced a former president in a debate. It was also the first debate since 2020 featuring either Biden, who did not face a serious challenge for the Democratic nomination, or Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee who skipped all the GOP debates during primary season.

The roughly 90-minute debate took place at CNN’s studios in Atlanta, and it was moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. There wasn’t an audience in studio — an anomaly in debates between presidential candidates. 

This was also the earliest presidential debate in US history. Debates between general election candidates have always started in September or early October.

Moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper sit across from Trump and Biden at the start of the debate.

Biden appeared to struggle with his delivery at multiple points during the start of the debate. Biden cleared his throat or coughed multiple times, a condition that his doctor has previously stated is caused by acid reflux. 

Biden's campaign won a coin toss before the debate to choose which side he would stand on. Trump's campaign then chose for the former president to deliver the last closing statement.

Trump answers a question during the debate. Trump launched his bid to reclaim the White House in November 2022, aiming to become only the second commander in chief to win two nonconsecutive terms. 

Patrons watch the CNN presidential debate during a watch party at Union Pub in Washington, DC, on June 27.

No props or pre-written notes were allowed on the stage. Candidates were given a pen, a pad of paper and a bottle of water. 

Donald Trump speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday in Atlanta.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that China, among other countries, “passed” on doing business with Iran during his presidency after he vowed that the US would not do business with any country that does so.  

“Iran was broke. Anybody that did business with Iran, including China, they couldn’t do business with the United States. They all passed,” Trump said.  

Facts First: This is a false claim.   

China’s oil imports from Iran did briefly plummet under Trump in 2019, the year his administration made a concerted effort to deter such purchases, but they never stopped – and then they rose sharply again while Trump was still president.  

“The claim is untrue because Chinese crude imports from Iran haven’t stopped at all,” Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, a market intelligence firm, told CNN in November.  

China’s official statistics recorded no purchases of Iranian crude in Trump’s last partial month in office, January 2021, and none in most of Biden’s first year in office. But that doesn’t mean China’s imports ceased; industry experts say it is widely known that China has used a variety of tactics to mask its continued imports from Iran.  

Smith said Iranian crude is often listed in Chinese data as being from Malaysia; ships may travel from Iran with their transponders switched off and then turn them on when they are near Malaysia, Smith said, or they may transfer the Iranian oil to other ships. 

Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said in a November email: “China significantly reduced its imports from Iran from around 800,000 barrels per day in 2018 to 100,000 in late 2019. But by the time Trump left office, they were back to upwards to 600(000)-700,000 barrels.”  

Vaez’s comments were corroborated by Kpler data that Smith provided to CNN. Kpler found that China imported about 511,000 barrels per day of Iranian crude in December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office. The low point under Trump was March 2020, when global oil demand crashed because of Covid-19. Even then, China imported about 87,000 barrels per day, Kpler found. (Since data on Iranian oil exports is based on cargo tracking by various companies and groups, other entities may have different data.) 

President Joe Biden will participate in a campaign event Friday in North Carolina before leaving for New York in the afternoon. 

He then delivers remarks at 4:30 p.m. at the Stonewall National Monument visitor center grand opening ceremony. 

 In the evening, he will then participate in a campaign reception in New York

Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday in Atlanta.

After Thursday’s debate, conservative commentator Scott Jennings said Biden’s “candidacy has fallen.”

“Everything we’ve been told about his mental acuity by these Democrats has been a lie,” he added.

Biden is seen during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday in Atlanta.

President Joe Biden said border crossings dropped 40%, arguing that the numbers are better than when Trump left office.  

“What I’ve done since I changed the law, what’s happened? I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally,” Biden said.  

Facts First: This is misleading.   

The number of daily encounters at the US southern border dropped 40% following President Joe Biden’s executive action restricting asylum access earlier this month. While there’s been a recent drop in border crossings, the number of people crossing the US-Mexico border was generally lower during the Trump administration.

Former President Trump’s advisers have been celebrating Trump’s performance during the debate as they watched from a hold room nearby. 

One of Trump’s advisers pointed specifically to his comments on January 6, which Trump had crafted and practiced during his debate preparations. 

His team’s main goal was for Trump to stay on topic and not to let President Joe Biden get under his skin. They believe he accomplished that goal.  

Senior advisers have also been closely watching the responses to Biden’s performance and age on social media, and have been sending around Democrats expressing concerns over Biden.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that his proposal to impose a 10% tariff on all goods coming into the US would not raise prices on Americans and instead cost other countries.  

“It’s just going to cost countries that have been ripping us off for years, like China, and many others,” Trump said.  

Facts first: This is false. Study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission (USITC), have shown that American consumers and industries bear almost the entire cost of US tariffs, including those duties previously imposed by Trump.

When the US puts a tariff on an imported good, the cost of the tariff comes directly out of the bank account of an American importer when the foreign-made product arrives at a US port. It’s possible that some foreign manufacturers lowered their prices to stay competitive in the US market after Trump raised tariffs — but not enough to keep the cost paid by American importers the same as before. 

As of June 12, American importers have paid more than $240 billion for tariffs that Trump imposed — and President Joe Biden mostly left in place — on imported solar panels, steel, aluminum, and Chinese-made goods, according to US Customs and Border Protection. The USITC found that US importers, on average between 2018 and 2021, ended up paying nearly the full cost of the tariffs because import prices increased at the same rate as the tariffs. For each 1% increase in the tariff rate, the price paid by the American importer also went up 1%.

Once an importing company pays the tariff, it can decide to eat the cost or pass all or some of it to the buyer of its goods – whether that’s a retailer or a consumer. For example, American shoe seller Deer Stags, which imports most of its product line from China, decided to do a little bit of both.

It was harder to get customers to pay more for existing styles that Deer Stags had carried for a long time, company president Rick Muskat told CNN. So the company ended up eating the cost of the tariffs placed on some older styles and charging more for some new items.

Economists generally agree that tariffs drive up prices. The Peterson Institute for International Economics recently estimated that Trump’s proposed 10% across-the-board tariff, together with his proposal to impose a 60% tariff on all imports from China, would cost the typical middle-income household at least $1,700 a year. And JP Morgan economists estimated in 2019 that the tariffs Trump imposed on about $300 billion of Chinese-made goods would cost the average American household $1,000 a year.  

Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden debate at CNN's Atlanta studios on Thursday.

Former President Donald Trump repeated his frequent claims that President Joe Biden and his Justice Department were behind Trump’s four indictments, including the Manhattan hush money case in which Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. 

“He indicted me because I was his opponent,” Trump said of Biden.  

Facts First: There is no evidence supporting either of Trump’s claims.

Grand juries made up of ordinary citizens – in New York, Georgia, Florida and Washington, DC – approved the indictments in each of Trump’s criminal cases. There is no basis for the claim that Biden ordered Trump to be criminally charged or face civil trials. 

There is also no evidence that Biden or the federal Justice Department had any role in launching or running Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution – and Bragg, a Democrat, is a locally elected official who does not report to the federal government. The indictment in the case was approved by a grand jury of ordinary citizens. 

Trump’s two federal indictments were brought by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Smith was appointed in November 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, but that is not proof that Biden was involved in the prosecution effort, much less that Biden personally ordered the indictments. Garland has said that he would resign if Biden ever asked him to act against Trump but that he was sure that would never happen.  

As he did during the debate, Trump has repeatedly invoked a lawyer on Bragg’s team, Matthew Colangelo, while making claims about the Justice Department’s involvement in the New York case. Colangelo left the Justice Department in 2022 to join the district attorney’s office as senior counsel to Bragg. But there is no evidence that Biden had anything to do with Colangelo’s employment decision. Colangelo and Bragg had been colleagues before Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney in 2021.  

Before Colangelo worked at the Justice Department, he and Bragg worked at the same time in the office of New York’s state attorney general, where Colangelo investigated Trump’s charity and financial practices and was involved in bringing various lawsuits against the Trump administration. 

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are seen during a CNN presidential debate in Atlanta on June 27.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump took the CNN stage for the first debate of the election cycle.

The candidates discussed a wide range of topics from immigration to abortion to democracy.

Here are some of the key moments:

Speaking at a Democratic watch party shortly after leaving the debate venue, President Joe Biden homed in on falsehoods he claims former President Donald Trump parroted while the two faced off for more than 90 minutes.

“I can’t think of one thing he said that was true,” Biden added.

He told the crowd: “Look, we’re gonna beat this guy. We need to beat this guy.”

They responded with chants of: “We need you!”

Biden has been battling a cold in recent days, sources familiar with his debate preparations say. His voice sounded hoarse and raspy during the debate, even more so than usual.

Former President Donald Trump brought up an anti-Joe Biden lie about Ukraine that has been a mainstay of both the 2020 and 2024 presidential cycles, as well as Trump’s 2019 impeachment.  

Trump slammed Biden for supposedly “telling the Ukrainian people” to “change the prosecutor, otherwise, you’re not getting $1 billion,” referring to efforts by Biden, as vice president, to remove Ukraine’s top prosecutor in 2016. Trump also claimed the Ukrainian prosecutor’s ouster was related to Biden’s “son,” referencing Hunter Biden, who at the time was on the board for a prominent Ukrainian energy company.  

“If I ever said that, that’s quid pro quo,” Trump quipped.  

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false.  

Since 2019, Trump and his Republican allies have falsely accused Biden of abusing his powers as vice president to get a top Ukrainian prosecutor fired, supposedly because the prosecutor’s probe into the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma Holdings threatened Hunter Biden.  

This claim was never true and has been repeatedly debunked. Nonetheless, it is one of the most-cited talking points used by Republicans against Joe Biden during any discussion about his ties to Ukraine.  

In reality, Biden’s actions toward the prosecutor were consistent with bipartisan US policy and was in lockstep with what America’s European allies were pushing for at the time. They sought to remove the prosecutor because he wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption in Ukraine – including at Burisma.  

The Obama administration, career US diplomats, US allies, the International Monetary Fund and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, and even Senate Republicans, among others, all made clear that they were displeased with the performance of Viktor Shokin, who became Ukraine’s prosecutor general in 2015.  

It is not clear how aggressively Shokin was investigating Burisma or its oligarch owner – or if there was even an active investigation – at the time that Joe Biden successfully pushed for Shokin’s firing in 2016.  

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Senate Republicans led a probe to find evidence on whether Biden had abused his position to help his family financially, but it came up empty. As the 2024 campaign approached, House Republicans put these false claims at the center of their now-flatlined impeachment inquiry into the president.

Trump is seen during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday in Atlanta.

Former President Donald Trump said of President Joe Biden, “The only jobs he created were for illegal immigrants and ‘bounceback jobs,’ a bounce back from the Covid.” 

Facts First: Trump’s claims that the job growth during Biden’s presidency has been all “bounceback” gains — where people went back to their old jobs lost during the pandemic — is not fully correct.   

Nearly 22 million jobs were lost under Trump in March and April 2020 when the global economy cratered on account of the pandemic. Following substantial relief and recovery measures, the US started regaining jobs immediately, adding more than 12 million jobs from May 2020 through December 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.  

The recovery continued after Biden took office, with the US reaching and surpassing its pre-pandemic (February 2020) employment totals in June 2022. 

The job gains didn’t stop there. Since June 2022, the US has added nearly 6.2 million more jobs in what’s become the fifth-longest period of employment expansion on record. In total under Biden, 15.6 million jobs have been added.  

But it’s not entirely fair nor accurate to say the jobs gained were all “bounceback,” or were people simply returning to their former positions.  

The pandemic drastically reshaped the employment landscape. For one, a significant portion of the labor force did not return due to early retirements, deaths, long Covid or caregiving responsibilities.  

Additionally, because of shifts in consumer spending patterns as well as health-and-safety implications, public-facing industries could not fully reopen or restaff immediately. Some of those workers found jobs in other industries or used the opportunity to start their own businesses.  

When the pandemic was more under control and in-person activities could fully resume, those industries faced worker shortages.  

The pandemic recovery included what’s been called the Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffling, where people – for a variety of reasons – switched jobs or careers.

Donald Trump speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday in Atlanta.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that the Paris climate accord would have cost the US $1 trillion, that the US was the only country that had to pay and that China, India and Russia weren’t paying. Trump called the accord “a rip-off of the United States.” 

Facts First: Trump’s claim that the US alone would have had to pay $1 trillion as part of the Paris climate accord is wildly inflated.

As part of the Paris agreement, in 2009, the US and other developed nations, including Western European countries, committed to collectively contribute $100 billion per year by 2020 to help poorer, developing countries, predominantly in the Global South, adapt to the impacts of climate change like sea level rise and worsening heat. Developed nations met their collective goal two years late in 2022, but the figure has never been as high as Trump was suggesting – and the US has certainly never paid $1 trillion in international climate finance. 

Under the Obama administration, the US paid $1 billion of a $3 billion commitment it originally made in 2014. After Trump pulled the country out of the Paris accord, the US paid nothing to the global finance goal. And while President Joe Biden pledged $11.4 billion annually from the US, this level of funding hasn’t materialized. That’s because Congress, responsible for appropriating the nation’s budget, has allocated only a fraction of that – roughly $1 billion in 2022. 

Trump is correct that countries, including China, India and Russia, have thus far not contributed to international climate finance. However, China’s position as the largest global emitter means many countries are pressuring it to contribute to international climate finance through a formal process. 

President Joe Biden speaks during CNN's Presidential Debate in Atlanta on June 27.

President Joe Biden attempted to contrast himself with his predecessor on the economy, particularly on the unemployment rate among Black Americans, which he claimed has been the lowest during his presidency.

“Black unemployment is the lowest level it’s been in a long, long time,” Biden said.

Facts First: This is false. Black unemployment is not the lowest it’s been in a long time.  

The Black or African American unemployment rate was 6.1% in May 2024, higher than a record set under the administration when it fell to an adjusted low of 4.8% in April 2023. The previous record was set less than four years prior during the Trump administration, when it fell to a seasonally adjusted 5.3% in August 2019.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former aide to Donald Trump, who has warned against a second Trump presidency, said Joe Biden’s debate performance tonight does not give her confidence that he can take on her former boss.

“I think Joe Biden lost in the first three minutes,” she said on CNN after the debate.

She reiterated that she thinks Trump is a “threat to democracy,” adding: “I think he is a threat to the America as we know it.”

“I am not confident that that is the man to take him on,” she said, referring to Biden.

CNN political commentator Van Jones, who was a special adviser to Barack Obama, said President Joe Biden’s debate performance Thursday was “painful.”

“That’s a good man. He loves his country. He’s doing the best that he can. But he had a test to meet tonight to restore confidence of the country and of the base. And he failed to do that,” Jones continued.

Democrats are despairing over Biden’s debate performance, with some even privately raising questions about whether he should remain the party’s nominee.

“I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now. We’re still far from our convention, and there is time for this party to figure out a different way forward if he will allow us to do that,” Jones said.

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Two Democratic Party officials, one in a senior position, expressed concern about President Joe Biden’s debate performance. After Biden’s shaky moment when he seemed to lose his train of thought about Medicare, one official said about the president’s performance: “nothing good.”

The officials pointed to other moments later in the debate when the president appeared to land some punches, particularly about Trump’s sleeping with a porn star.

But the officials also questioned why Biden missed other opportunities to slam Trump’s comments, particularly on the issue of abortion.

Supporters of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. protest him not being included in the CNN presidential debate, outside the White House in Washington, DC on June 27.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slammed both President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump on the rising national debt and the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, two issues discussed at the beginning of CNN’s presidential debate.

Kennedy and the live studio audience at his debate rebuttal event in West Hollywood, California, listened to a feed of CNN’s debate as Biden and Trump debated their economic records in response to the opening questions from CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

He then chastised both candidates for increasing the national debt, which he called an “existential” problem, while insisting that his voice would have added clarity to the conversation on the issue had he qualified for the debate.

“President Trump came into office promising to balance the budget. Instead, he spent more money in office than every president in United States history combined,” Kennedy said, echoing an argument made by Biden during the debate.

“Biden will beat him,” he continued. “By the time he leaves office, he’ll have run up more than President Trump. That’s why we have inflation.”

“This is the reason that they need me on stage. Because I would confront them with what they did,” Kennedy added. 

Kennedy also responded to Trump criticizing Biden for implementing public health mandates in response to Covid-19, a tactic Trump also utilized during his administration. He blamed both presidents for failing to adequately respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Kennedy has used both issues to differentiate himself from both Biden and Trump throughout his campaign as he seeks to portray himself as a political outsider who would reform conventional policy positions supported by both Democrats and Republicans.

People watch the CNN presidential debate during a watch party at Union Pub in Washington, DC on June 27.

Trump co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita declared victory before former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden had given their closing arguments at the CNN presidential debate and argued Biden “showed exactly why he deserves to be fired.”

“Tonight President Trump delivered the greatest debate performance and victory in history to the largest voter audience in history,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a news release.

They argued, “Joe Biden on the other hand showed exactly why he deserves to be fired. Despite taking a week-long vacation at Camp David to prepare for the debate, Biden was unable to defend his disastrous record on the economy and the border.”

After closing statements, Trump clocked in approximately 40 minutes and 12 seconds, while Biden’s time came in at 35 minutes and 41 seconds.

While both candidates had an equal chance to respond to questions, they could choose not to use the maximum allotted time.

Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden debate at CNN's Atlanta studios on Thursday.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that President Joe Biden called Black people “super predators” for a decade in the 1990s.  

“What he’s done to the Black population is horrible, including the fact that for 10 years he called them ‘super predators’ – in the 1990s – we can’t forget that,” Trump said.  

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Biden never publicly deployed the phrase “super predators” or endorsed the criminological theory behind it (which held that there was a new breed of highly and remorselessly violent young offenders). Biden did, however, refer to “predators on our streets” who were “beyond the pale” while promoting the 1994 crime bill. 

As reported by CNN’s KFILE in 2019, Biden said in a 1993 Senate floor speech in support of the crime bill that “we have predators on our streets that society has, in fact, in part because of its neglect, created.” And he urged the government to focus on the people he said were in danger of becoming “the predators 15 years from now” if their lives weren’t changed – “the cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity.” 

But Biden did not speak of “super predators.”  

Four years later, at a 1997 hearing, he noted that the vast majority of youth criminal cases involved nonviolent offenses and said, “When we talk about the juvenile justice system, we have to remember that most of the youth involved in the system are not the so-called super predators.” 

It was Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, who affirmatively used the phrase “super predators” as she argued in support of the 1994 crime bill (in 1996). She said in 2016 that she shouldn’t have used that language. 

Trump wrote in a 2000 book that he supported tougher sentencing and street policing and warned of “wolf packs” of young criminals roaming the streets – and he cited a since-discredited statistical analysis that was linked to the “super predator” theory. 

Heading into Thursday’s debate, Biden allies had hoped that President Joe Biden would be able to deliver a tight and concise message on immigration to blunt former President Donald Trump’s attacks on one of the most politically fraught issues. 

 But it fell short of expectations. 

Polling shows that immigration remains a top issue for voters, and Biden has repeatedly lagged Trump on the issue. Over recent weeks, the White House took multiple steps to try to turn the tables against Trump, announcing multiple measures to clamp down on border crossings while also extending protections to spouses of US citizens who are undocumented. 

Biden’s advisers didn’t see immigration as the defining issue for them, but the president had been prepared to tackle the issue when raised, including pointing to actions taken by the administration and the border security bill that Trump tanked earlier this year. 

 Biden repeatedly cited the border bill during Thursday’s debate when talking about immigration, blaming Trump for the measure failing. 

 “I think, given the limited time, he hit one of the most important points — when he worked with Congress to deliver a bipartisan border bill, Trump tanked it. And he reminded people that Trump’s legacy is marked by family separation,” one immigrant advocate told CNN. 

But the advocate said: “Biden needs to tighten up his messaging because he has a lot of good to stand on, including the moral authority on the issue.” 

President Joe Biden touted two measures that his administration and congressional Democrats have enacted to reduce drug prices.  

“We brought down the price of prescription drugs, which is a major issue for many people, to $15 for an insulin shot as opposed to $400. No senior has to pay more than $200 for any drug… beginning next year,” Biden said. 

Facts First: Biden is wrong. He incorrectly described two key provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that aim to reduce prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries. 

Under the law, Medicare enrollees don’t pay more than $35 a month for each insulin prescription. 

The law also placed a cap on Medicare’s Part D drug plans so that seniors and people with disabilities won’t pay more than $2,000 a year in out-of-pocket costs for medications bought at the pharmacy, starting in 2025.  

Biden speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday.

Democrats are despairing over President Joe Biden’s debate performance Thursday night, a showing so halting some even privately raised questions about whether he should remain the party’s nominee.

Biden appeared onstage with a soft, halting voice and an open-mouthed, staring look. He struggled to finish thoughts at points, and ceded ground on issues like abortion where Democrats have an edge.

It took just minutes for Democrats to realize how bad it was becoming.

“Horrific,” said another Democratic operative.

And one Democrat who’s worked on campaigns up and down the ballot said simply: “We are f***ed.”

The looming question as the debate came to a close was almost existential: Should someone else top the Democratic ticket?

“It’s hard to argue that Biden should be our nominee,” said an operative who’s worked on campaigns at all levels for over a decade.

This debate was historic for many reasons, but not least because it is taking place before each man is formally nominated at their respective conventions. The Democratic National Convention is set to convene August 19 in Chicago.

Democrats have spent much of the past year handwringing about Biden’s chances of beating Trump in an election many view as an existential one that will decide the very survival of American democracy. But Biden himself was determined to be the one to take on Trump, at one point even saying directly: “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running.”

No serious Democratic challengers stepped up to run against Biden, and at this point in the campaign he’d have to decide to step aside if Democrats were to pick another nominee. If Biden did withdraw, the Democratic nomination would be decided on the floor.

Democrats were even talking about who it might be instead: “If I was Gavin (Newsom) or Gretchen (Whitmer), I’d be making calls tonight,” one said.

Trump speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday.

Former President Donald Trump made his final pitch of the debate to voters in closing statements, touting his record during his first term as president.

“We rebuilt the military, we got the largest tax cut in history, the largest regulation cut in history,” Trump said. “The reason he’s got jobs is because I cut the regulation that gave jobs.”

The former president called Biden a “complainer” and said he “doesn’t do anything.” He attacked Biden’s border policy and his handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and other facets of Biden’s foreign policy.

In his closing statements, President Joe Biden said his predecessor left him with a “debacle” while promising to promote childcare, clean up lead pipes and bring down inflation if he retains a second term in the White House.

“We have to make sure that we have a fairer tax system,” Biden said.

On the economy, Biden said: “We’re gonna continue to fight to bring down inflation and give people a break.”

President Joe Biden said that he doubts Donald Trump will accept the results of the 2024 election if he loses, calling the former president a “whiner.”

Going deeper: In past remarks, Trump has refused to unconditionally accept the results of the upcoming election and has made comments that have sought to undermine confidence in the American electoral system in the event he loses in November.

He said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he would accept the results “if everything’s honest.” Biden has previously warned, “I promise you he won’t” accept the result of the 2024 election. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson in a post on X said former President Donald Trump is the only candidate “qualified and capable” to be president. 

“This is the biggest mismatch in the history of presidential debates,” Johnson added.

Trump speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday.

Donald Trump claimed that when he was president, Iran “had no money for Hamas” and no money “for terror.”  

“Do you wanna know why? Because Iran was broke with me. I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke,” Trumps aid. “They had no money for Hamas, they had no money for anything. No money for terror. That’s why you had no terror, at all, during my administration. This place, the whole world is blowing up under him.”  

Facts First: Trump’s claim that Iran had “no money for Hamas” and “no money for terror” during his presidency is false. Iran’s funding for such groups did decline in the second half of his presidency, in large part because his sanctions on the country had a major negative impact on the Iranian economy, but the funding never stopped entirely, as four experts told CNN earlier this month.  

Trump’s own administration said in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups, including Hezbollah. The Trump administration began imposing sanctions on Iran in late 2018, pursuing a campaign known as “maximum pressure.” But Trump-appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said himself in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups. “So you continue to have, in spite of the Iranian leadership demanding that more money be given to them, they are using the resources that they have to continue funding Hezbollah in Lebanon and threatening the state of Israel, funding Iraqi terrorist Shia groups, all the things that they have done historically – continuing to build out their capabilities even while the people inside of their own country are suffering,” Pompeo said in a May 2020 interview, according to a transcript posted on the State Department’s website.  

Trump could have fairly said that his sanctions on Iran had made life more difficult for terror groups (though it’s unclear how much their operations were affected). Instead, he continued his years-old practice of exaggerating even legitimate achievements.  

You can read a more detailed fact check from earlier in June here.   

Roughly an hour and a half into the debate, Trump clocked in approximately 38 minutes and 13 seconds, while Biden’s time came in at 33 minutes and 41 seconds. While both candidates have an equal chance to respond to questions, they can choose not to use the maximum allotted time.

We’re tracking how much speaking time each candidate gets during the first presidential debate of the cycle, hosted by CNN in Atlanta.

Data will be updated every 5 seconds.

Follow along live here.

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Social Security Social Security is facing a cliff in 2035 if Congress doesn’t act. President Joe Biden on Thursday night said that the very wealthy should “begin to pay their fair share.” to help the program stay financially sound.

Biden hasn’t laid out a detailed plan on how he plans to shore up Social Security, but his main proposal has been to raise taxes on high-income Americans.

Employers and employees each pay a 6.2% tax, for a total of 12.4%, into Social Security. But the earnings subject to that tax are capped at $168,600 in 2024.

Halfway through a wide-ranging debate that covered domestic and global issues, the Biden camp feels buoyed by answers the president delivered on reproductive rights, criticism of January 6, and Trump’s myriad legal battles, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

 The source acknowledges that Biden’s cold has affected his voice and delivery.

Former President Donald Trump, complaining about the European Union’s trade practices, claimed that the EU doesn’t accept US products, including American cars.

Facts First: It’s not true that the European Union won’t take US products, including American cars, though some US exports do face EU trade barriers and US automakers have often had a hard time gaining popularity with European consumers. 

The US exported about $368 billion in goods to the European Union in 2023 (while importing about $576 billion from the EU that year), federal figures show.

According to a December 2023 report from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, the EU is the second-largest market for US vehicle exports — importing 271,476 US vehicles in 2022, valued at nearly 9 billion euros. (Some of these are vehicles made by European automakers at plants in the US.)

The EU’s Eurostat statistical office says that car imports from the US hit a new peak in 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, at a value of about 11 billion euros. 

Trump and Biden debate in Atlanta on Thursday.

The first presidential debate of 2024 is in its second break right now.

President Joe Biden has been battling a cold in recent days, sources familiar with his debate preparations say. His voice has sounded hoarse and raspy during the debate, even more so than usual.

Here are some of the biggest moments from the debate so far:

Age:

Social Security:

Court cases:

Democracy and January 6:

Immigration:

Foreign policy:

Abortion:

Economy:

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump went back and forth about their golf games on the debate stage Thursday.

In response to a question about his age, Trump pointed to his golf handicap, saying that he feels like he is in good shape.

“I just won two club championships, not even senior. Two regular club championships,” the former president said. “To do that, you have to be quite smart, and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way.”

“He doesn’t do it,” Trump said of Biden. “He can’t hit a ball 50 yards.”

Biden quipped that he would be happy to “have a driving contest with him.”

“I told you before I’m happy to play golf. If you carry your own bag. Do you think you could do it?” Biden responded.

“Let’s not act like children,” Trump later said.

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After being asked multiple times by CNN’s Dana Bash whether he will accept the results of the upcoming presidential election, regardless of who wins, former President Donald Trump said he will “if it is a fair and legal and good election.”

“It would be much easier for me to do that than running again,” he said.

When asked by Bash if he would condemn political violence of any kind, Trump said he “shouldn’t have to say that.”

“But of course I believe that,” the former president said. “It’s totally unacceptable.”

Remember: Trump consistently has refused to concede that he lost the 2020 election and has continued to repeat false claims about it being stolen from him by President Joe Biden.

Even after Biden’s victory in the Electoral College, and after he became president, Trump refused to say the election that he won was legitimate, alleging, without proof, that millions of people voted illegally, costing him the popular vote. The special commission he appointed as president to investigate his allegations of voter fraud didn’t find any.

CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf contributed reporting

Democrats watching the debate tonight are worried by President Joe Biden’s performance, alarmed that the president is not being more forceful against Donald Trump’s mistruths nor clear enough about his own vision and what he’s done for the country.

Another lawmaker told CNN that Biden’s performance was “getting better but, train wreck.”

Democrats are especially worried that Trump is coming off as more measured than usual while Biden is not “punching back” on Trump’s lies. 

Former President Donald Trump said that he deployed the National Guard to Minneapolis in 2020 during the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.  

“When they ripped down Portland, when they ripped down many other cities. You go to Minnesota, Minneapolis, what they’ve done there with the fires all over the city — if I didn’t bring in the National Guard, that city would have been destroyed.”  

Facts First: This is false. Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, not Trump, deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.  

Joe Biden is seen during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday.

President Joe Biden said that the US Border Patrol union had endorsed him and then appeared to clarify and said the group had “endorsed (his) position.”  

Facts First: This is misleading. The National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents, backed a bipartisan border deal reached by senators that included some of the toughest security measures in recent memory, but it didn’t endorse Biden. The deal failed in the Senate. 

In a post on X, the union swiftly responded to the president Thursday: “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.” 

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are seen during a CNN Presidential debate in Atlanta on Thursday.

President Joe Biden claimed that he is the only president this decade “that doesn’t have any… troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did,” referring to former President Donald Trump. 

Facts First: Biden is wrong. US service members have died abroad during his presidency, including 13 troops killed in a suicide bombing during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.  

Thirteen US service members — including 11 Marines, one Army special operations soldier, and one Navy corpsman — were killed in the suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Three US soldiers were also killed this year at a small US outpost in Jordan in a one-way drone attack launched by Iran-backed militants. And two US Navy SEALs died in January off the coast of Somalia while conducting a night-time seizure of lethal aid being transported from Iran to Yemen. 

Other US service members have also died abroad in training incidents, including five US soldiers who died in a helicopter crash in the eastern Mediterranean Sea in November 2023 during a routine refueling mission, and eight US airmen who died in a CV-22 Osprey crash in November 2023 off the coast of Yakushima Island, Japan. 

Biden speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday.

Asked about voter concerns regarding his age, President Joe Biden mentioned his opponent is only a few years younger than him, “but a lot less competent.”

“First of all,” Biden said, “I spent half my career being criticized for being the youngest person in politics … and now I’m the oldest.”

“This guy’s three years younger and a lot less competent,” Biden said.

He urged voters to “just look at the record, what I’ve done.”

Asked the same question, Trump challenged Biden to a cognitive test. The pair then argued about their golf skills.

Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden debate at CNN's Atlanta studios on June 27.

When asked what he would do to make childcare more affordable, Trump continued his attacks on Biden, arguing that, “This shouldn’t be a debate … He is the worst president in the history of our country.” 

“​​If he wins this election, our country doesn’t have a chance — not even a chance of coming out of this rut. We probably won’t have a country left anymore,” he continued. 

Biden responded by noting a survey of historians that said Trump was the worst president in history, and claimed Trump did “virtually nothing for childcare” during his presidency. 

“We should significantly increase the childcare tax credit. We should significantly increase the availability of single parents to be able to go back to work. And we should encourage businesses to have childcare facilities,” Biden added.

Former President Donald Trump at CNN's Atlanta studios on June 27.

Former President Donald Trump repeated his frequent claim that “everybody” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned and the power to set abortion policy returned to individual states.  

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Multiple polls have shown that most Americans – two-thirds or nearly two-thirds of respondents in multiple polls – wish Roe had been preserved.  

For example, a CNN poll conducted by SSRS in April 2024 found that 65% of adults opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. That’s nearly identical to the result of a CNN poll conducted by SSRS in July 2022, the month after the decision. Similarly, a Marquette Law School poll in February 2024 found that 67% of adults opposed the decision that overturned Roe.  

An NBC News poll in June 2023 found 61% opposition among registered voters to the decision that overturned Roe. A Gallup poll in May 2023 found that 61% of adults called the decision a bad thing.  

Many legal scholars had also wanted Roe preserved, as several of them told CNN when Trump made a similar claim and said, “all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and, in fact, demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade” in April. 

“Any claim that all legal scholars wanted Roe overturned is mind-numbingly false,” Rutgers Law School professor Kimberly Mutcherson, a legal scholar who supported the preservation of Roe, said in April. 

“Donald Trump’s claim is flatly incorrect,” another legal scholar who did not want Roe overturned, Maya Manian, an American University law professor and faculty director of the university’s Health Law and Policy Program, said in April.  

Trump’s claim is “obviously not” true, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who is an expert on the history of the US abortion debate. Ziegler, who also did not want Roe overturned, said in an April interview: “Most legal scholars probably track most Americans, who didn’t want to overturn Roe… It wasn’t as if legal scholars were somehow outliers.” 

It is true that some legal scholars who support abortion rights wished that Roe had been written differently; the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of them. But Ziegler noted that although “there was a cottage industry of legal scholars kind of rewriting Roe – ‘what Roe should’ve said’ — that isn’t saying Roe should’ve been overturned. Those are very different things.”  

Read more.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that his administration saved America’s steel industry with tariffs on foreign steel.

America’s steel industry has been in decline for a century. Chinese steel, in particular, is significantly cheaper and therefore more popular than steel made in America. Trump’s tariffs did little to change the fortunes of the steel industry in America.

That’s evidenced by US Steel, which decades ago was the world’s biggest company. Last year, it announced it planned to sell itself to Nippon Steel, a Japanese rival, in a $14 billion deal.

Biden came out publicly against that proposed deal, citing antitrust and foreign competition concerns.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are seen during a CNN Presidential debate in Atlanta on June 27.

President Joe Biden vowed to keep Social Security solvent, saying that forcing wealthy Americans to “pay their fair share” is one way to ensure that happens.

But he added that the biggest thing that would keep Social Security solvent is defeating former President Donald Trump in the upcoming election.

In response, Trump blamed Biden for “destroying” Social Security and said the current president “doesn’t know what he’s doing.” He claimed that “millions of people” are immigrating into the US and are taking services such as Social Security and Medicaid away from other Americans. 

Some background: Biden has previously homed in on Trump’s statements suggesting he would be open to cutting programs such as Social Security and Medicare. 

In an interview with CNBC last month, Trump said: “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements.”

Biden responded on social media: “Not on my watch.”

President Joe Biden said he will “make the very wealthy begin to pay their fair share” to keep Social Security solvent.

“I would not raise the cost of Social Security for anybody under $400,000. After that, I begin to make the wealthy begin to pay their fair share by increasing from 1% beyond to be able to guarantee the program for life,” he said.

Biden has homed in on Trump’s statements suggesting he would be open to cutting programs like Social Security and Medicare. 

In an interview with CNBC last month, Trump said: “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements,” Trump said on CNBC. Biden responded on X: “Not on my watch.” 

He reiterated his vow to protect Social Security during his State of the Union address. 

“Many of my Republican friends want to put Social Security on the chopping block,” Biden said “If anyone here tries to cut Social Security or Medicare or raise the retirement age I will stop them.” 

“I will protect and strengthen Social Security and make the wealthy pay their fair share,” he added. 

Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden debate at CNN's Atlanta studios on June 27.

Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have repeatedly vowed to protect Social Security, but neither has issued detailed proposals to address the beloved entitlement program’s looming insolvency.

During tonight’s debate, Trump warned about the negative impacts of another Biden administration on Social Security.

The combined Social Security trust funds – which help support monthly payments to the elderly, survivors and people with disabilities – are expected to be exhausted in 2035 unless Congress acts, according to its trustees’ latest annual report. After that, payroll tax revenue and other income sources will only be able to cover 83% of benefits owed.

Biden has said he would increase taxes on higher-income Americans to shore up Social Security’s finances and has repeatedly slammed a budget proposal from a conservative House Republican group for containing benefit cuts. The president has also criticized Trump for being open to making cuts in the program.

Trump, meanwhile, has not provided details on how he would fix Social Security’s fiscal woes. During a CNBC interview in March, he referenced that there was a lot one could do in terms of cutting entitlements. But he later said that he was referring to addressing theft and bad management of Social Security and Medicare and repeated his promise to protect them.

“I don’t suspect that you’re going to see anything come out before the election from either camp,” said Gary Engelhardt, an economics professor at Syracuse University.

Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund, known as Medicare Part A, is expected to be able to cover scheduled inpatient hospital benefits until 2036 unless Congress acts, after which it will only be able to pay 89% of total scheduled benefits, according to the program’s latest trustees report. 

Biden has issued a plan that he says would solve Medicare’s financial problems by raising certain taxes on wealthier individuals and funneling some savings from the proposed Medicare drug reforms into the trust fund. Trump has not suggested a fix for Medicare.

President Joe Biden pushed back on former President Donald Trump’s claim that he took actions to combat the climate crisis.

Asked if he would take any actions to address climate change in his second term, Trump didn’t immediately answer the question. Prompted again by CNN moderator Dana Bash, Trump replied that he wants “absolutely immaculate clean water” and “absolutely clean air.”

“And we had it,” Trump said. “We had the best numbers ever.”

Biden in response said, “I don’t know where the hell he’s been. The idea that anything he said is true.”

“He’s claiming to have done something to have the cleanest water? The cleanest water? He had not a damn thing for the environment,” Biden said, touting his hand in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated money to fighting climate change.

Biden also claimed that Trump wanted to undo all of the actions he has taken so far.

Some context: In his first term, Trump overturned more than 100 environmental rules and actions put in place by the Obama administration. 

Biden’s administration has spent much of its tenure undoing Trump’s actions – in some places enacting even stronger regulations on planet-warming pollution coming from vehicles, power plants and the oil and gas industry. 

Trump has vowed to again reverse course from Biden; he wants to give a boost to fossil fuels and oil and gas drilling in particular. 

President Joe Biden launched a fiery set of criticisms against former President Donald Trump’s legal troubles, comparing his predecessor’s morals to an “alley cat” as he called him a “convicted felon.”

“The crimes that you are still charged with – and think of all the civil penalties you have. How many billions of dollars do you owe in civil penalties for molesting a woman in public? For doing a whole range of things? Of having sex with a porn star on the night – while your wife was pregnant?” Biden asked. 

Trump was found guilty last month on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to an adult-film star in 2016. And last year, a jury found that Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in the spring of 1996 and awarded her $5 million for battery and defamation.

Biden turned to Trump, and continued, “You have the morals of an alley cat.” 

Trump denied having sex with a porn star. 

Biden speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday.

President Joe Biden has been battling a cold in recent days, sources familiar with his debate preparations say.

His voice has sounded hoarse and raspy during the debate, even more so than usual.

Biden also experiences “occasional symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux, primarily having to clear his throat more often,” Dr. Kevin O’Connor, the president’s physician, said in a memo following his February physical.

“He caused the inflation,” former President Donald Trump claimed, attacking President Joe Biden in a conversation about whether Biden’s economy is working for Black Americans.

Trump also claimed that “there was no inflation” during his administration.

The causes of America’s inflation crisis are numerous. The pandemic led to massive supply chain disruptions that sent prices surging. Russia’s war with Ukraine exacerbated those costs and sent energy prices through the roof. And the Federal Reserve failed to understand the seriousness of the inflation crisis, keeping rates low for an extended period of time.

On top of that, stimulus checks distributed during both the Trump administration and the Biden administration helped boost inflation.

Inflation in America peaked in June 2022, with consumer prices surging 9.1% over the previous year. It’s now down to a still-high but much healthier 3.3%. But that’s significantly higher than the 1.4% inflation rate when Biden took office.

America’s inflation had been a non-issue for decades before Biden took office and was routinely below the Fed’s target 2% inflation rate during the Trump administration. But inflation was initially pushed to practically zero — artificially — during the pandemic lockdown. Reopening the economy contributed to inflation’s rebound.

Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden debate at CNN's Atlanta studios on June 27, 2024.

Former President Donald Trump denied that he had used the words “suckers” or “losers” to describe members of the US military who had been killed in action, after President Joe Biden mentioned the alleged remarks to criticize his predecessor’s record on veterans.  

Biden touted his visit to a World War I cemetery, which he said Trump “refused to go” to and allegedly told a four-star general it was because “they’re a bunch of losers and suckers.”  

Trump claimed the remark was “made up” by Biden.  

Facts First: The Atlantic magazine, citing four unnamed sources with “firsthand knowledge,” reported in 2020 that on the day Trump canceled a visit to a military cemetery in France where US troops who were killed in World War I are buried, he had told members of his senior staff, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The magazine also reported that in another conversation on the same trip, Trump had referred to marines who had been killed in the region as “suckers.” 

John Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff and secretary of Homeland Security, has said on the record that in 2018 Trump did use the words “suckers” and “losers” to refer to servicemembers who were killed in action. Kelly told CNN anchor Jim Sciutto for Sciutto’s 2024 book that Trump would say: “Why do you people all say that these guys who get wounded or killed are heroes? They’re suckers for going in the first place, and they’re losers.” 

There is no public recording of Trump making such remarks, so we can’t definitively call Trump’s denial false. But the account of Trump’s comments does not solely rest on unnamed sources from the article in The Atlantic. 

Black Americans continue to struggle economically more than other racial group in many regards. But President Joe Biden said Black voters should recognize that the Black unemployment rate is “the lowest it’s been in a long, long time.”

Under Biden’s presidency, the Black unemployment rate hit a record low of 4.8% in April 2023. The prior record low was set under Trump’s presidency, at 5.3%.

However, the Black unemployment rate has started to increase. As of last month, it was at 6.1%, while the nation’s overall unemployment rate was at 4%.

After the first break, former President Donald Trump clocked in approximately 23 minutes and six seconds, while President Joe Biden’s time came in at roughly 18 minutes and 26 seconds.

While both candidates have an equal chance to respond to questions, they can choose not to use the maximum allotted time.

We’re tracking how much speaking time each candidate gets during the first presidential debate of the cycle, hosted by CNN in Atlanta.

Data will be updated every five seconds.

Follow along live here.

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President Joe Biden has made abortion access a central issue in his re-election campaign, but he has stopped short of outlining the exact parameters for when he believes abortion should be legal. 

Biden said he supports abortion under the circumstances outlined in Roe v. Wade, he believes a doctor should be making the decision, and – pushed to say whether he believed there was a point in pregnancy after which abortion should not be legal – Biden said, “We are not for late-term abortion, period.” 

The Biden campaign was ready for that issue to come up. A statement released after the exchange hailed Biden’s support for Roe and attempted to fact-check claims made by Trump that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris support abortion up to birth. 

For background: A devout Catholic, Biden’s position on the issue has shifted over his decades in public office. Early in his career as a senator, he said the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade “went too far.” Pope Francis has called Biden’s more recent support of abortion rights an “incoherence,” but has supported Biden’s ability to continue receiving communion despite his policy stance. 

Former President Donald Trump mentioned the current state of Social Security and Medicare, two entitlement programs that many Americans rely on but which are facing potential problems in the future.

The programs’ trustees recently estimated that Social Security will not be able to pay full benefits in 2035 if Congress doesn’t act.

Medicare has some more time, but that program is also on shaky financial ground. There were about 67 million Americans who received Social Security benefits last year, while Medicare covered 66.7 million senior citizens and people with disabilities.

As they watched the debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, attendees at a Biden-Harris watch party in Phoenix, Arizona, could also play debate bingo. 

Some of the bingo spaces included some of Biden’s common sayings like “malarkey” and “Not a joke!”

Other spaces were to highlight Biden’s top campaign promises. Six red spaces took aim at Trump, with phrases like “denies losing in 2020” and “defends January 6.” 

The so-called “free space” was an image of the “Dark Brandon” meme. 

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday said the terms Russian President Vladimir Putin has put forward to end Russia’s war in Ukraine are “not acceptable.” 

Putin has said Russia would only end its war in Ukraine if Kyiv surrenders the entirety of four regions claimed by Moscow and abandons its bid to join NATO. 

After initially dodging the question posed by CNN’s Dana Bash at the presidential debate in Atlanta, Trump was pressed by Bash a second time: “Are Putin’s terms acceptable to you?” 

“No, they’re not acceptable,” Trump said.

Trump again claimed he would end the war in Ukraine if reelected, as he regularly does on the campaign trail, and again did not provide any specifics about how he would end the war, which is now in its third year.

President Joe Biden participates in the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta on June 27.

When asked what he would do to get Israel and Hamas to end the war in Gaza, Biden touted a plan that included trading the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and a continued “ceasefire with additional conditions.”

“The only one who wants the war to continue is Hamas,” Biden said. “We’re still pushing hard to get them to accept.”

Some background: In May, Biden laid out a three-phase proposal, which he said Israel had submitted, to wind down the war in Gaza, declaring, “It’s time for this war to end.”

It was perhaps the furthest Biden has gone in telling Israel its stated goals for its operation in Gaza have been met, and that the time has arrived to stop the fighting as part of a hostage deal — but the president’s push has still not resulted in a ceasefire, nearly a month later.

Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden debate at CNN's Atlanta studios on June 27.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have been going head-to-head on the debate stage, covering a range of topics.

Here are some of the top lines so far:

Former President Donald Trump said of President Joe Biden, “The only jobs he created were for illegal immigrants and ‘bounce-back jobs,’ a bounce-back from the Covid.” 

Facts First: Trump’s claims that the job growth during Biden’s presidency has been all “bounce-back” gains, where people went back to their old jobs, is not fully correct.  

Nearly 22 million jobs were lost under Trump in March and April 2020 when the global economy cratered on account of the pandemic. Following substantial relief and recovery measures, the US started regaining jobs immediately, adding more than 12 million jobs from May 2020 through December 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.  

The recovery continued after Biden took office, with the US reaching and surpassing its pre-pandemic (February 2020) employment totals in June 2022.  

The job gains didn’t stop there. Since June 2022, the US has added nearly 6.2 million more jobs in what’s become the fifth-longest period of employment expansion on record. In total under Biden, 15.6 million jobs have been added.  

But it’s not entirely fair nor accurate to say the jobs gained were all “bounce-back” or were people simply returning to their former positions. 

The pandemic drastically reshaped the employment landscape. For one, a significant portion of the labor force did not return due to early retirements, deaths, long Covid or caregiving responsibilities.  

Additionally, because of shifts in consumer spending patterns as well as health-and-safety implications, public-facing industries could not fully reopen or restaff immediately. Some of those workers found jobs in other industries or used the opportunity to start their own businesses.  

When the pandemic was more under control and in-person activities could fully resume, those industries faced worker shortages.  

The pandemic recovery included what’s been called the Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffling, where people – for a variety of reasons – switched jobs or careers.

President Joe Biden debate at CNN's Atlanta studios on June 27, 2024.

President Joe Biden brought up Trump’s criminal felony convictions for the first time during the debate Thursday.

The statement came after a back-and-forth between the two candidates about January 6 and the violence that took place in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. 

Biden added there was “no effort” on Trump’s part to stop the riot on January 6.

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Former President Donald Trump departs the courtroom after being found guilty on all 34 counts in his hush money trial at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 30 in New York City.

Former President Donald Trump is facing four federal criminal cases. Here’s a summary of each case and where it stands: 

Hush Money: Trump was first indicted in March 2023 by the Manhattan district attorney on state charges related to a hush-money payment to an adult-film star in 2016. On May 30, he was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree by 12 jurors. He became the first former US president to be convicted of a felony. Prosecutors alleged that Trump was a part of an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election. Further, they alleged he was part of an unlawful plan to suppress negative information, including the $130,000 payment. Trump pleaded not guilty. Trump’s sentencing on this verdict is scheduled for July 11. 

Classified documents: Trump was indicted in June 2023 by a federal grand jury in Miami for taking classified national defense documents from the White House after he left office and resisting the government’s attempts to retrieve the materials. Both Trump and his aide Walt Nauta have pleaded not guilty. On July 27, 2023, the special counsel charged Trump with three new counts, including one additional count of willful retention of national defense information. Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely postponed the trial on May 7, 2024, citing significant issues around classified evidence that would need to be worked out before the federal criminal case goes to a jury. 

Election interference: Special counsel Jack Smith investigated alleged efforts by the former president and his allies to overturn the 2020 election. The indictment from August 2023 alleges Trump and a co-conspirator “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol by calling lawmakers to convince them … to delay the certification” of the election. It also alleges another co-conspirator pushed then-Vice President Mike Pence to “violate the law” to delay President Joe Biden’s victory. Trump pleaded not guilty to all four counts. That case has been on hold as the Supreme Court weighed Trump’s claims of presidential immunity in the matter. 

Fulton County: An Atlanta-based grand jury in August 2023, indicted Trump and 18 others on state charges stemming from their alleged efforts to overturn the former president’s 2020 electoral defeat. On March 13, 2024, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee dismissed six of the 41 counts from the indictment, including three that applied to Trump. The partial dismissal does not mean that the entire indictment has been dismissed. McAfee’s partial dismissal left most of the sprawling racketeering indictment intact. On June 5, a Georgia appeals court indefinitely paused the case until a panel of judges rules on whether Willis should be disqualified. 

Former President Donald Trump was asked about his actions and inactions on January 6, 2021, when rioters attacked the US Capitol.

At first, Trump tried to deflect the question by pointing to other areas where he wanted to attack Biden.

When CNN’s Jake Tapper pushed him again to answer about voters concern about democracy and constitution following January 6, Trump said he had offered “10,000 soldiers or National Guard” ahead of his speech that day, and said he was turned down.

Biden’s response: The president pointed out that Trump encouraged the people to go to the Capitol Hill, and sat in the Oval Office for three hours “watching, being begged by his vice president and a number of his colleagues on the Republican side as well to do something, to call for a stop, to end it. Instead, he talked about these people being great patriots of America. In fact, he says he’ll now forgive them for what they have done.”

Former President Donald Trump did not directly answer if he would support an independent Palestinian state to end the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Former President Donald Trump during a CNN Presidential debate in Atlanta on June 27.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that Americans are “living right now in a rat’s nest” due to rising crime in the country which he associated with more immigrants entering.

Trump blamed Biden and what he called the “Biden migrant crime” for the issue.

“They’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen before,” the former president said.

He mentioned the death of twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, who was found dead in a creek earlier this month. Two undocumented men from Venezuela are accused of killing the girl, and both are facing charges of capital murder in her death, according to the Houston Police Department. Both are being held on a $10 million bond this week, court records show.

Trump said Thursday that he recently met with Nungaray’s family.

Some context: Trump is repeating prior claims that the US is being “overrun” by a “new form” of crime, but data suggests that in 2023 the US was at or around its lowest violent crime rate in more than 50 years amid a sharp decline in homicides.

There were cases of undocumented people committing crimes during Trump’s own presidency. And despite some recent cases in which undocumented people are accused of serious offenses, research has found no connection between immigration and crime — and sometimes that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than people born in the US.

Former President Donald Trump brought up Hunter Biden for the first time during Thursday night’s debate — drawing a strong reaction from the president.

The mention came during a back-and-forth between Biden and Trump about whether Trump reportedly called veterans “suckers and losers” while touring a cemetery in France during his time as president.

Trump denied saying those remarks before evoking the name of Biden’s son in a roundabout way, mentioning a laptop that the younger Biden left at a computer repair shop.

“That came from his son, Hunter,” Trump said, before demanding an apology from Biden for bringing up the “suckers and losers” remarks.

Biden responded that he didn’t have to apologize to Trump for anything.

President Joe Biden pauses while answering a question during the CNN Presidential Debate on Thursday.

President Joe Biden has appeared to struggle with his voice at multiple points during the start of Thursday evening’s CNN presidential debate. 

Biden cleared his throat or coughed multiple times, a condition that his doctor has previously stated is caused by acid reflux.

Biden experiences “occasional symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux, primarily having to clear his throat more often,” Dr. Kevin O’Connor, the president’s physician, said in a memo following his February physical. 

Those symptoms, O’Connor wrote “are typically exacerbated shortly after meals.” The president takes Pepcid in the morning and Nexium in the evening for “acid control,” O’Connor added. 

Biden has also struggled with a stutter, something he has addressed openly and has had a profound effect on him. 

Biden said at a CNN town hall in February 2020 that he “still occasionally, when I find myself really tired,” catches himself stuttering.

“It has nothing to do with your intelligence quotient. It has nothing to do with your intellectual makeup,” Biden said at the time. He said he thinks “part of it’s confidence” and that he has to “think in terms of not rushing.”

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A smoke plume rises during Israeli bombardment in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on May 14 amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The war between Israel and Hamas has been going on since October 7, 2023, when the Islamist militant group killed more than 1,200 people and took some 250 others hostage. In response, Israel launched its war in Gaza to recover the hostages, destroy Hamas’ ability to govern there and ensure another attack could not be launched from the Palestinian territory. 

Israel has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians in the strip since, according to the health authorities in Gaza. The United Nations and multiple other humanitarian organizations have sounded the alarm about widespread malnutrition, hunger and risk of famine, lack of aid and medical supplies, collapse of health care system and mass displacement of millions of civilians.  

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims to have killed more than 14,000 Hamas fighters. CNN cannot independently verify that figure. However, Hamas is not destroyed yet, and not all hostages have been recovered. Netanyahu said over the weekend that the “intense phase of the war with Hamas (in Gaza) is about to end,” and that the military’s focus could then shift to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where fighting with the Iran-backed group Hezbollah has intensified in recent weeks. Netanyahu, however, vowed that Israel would continue operating in Gaza until the militant group Hamas was eliminated.  

The war has sparked anger across the streets of Israel, with tens of thousands joining protests over a hostage deal, among other issues.  

What Biden has done: The Biden administration has consistently offered its full-throated support to Israel and its right to defend itself. Multiple US officials and leaders, including President Joe Biden, have traveled to Israel in a show of solidarity, discuss defense and security needs, and push a deal on ceasefire and hostage release. In May, Biden laid out a three-phase Israeli proposal that would pair a release of hostages with a “full and complete ceasefire,” a plan he said presented the best hope to bring peace to Gaza. Netanyahu however has said that the conditions for ending the country’s war in Gaza “have not changed,” raising questions over the peace proposal laid out by Biden. 

Trump’s stance: Former President Trump has not specified how he would approach the war if reelected and how his policies would differ from Biden’s. He only offers vague commentary while criticizing Biden and arguing the October 7 attack would not have happened if he were president. He has also made several public comments critical of Netanyahu. He criticized the prime minister and Israeli intelligence services for being caught unprepared by the attack. In an April interview, he said Israel needs to “finish what they started” and “get it over with fast,” as he continued arguing Israel was “losing the PR war” because of the visuals coming out of Gaza. 

President Joe Biden slammed former President Donald Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming that his predecessor gave Americans the dangerous advice to inject bleach.

“The pandemic was so badly handled,” Biden said. “Many people were dying. All he said was, ‘It’s not that serious, just inject a little bleach in your arm.’” 

Facts First: Biden’s claim is misleading, since Trump never portrayed his ill-informed and widely denounced musings as actual advice to Americans. Rather, he was talking about the possibility of scientists conducting tests. During a news briefing in April 2020, Trump expressed interest in scientists exploring the possibility of whether Covid-19 could be treated using disinfectants inside people’s bodies, “by injection inside or almost a cleaning.” Trump’s comments were slammed by medical experts as highly dangerous, and they prompted urgent warnings from public health authorities and companies that sell household disinfectants. But he never actually said he was suggesting citizens use such products. 

Trump made the remarks after Bill Bryan, the acting undersecretary of science and technology for the Department of Homeland Security, outlined tests in which he said sunlight or disinfectants such as bleach and isopropyl alcohol quickly killed the coronavirus on surfaces and in saliva. 

When Trump jumped shortly afterward to the dangerous idea of injecting disinfectants inside people’s bodies, he was talking about experts somehow testing that idea. He said: “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. So we’ll see.” 

President Joe Biden cited during the debate a 2020 story from The Atlantic, which reported that former President Donald Trump had privately denigrated fallen US service members, calling them “losers” and “suckers.”

Biden said he was at a World War I cemetery, where Trump stood with “his four-star general and he told him, ‘I don’t want to go in there because they’re a bunch of losers and suckers.’”

Referring to his son Beau Biden, an Iraq War veteran who died of brain cancer, Biden said, “My son was not a loser, was not a sucker. You’re the sucker, you’re the loser,” pointing at Trump.

Trump denied that he made those remarks at the time. And he reiterated that denial on Thursday.

The former president said Biden made up the quote and should apologize to him.

Biden, in turn, dismissed the idea of apologizing “for anything along the line.”

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President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump began the debate talking about the economy. The US is the world’s largest economy, and as such has an outsized impact on the entire world.

At the moment, the American economy is on solid footing. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic output, grew a strong 3.1% in 2023 before slowing in the first three months of 2024. The unemployment rate is at a low 4%. New applications for unemployment benefits have trended up in recent weeks, but they are still around pre-pandemic levels.

Meanwhile, consumer spending, which accounts for about two thirds of the US economy, has cooled in recent months, but American shoppers are still spending at a healthy pace.

In fact, the International Monetary Fund revised up its estimate for global growth because US economic growth has been so strong.

The biggest headwinds for the economy right now are still-high inflation, which remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. The Consumer Price Index, a closely watched inflation gauge, is currently at an annual rate of 3.3%. Interest rates, which the Fed raised aggressively to combat inflation starting in March 2022, are currently perched at a 23-year high. Fed officials recently signaled that they plan on cutting rates only once this year. Those two economic hurdles are weighing on Americans.

Ukrainian soldiers with the 57th Motorized Brigade operate at an artillery position on June 9 near Vovchansk, Kharkiv Region, Ukraine.

It’s been more than two years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

Earlier in June, Russian President Vladimir Putin restated the Kremlin’s own peace plan, which calls for Ukrainian troops to withdraw from four southern and eastern regions of Ukrainian territory that Moscow said it would annex in violation of international law. It also demanded Kyiv abandon its bid to join NATO. 

While Russian forces have made modest gains in two of the regions – Donetsk and Luhansk – in recent months, they are far from occupying all four, which include Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. 

The Biden administration has steadily supported Ukraine in its defense. Most recently, the US announced a new $400 million military aid package to Ukraine. 

A two-day June summit in Switzerland dedicated to forging a path forward to end the war concluded with key powers spurning a joint communique agreed to by more than 80 other countries and international organizations. However, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates — all of whom have important trading relationships with Russia as members of the BRICS economic group — attended the meeting but did not agree to sign the joint statement. 

What Trump says: As president, Donald Trump had described NATO as “obsolete” and has aligned himself with Putin, who wants to weaken the alliance. Trump has long praised Putin and went as far as to side with the Russian leader over the US intelligence community over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has also previously pledged to end the war in Ukraine, though he’s offered no details on how he would do so. “Shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” Trump said at a New Hampshire campaign event last year, adding in another speech that it would take him “no longer than one day” to settle the war if elected. 

CNN’s Haley Britzky contributed reporting to this post.

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President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are seen during a CNN Presidential debate in Atlanta on June 27.

When asked why voters should trust him on the border crisis, President Joe Biden said his administration worked very hard to get a bipartisan border agreement with Congress and called out Trump’s actions on immigration during his presidency.

Trump fired back, claiming that toward the end of his administration, the country had the “safest border in history in that final couple of months.” He also repeated claims that the “the largest number of terrorists” from all over the world are “coming into our country right now.”

In the first several months of his term, Biden’s immigration policy focused on reversing Trump-era rules and promises. Almost immediately upon taking office, Biden signed executive orders undoing Trump’s expansion of immigration enforcement, reversing Trump’s restrictions on US entry for passport holders from seven Muslim-majority countries and halting construction of the border wall. 

His policies have shown how Biden attempts to walk a line — the president has sought to lower the number of migrant crossings while promising some protections for undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States for years and established families and careers. Amid large migrant crossings and some bipartisan criticism over his immigration policies, the president has taken steps that have angered some immigration-rights activists. 

In early June, Biden invoked an authority that bars migrants who cross the US-Mexico border illegally from seeking asylum once a daily threshold is met, a significant attempt by the president to address head on one of his biggest political vulnerabilities. The executive action came after a bipartisan border measure failed earlier this year. Later this month, Biden announced another executive action allowing certain undocumented spouses and children of US citizens to apply for lawful permanent residency without leaving the country. 

CNN’s Michael Williams, Way Mullery, Kenneth Uzquiano and Abby Turner contributed reporting to this post. 

Most recent polls show that immigration is a key issue for voters this election. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric on immigrants remains very different.  

Here’s what you need to know: 

President Joe Biden debates on June 27 in Atlanta.

President Joe Biden batted down his opponent’s claims that Roe v. Wade allowed doctors to kill babies “in the ninth month” during the presidential debate on Thursday.

Trump suggested that under Roe, doctors were allowed to “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, and kill the baby.”

The president has made the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — and Trump’s repeated promises to go further in restricting abortion access if he wins in November — a centerpiece of his reelection campaign. During his State of the Union address in March, Biden promised to codify the abortion-related protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade into federal law if he wins a second term, but he acknowledged that would require the cooperation of a Democratic-controlled Congress. He also called for codifying Roe into law when he was running for president in 2020. 

CNN’s Michael Williams, Way Mullery, Kenneth Uzquiano and Abby Turner contributed reporting to this post. 

President Joe Biden said that putting the issue of abortion up to state discretion has “been a terrible thing.”

He went on to warn against states deciding abortion laws.

“The idea that states are able to do this is a little like saying we’re going to turn civil rights back to the states,” Biden said.

The president also mentioned cases of women who are pregnant due to rape. 

“It’s just ridiculous and they can do nothing about it,” Biden said. 

Remember: In some of his most significant and enduring acts as president, Trump appointed three conservative nominees to the Supreme Court, which paved the way for the court’s 2022 decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, which had enshrined the right to an abortion in federal law for nearly half a century. 

The president has made the Supreme Court’s decision — and Trump’s repeated promises to go further in restricting abortion access if he wins in November — a centerpiece of his reelection campaign.

President Donald Trump speaks during the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta on Thursday.

Former President Donald Trump said he will not block abortion medication if he was elected.

He also said he agreed with the recent Supreme Court ruling on the abortion pill.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s approach to regulating the abortion pill mifepristone with a ruling that will continue to allow the pills to be mailed to patients without an in-person doctor’s visit.

Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden debate at CNN's Atlanta studios on June 27.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that the job growth during President Joe Biden’s presidency is all “bounceback” gains after the pandemic lockdowns that temporarily devastated the US economy.

Nearly 22 million jobs were lost under Trump in March and April 2020 when the global economy cratered on account of the pandemic. The US started regaining jobs immediately under Trump — following substantial relief and recovery measures — and added more than 12 million jobs from May 2020 through December 2020.

The recovery continued after Biden took office, with the US reaching and surpassing its pre-pandemic employment totals in June 2022.

The job gains didn’t stop there. Since then, the US has added nearly 6.2 million more jobs in what’s become the fifth-longest period of employment expansion on record.

But the jobs gained were not all “bounceback” positions — people did not all simply return to their former roles.

The pandemic drastically reshaped the employment landscape. For one, a significant portion of the labor force did not return due to early retirements, deaths, long Covid or caregiving responsibilities.

Additionally, because of shifts in consumer spending patterns as well as health-and-safety implications, public-facing industries could not fully reopen or restaff immediately. Some of those workers found jobs in other industries or used the opportunity to start their own business.

When the pandemic was more under control and in-person activities could fully resume, those industries faced worker shortages.

The pandemic recovery included what’s been called the Great Reshuffling, where people – for a variety of reasons – switched jobs or careers.

Abortion rights supporter and anti-abortion activists square off on the day the Supreme Court justices hear oral arguments over the legality of Idaho's Republican-backed, near-total abortion ban in medical-emergency situations, at the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on April 24.

In some of his most significant and enduring acts as president, Donald Trump appointed three conservative nominees to the Supreme Court. The ensuing right-wing supermajority paved the way for the court’s 2022 decision that overturned Roe. V Wade, which had enshrined the right to an abortion in federal law for nearly half a century. 

President Joe Biden has made the court’s decision, and Trump’s past threats to go further in restricting abortion access,  a centerpiece of his reelection campaign. 

During his State of the Union speech, Biden promised to codify the abortion-related protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade into federal law if he wins a second term, but he acknowledged that would require the cooperation of a Democratic-controlled Congress. Read more here about Biden’s campaign promises on the topic.  

On Thursday ahead of the CNN debate, the Supreme Court formally dismissed an appeal over Idaho’s strict abortion ban, blocking enforcement of the state’s law a day after the opinion was inadvertently posted on the court’s website in an astonishing departure from its highly controlled protocols. 

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone. While it allowed a key abortion medication on the market for women, the Biden campaign also used the moment to warn voters that reproductive rights remain under threat from “MAGA attacks” in the country.

Meanwhile, Trump earlier this year said abortion legislation should be left up to the states, saying in April, “My view is now that we have abortion where everyone wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both.” 

Following the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that overturned the federal legal right to an abortion, nearly two dozen states have banned or limited access to the procedure. States where abortion is most limited report higher rates of maternal and infant mortality, as well as greater economic insecurity. 

CNN’s Tierney Sneed and John Fritze contributed reporting to this post. 

President Joe Biden suggested that the economy he inherited from former President Donald Trump was partly responsible for the spike in inflation that occurred under his presidency.

Trump followed up, saying Biden inherited “almost no inflation.”

For reference, inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index was at 1.4% when Biden took office in 2021. By June 2022, it soared to 9%, the highest inflation rate in over 40 years. Currently, inflation is at 3.3%.

Former President Donald Trump called President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country’s life.”

“I was getting out of Afghanistan, but we were getting out with dignity, with strength, with power,” Trump said.

Trump’s remark was prompted by a comment from Biden, who said of his predecessor: “When he was president they were still killing people in Afghanistan. He didn’t do anything about that.”

Remember: The US State Department released a long-awaited Afghanistan After Action Review report in June 2023, which found that both the Trump and Biden administrations’ decisions to pull all US troops from Afghanistan had detrimental consequences, and detailed damning shortcomings by the Biden administration that led to the deadly and chaotic US withdrawal from that country after nearly two decades on the ground.

A CNN investigation last April uncovered new video evidence that undermines two Pentagon probes into the withdrawal, raising serious questions for the Pentagon, which has continued to dismiss mounting evidence that civilians were shot dead.

This post was updated with Biden’s initial comments.

President Joe Biden has been telling voters the economy is booming and has hardly ever been doing better — even though, as he frequently says, there’s still work to be done. But from former President Donald Trump’s vantage point, “the economy is crashing” and is in total disarray, as he said at a recent campaign rally in Wisconsin.

Here’s what’s really going on: 

Latest jobs report: The good news is wages grew. Stronger-than-expected wage gains for May pushed up average hourly earnings to 4.1% over the past year. But unemployment edged up to 4% from 3.9%, the first time in more than two years that the jobless rate is not below 4%. 

Inflation has cooled but Americans remain shaky about economy: Inflation cooled in May, the latest month for which there is data available, with consumer prices rising 3.3% from a year earlier and slowing from April’s 3.4% rate. And it’s down significantly from June 2022, when it hit 9.1%. But US consumer confidence teetered slightly in June as Americans grew a little warier about the future, new data released Tuesday showed. The Conference Board’s latest consumer confidence index dipped to 100.4 in June from a downwardly revised level of 101.3 in May. 

Relief could come later this year as the May data has led investors to raise their bets that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates this year. The Fed at its June policy meeting penciled in one cut this year and four in 2025. 

People are racking up debt: One reason consumer spending has held up so well in the face of higher-than-desirable inflation combined with the highest interest rates in over two decades is that consumers aren’t necessarily spending within their means. The savings many accumulated during the pandemic have all but evaporated, leading to a lot more credit card purchases that aren’t being paid back on time. That, combined with the gradually cooling labor market — which is reducing workers’ leverage — is causing some households to accumulate more debt and fall into serious delinquency, meaning 90 plus days late on a payment. New York Fed data for the first quarter of the year showed the percentage of credit card balances in serious delinquency climbed to its highest level since 2012. 

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump did not shake hands when they entered the debate stage.

The two candidates last met at a debate in 2020, where they also did not shake hands due to Covid-19 protocols.

Before the debate, two longtime Biden aides said they expected Biden would “probably not” extend his hand, with one saying: “He didn’t have to in 2020, why change that now?” 

Watch the moment:

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CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are now outlining the rules for tonight’s debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Click here to read the full rules rundown.

The first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, hosted by CNN, has started. Incumbent President Joe Biden is going head-to-head with former President Donald Trump.

Biden and Trump are expected to address an array of issues.

The debate is the earliest such event in US history. Televised presidential debates between general election candidates have always started in September or early October, going back to the first one between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960.

Our reporters are watching and providing live updates on key moments as well as fact checks.

In a historic rematch, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump return to the stage for the first debate between an incumbent and a former president.

We’re tracking how much speaking time each candidate gets during the first presidential debate of the cycle, hosted by CNN in Atlanta.

Data will be updated every 5 seconds.

Follow along live here.

Síguelo en español aquí.

Biden aides have been paying attention to Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory that the president will be taking some kind of performance enhancement for tonight’s debate — and now they’re hoping to raise some money off it. 

Ahead of the debate, the Biden campaign started selling cans of water online for $4.60—for the 46th president — covered in jokes including what’s meant to look like a handwritten “Dark Brandon’s secret sauce” and a “ZERO MALARKEY” calorie count.  

The Biden campaign announced the item with a tweet from Biden’s account reading “I don’t know what they’ve got in these performance enhancers, but I’m feeling pretty jacked up. Try it yourselves, folks. See you in a bit.”

Trump made an unfounded accusation that Biden would be getting a shot to change his energy levels at a rally over the weekend.

In the hours ahead of the debate, Donald Trump Jr. kept up the claims, insisting that Biden’s refusal to take a drug test was itself an admission that the accusation was justified: “If he wasn’t jacked up on drugs, why wouldn’t he take such an easy test?”

The jockeying to be Donald Trump’s vice president will be on full display tonight, as his surrogates take to the spin room following the debate.

All of Trump’s potential vice presidential picks are planning to flood the airwaves in defense of the former president.

Sens. Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance as well as North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum — who CNN recently reported has emerged at the top of Trump’s list — will be in attendance.

Dr. Ben Carson, Sen. Tim Scott, and Reps. Elisa Stefanik and Byron Donalds, all of whom have done some version of vetting for the job will also be in the room.

Trump has said that he has chosen his vice president, but has not shared this with anyone close to him. Sources said he was likely to announce his choice before the convention next month.

Less than five months out from Election Day, the Biden campaign acknowledges that it still has a stubborn problem to fix: Too many Americans are still tuned out of the political news cycle.

In the lead-up to tonight’s historic debate, advisers to the president acknowledged that many voters – including significant swaths of the persuadable voters who will be key to deciding the election – are not paying attention to the election or the news.

Biden’s team is keenly aware that as a result, the impression many Americans have of Biden is shaped by the 10-, 15-, and 30-second clips of him circulating on YouTube, TikTok and other social media platforms, one adviser told CNN. And many of those snippets, of course, feature the president in an unflattering light, as former President Donald Trump has sought to cast Biden as senile and physically and mentally not up for the job. 

Tonight is the campaign’s single best opportunity yet, this adviser said, to shatter those impressions, particularly with voters who have never tuned in to watch a full speech or event featuring the president. 

The first debate of the cycle has a history of tripping up incumbent presidents. It’s a fate that Joe Biden is trying to avoid by returning to his roots and buckling down in his preparation to take the stage with former President Donald Trump on Thursday night, a Biden biographer said.

Biden and his team of advisers have been at Camp David for the last several days preparing for the debate. The preparations evolved from informal discussions about topics, questions and potential responses and culminated in more formal 90-minute mock debates.

“Some of this has to do with the stutter. He would go back, he would put the breath marks in — the tick marks — for where he was going to take a breath in his speech,” Osnos said.

Though participating in a debate is not the same as giving a speech, “the same habits really hold,” he said.

The biographer said the exception to presidents giving a less-than-strong performance on first debates was Bill Clinton, who also practiced and conducted mock debates beforehand.

Supporters of President Joe Biden react outside the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, ahead of a presidential debate, in Atlanta on Thursday.

President Joe Biden had the best fundraising hour of his entire campaign from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday, a Biden campaign official tells CNN. The campaign did not immediately provide a dollar figure.

It comes as the campaign has been blitzing supporters with email and text fundraising appeals, seeking to bolster the war chest as the fundraising advantage narrows. 

The past hour broke a record that was set just before – in the 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. hour – signaling that Thursday will be a big coup for Biden’s coffers. Before that, the campaign hauled in record cash during the president’s State of the Union address.

The stage is set ahead of the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta on June 27.

President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, are set to make history on CNN as they meet for their first 2024 debate in just an hour’s time

Here are some key things to watch for:

What Trump focuses on: Trump devotes huge shares of his public comments to personal grievances — rehashing long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election, recasting insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol as patriots, and lambasting the criminal charges he faces as political hit jobs.

That litany of grievances is unlikely to convince a broader audience of voters who may consider backing him that he is focused on their interests.

That’s why Trump’s advisers and allies have urged the former president to focus on issues like the economy, crime and inflation.

How Biden answers the age question: The 81-year-old is the oldest US president — and any misstep, meandering statement or lost thought on the debate stage will be heavily scrutinized or even distorted by allies of Trump, 78.

What Trump says about abortion: Right-wingers who celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade are now frustrated by Trump’s refusal to push for a national abortion ban. The left is certain that, should he be elected, Trump would embrace the most conservative possible position.

What Trump says during the debate will be less interesting for its content than to whom he seems to be appealing.

Scrutiny over inflation: Though inflation has slowed from its 2022 peak, the cumulative effect of higher prices has long been a drag on Biden’s approval rating.

Biden, though, has a readily available counter to critics: Experts have said many of Trump’s proposals — including tariffs, immigration limits and measures to lower interest rates — would worsen inflation.

Read the full story to see the complete list of things to watch for in tonight’s debate. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during an interview in the spin room before a presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in Atlanta on Thursday.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom – whom many suspected would jump into the Democratic race last year – said voters who are dissatisfied with the choice of Donald Trump and Joe Biden should focus on ideas not age. 

Newsom argued young voters want a candidate who will fight against climate change, invest in “low carbon green growth,” protect reproductive rights and fight for common sense gun laws. 

Newsom dismissed a question from another reporter on if he’d be ready to jump into the race if Biden were to step out, calling it “nonsensical speculation.”

“This is the President of the United States running for reelection. He’s our guy and that’s part of the diversion tactic of the right, to continue to try to muddy the waters,” Newsom said. “It’s just like the absurdity of who’s going to get an injection shot.”

The debate stage ahead of the CNN Presidential Debate on Wednesday, June 26 in Atlanta.

Tonight’s CNN debate will be hosted by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash in Atlanta and will mark the first in-person showdown of the 2024 campaign between President Joe Biden and his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.

The event begins at 9 p.m. ET in the network’s studios in Atlanta. Both candidates agreed to accept the rules and format of the debate, as outlined in letters sent to the campaigns by the network in May.

The 90-minute debate will include two commercial breaks, according to the network, and campaign staff may not interact with their candidate during that time.

Here are more details about the rules for tonight’s debate:

The debate stage ahead of the CNN Presidential Debate in Atlanta on June 26.

Tonight’s CNN debate will be hosted by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash in Atlanta and will mark the first in-person showdown of the 2024 campaign between President Joe Biden and his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.

Both candidates accepted the network’s invitation and agreed to accept the rules and format of the debate, as outlined in letters sent to the campaigns by the network in May.

The 90-minute debate will include two commercial breaks, according to the network, and campaign staff may not interact with their candidate during that time.

Here are more details about the rules for tonight’s debate:

Former President Donald Trump and many on his team believe that the performance aspect of the debate is as important as the substance. 

Trump’s team on the ground in Atlanta has spent the last 24 hours hyper-focused on the visuals, optics and logistics around the debate.

Trump himself cares deeply about optics and his team wants to make sure everything, down to the minutia of the number of steps in the walk to the podiums, how the audio sounds from each podium location and where the cameras will be, is accounted for. 

One source said the height of the podiums and how they were angled was even taken into consideration. Trump will see the layout for himself tonight when he does a candidate walk-through, according to sources familiar with his planning.

Trump’s team has aimed to portray him as the stronger candidate, and that includes physically. While on the campaign trail, Trump often comments both publicly and privately about set-ups, the quality of the microphones and how he looks on stage. 

Trump has routinely complained about the format of the debate, despite the fact that his team agreed to the rules when they accepted CNN’s invitation.

Much of this designed to give him an escape route if he doesn’t perform as his campaign hopes on Thursday night, though many in Trump’s orbit have come to believe the lack of audience and muted mics could actually help Trump.

President Joe Biden’s campaign is launching a new paid media blitz Thursday night to coincide with the night’s presidential debate, CNN has learned.

A trio of ads are set to air in battleground states around the historic face-off between Biden and Donald Trump as the campaign hopes to reach the many Americans who are expected to tune in. 

The first ad, running before the debate, ties Trump to restrictive abortion bans that have cropped up across the country and features a Texas woman who nearly died after being denied medical care after suffering a miscarriage.

The second ad features Michigan Sheriff Chris Swanson slamming Trump for refusing to condemn the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The third, to air after the match-up, highlights the former president’s legal woes and attacks his legislative record. 

The ads are part of a larger $50 million June paid media buy. 

The selection of these three particular ads by the Biden campaign helps crystalize the three biggest arguments it wants the president to deliver on the debate stage, as CNN has reported: the economy, reproductive rights and threats to democracy. 

CNN’s editorial policy prohibits the broadcast of campaign ads during the debate — but networks airing the debate were provided with non-binding editorial guidance recommending they follow suit, though they are not obligated to do so.

In preparations over the past week at Camp David for tonight’s debate, President Joe Biden and his aides have been going over the full suite of domestic and foreign policy issues that Biden and Donald Trump may be asked to discuss. But policy issues aside, the Biden team is also bracing for personal insults.

Debate preparations have included getting Biden ready to respond to ridicule from Trump directed not only at the president himself, but his family, too, a Biden adviser tells CNN.

This offers yet another window into the team’s broader strategy of trying to be ready for anything and everything that the famously unpredictable former president might throw Biden’s way.

They have prepared for multiple versions of the Republican: the bombastic one that showed up to debate in 2020 and talked over Biden and lobbed personal insults, or a more restrained version that seems to recognize the appeal of a more presidential bearing.

If it’s the restrained version that appears, Biden’s team hopes well-practiced attacks and constant rebuttals can help provoke him into the bombast that they believe will turn many voters off.

Biden’s debate camp: The extensive preparation at Camp David has left Biden open to mockery from Trump, who accused Biden of retreating to a “log cabin to study,” but it matches efforts undertaken by previous presidents.

Part of the goal is to reorient the president to the feel of standing for 90 minutes on stage with a rival, constrained by debate rules that don’t normally apply to a commander-in-chief.

That includes an inability to consult note cards, which Biden often relies upon, and an agreed-upon mandate that microphones will be muted when its not his time to speak.

Banners hang outside of CNN’s Atlanta headquarters ahead of CNN’s Presidential Debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on Monday, June 24.

Members of Congress from across the political spectrum told CNN they would be tuning in for tonight’s presidential debate, with some juggling various watch parties and others planning to relax and keep track of it from home.

“Oh, hell yeah, I’m watching the debate. I might even live-tweet it,” said GOP Rep. Nancy Mace.

“I’ll be watching with a couple of other members,” Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee said, noting it was “just a small group of folks” getting together.

House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar said he’ll tune in with some colleagues.

During his weekly news conference, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters he’s going to stop by the Congressional Black Caucus’ watch party.

However, other members were planning on a more low-key night.

Former Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters he plans to watch alone at his apartment and GOP Rep. Troy Nehls, decked out in his gold Donald Trump shoes and his third Trump tie this week, said he wanted to sit back and “absorb” the debate without “a whole lot of commentary.”

One GOP member, Rep. Dusty Johnson admitted that he’s unsure if he’ll watch tonight.

“I don’t know, I kind of hate debates,” he said. “I never really watch political debates. I know I’m supposed to, but there’s a lot of work to do, a lot of reading to be done. I imagine you guys will do a good job of covering it and tell me what the important sound bites were.”

Rhetoric & Writing Studies Major, Adamary Garcia studies inside of the Perry-Castaneda Library at the University of Texas at Austin on February 22 in Austin, Texas.

Former President Donald Trump announced plans in a September 2023 campaign video to close the Department of Education and send “all education and education work and needs back to the states.”

The former president has also promised to “put parents back in charge and give them the final say” in education. In a January 2023 campaign video, the former president said he would give funding preferences and “favorable treatment” to schools that allow parents to elect principals, abolish teacher tenure for K-12 teachers, use merit pay to incentivize quality teaching and cut the number of school administrators, such as those overseeing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Trump also said in that campaign video that he would cut funding for schools that teach critical race theory and gender ideology.

The former president said he would charge the Department of Justice and the Department of Education with investigating civil rights violations of race-based discrimination in schools while also removing “Marxists” from the Department of Education.

Biden, on the other hand, has criticized Republican-led drives to ban certain books from public schools.

In the same speech, Biden also called for expanded pre-kindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds, along with raises for teachers in public schools. He said he wants to continue making college more affordable by expanding access to Pell grants for working-class families, renewing a 2020 promise he made to double the grants’ value.

Read more about Biden and Trump’s campaign promises.

First lady Jill Biden speaks at a campaign stop with campaign volunteers at the Virginia Beach Democratic Coordinated Campaign Office on Thursday, June 27 in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

First lady Jill Biden told a group of top supporters Thursday evening that her husband is “ready to go” and “prepared” for the presidential debate tonight. 

Biden urged the group to “keep working” heading into the November election, echoing comments she made at a field office earlier Thursday in Virginia Beach.

Rep. Byron Donalds is interviewed at a "Congress, cognac and cigars" Republican event on Wednesday, June 26, in Fairburn, Georgia.

On the debate stage tonight, former President Donald Trump is going to “be direct” and “present leadership,” Rep. Byron Donalds, a potential pick to be Trump’s running mate, said.

The Republican representative said Trump is going to “demonstrate that mantle of leadership” to voters and tell Americans what his agenda means to them “on an individual basis.”

He said Trump will look to show how the Biden administration’s policies stand in opposition to what the former president would do in a second term.

Trying to get ahead of Joe Biden’s expected attacks against Trump, Donalds said the president will be the one to bring up Trump’s legal troubles and the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol “because he has nothing else to talk about.”

Former President Donald Trump arrives in Atlanta for the CNN Presidential Debate with President Joe Biden on Thursday, June 27.

Former President Donald Trump was not accompanied by former first lady Melania Trump as he exited his plane at the Atlanta airport ahead of CNN’s presidential debate. 

He briefly waved to supporters gathered on the tarmac before getting in his car. 

Top Trump campaign officials Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita, Steven Cheung, Jason Miller, Margo Martin, James Blair and others were seen exiting the plane. 

Watch the moment:

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Shipping containers from China and other Asian countries are unloaded at the Port of Los Angeles on September 14, 2019.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump don’t agree on a lot, but they both have embraced tariffs as part of their trade policy. 

Tariffs raise the price of imported goods for American businesses. But they can also help protect some domestic manufacturers and — despite the cost — help score political points in swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. 

Trump’s tariff policy: While in office, Trump put new tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, washing machines and roughly $300 billion of Chinese-made goods. 

If he returns to the White House, Trump plans to add to those tariffs by enacting a duty of at least 10% on all imports from all countries, a tariff upward of 60% on all Chinese imports and a 100% tariff on all cars made outside the US.

Biden’s tariff policy: Biden has kept most of Trump’s tariffs in place, including on Chinese-made goods like shoes, baseball caps and luggage. 

In May, Biden announced that he would increase tariffs on $18 billion in Chinese imports across a handful of sectors deemed strategic to national security, including electric vehicles, battery components, legacy semiconductors, steel and aluminum. The new tariff rates will take effect over the next two years.

Following Thursday night’s presidential debate, one member of the Trump family will be in the spin room. But she won’t be there to show support for Donald Trump. Rather, she’ll be there as a surrogate for President Joe Biden.

Mary Trump, the former president’s estranged niece, will be one of multiple people in the debate spin room advocating for Biden, according to the campaign.

The show of support by a member of Trump’s family immediately after one of the most highly anticipated political events of the 2024 cycle is a part of the Biden campaign’s broader effort to argue that people who know Trump best agree that the ex-president is simply unfit to be president.

In a statement shared by the Biden campaign before the debate, Mary Trump said that she had witnessed her uncle’s “narcissism and cruelty” her entire life, and that “his sense of inferiority has always driven his jealousy and his pathological need to dominate others” – a fact that she insisted the American people must learn. 

 Earlier Thursday, the Biden campaign released a social media video blasting Trump as “unfit” for office, featuring comments from former Trump administration officials.

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, former Vice President Mike Pence, former White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah Griffin, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and former National Security Adviser John Bolton — all of whom worked in the Trump administration and have been outspoken in warning about the threat of a second Trump term – are shown in the video.

Former President Donald Trump’s plane has landed in Atlanta for CNN’s presidential debate.  

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The cost of childcare and other critical economic issues are among topics that are top of mind for Black voters ahead of CNN’s debate, according to a policy and advocacy organization that endorsed President Joe Biden.

Care in Action’s associated political operation, Care in Action PAC endorsed the Biden-Harris bid for a second term last June.

But during a Zoom briefing on the economic anxieties around care and housing for Black voters co-hosted by the group ahead of the highly anticipated debate between Biden and former President Donald Trump, Black voters on the call gave a more lukewarm endorsement. 

The briefing was moderated by John Taylor, the head of the Black Male Initiative Fund, as well as Hillary Holley, the executive director of Care in Action.

Evan Hardin, 23, is a Georgia-based “cost-burdened” father and organizer with the Black Male Initiative and said he too will vote for Biden, but didn’t give an affirmative reason for that vote when asked.

He described himself instead as being “at the point where we have to pick our opposition,” framing any other vote as “diametrically ideologically opposed to me and my existence.”

CNN spoke to some Republican female voters in Arizona. Here’s what they said about the upcoming debate:

Georgia Goodwin: The Tucson Republican voter wants tonight’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump to not be a “circus.” She hopes that Trump will discuss his policy positions but knows Trump “will be Trump.”

“He’s a man, who even though he’s got a lot of bluster, stands true to his word,” said Goodwin, who mentioned crime as one of the issues motivating her to vote in November for the former president.

She questioned President Joe Biden’s mental fitness and said that “people want to brush it off as just his age. His age has nothing to do with it.” 

Bonnie Jakimowich, and her daughter Tamara Varga, who are both backing Trump for reelection, said they hope Trump is on “his best behavior.” 

“I hope Trump doesn’t take the bait on pushing [Biden’s] buttons. So, I hope he will remain professional. And he can throw a few jokes in once in a while, but stay calm and don’t take the bait,” the 76-year-old mother said.

Varga, 47, said she “would be afraid” for another four years under Biden, citing the illegal crossings of migrants at the US-Mexico border.

CNN spoke to some female voters in Arizona ahead of the presidential debate. Here’s what they are expecting to see during the debate.

Sarah Moorhead: A Joe Biden supporter from Mesa, she is confident that Biden will “do well” in tonight’s debate against Donald Trump and expects the president to show his knowledge of world and domestic affairs.

Julia Salazar: The registered independent said she left the Republican Party because of Donald Trump. The Gilbert resident believes Biden is “sharp on the issues.” 

Erlinda Bates: The Latina Democratic voter from Phoenix supporting Biden is bracing for the unexpected on the debate stage, but does not view the president’s age as a detriment in the election.

Bates argued that Biden, 81, has more experience, maturity, and knowledge of how the government works. Being roughly the same age as the president, Bates said, “the more you know, the better you can handle emergencies.”

Kathleen Lucas: The 47-year-old Democratic voter from Phoenix feels that politicians over 60 should be retired. Lucas, who’s undecided on the presidential election, said the debate may help make her decision of who to vote for, but she isn’t pleased with either Biden or Trump.

CNN spoke to five conservative-leaning male voters in their early twenties about what they’re hoping to see from President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in tonight’s historic debate.

Michael Vaden: “I really just want a civil debate,” said the 21-year-old who lives in Atlanta and attends Georgia Institute of Technology. He identifies as a middle-of-the-road voter who leans more conservative.

Vaden said he’s “not really” satisfied with the choices for president in 2024, and would prefer “if we had some other golden option come through like a, someone who’s stately, someone who’s well-spoken, someone who’s not rude, like, Abraham Lincoln-type.”

Jake Kennedy: “Everybody’s been anticipating this for a while,” said the 22-year-old Georgia Tech student from Winder, Georgia. “A lot of voters are going to be swinging on this debate tonight. So, I think it’s gonna be a huge impact and they’ll probably be swaying a good bit of voters.”

He said that he leans “a little bit more far right” and expressed dissatisfaction with Biden on foreign policy, an issue that is top of his mind.

Donovan Dykstra: The 21-year-old from Augusta, Georgia, says he supports Trump and likes the way the former president speaks. “He’s also a good businessman,” the Georgia Tech student said. Tonight, he says he wants to “hear a good civil conversation” and see what both candidates have to say. Also, he said he wants to see if Biden “has a good answer back” to Trump. “If he can spit out anything intellectual? I’d be pretty shocked, honestly,” Dykstra said of Biden.

Noah Sells: The 22-year-old who lives in Carl, Georgia, does not attend college. He said he is looking to see a candidate who can make it easier to buy property in America. 

Dhruva Kothari: The Georgia Tech student from Annapolis, Maryland, considers himself “a lot less conservative” than his peers while he still leans right. He says wants to see “someone who can prove that one: They can stay in good health to lead our country for the next four years. Two: Someone who can see the common person. I think a lot of the time one group gets isolated, but the common man gets left behind.” 

Leaders attend the opening high-level session of the 2023 NATO Summit on July 11, 2023, in Vilnius, Lithuania.

President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have espoused vastly different viewpoints about America’s role on the world stage, with Biden focused on bolstering alliances with countries in Europe and Trump preaching a more isolationist policy stance, especially on Ukraine.

Biden has said he will continue to repair relationships that have faltered under Trump’s control — and uphold American commitments to NATO and Ukraine.

Trump, meanwhile, has said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO-member countries who don’t fulfill certain funding obligations.

In some of his first actions as president, Biden worked to return the United States to the presence it held on the world stage before Trump became president.

As president, Trump denigrated alliances like NATO and withdrew the United States from crucial international agreements, including the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords.

The former president has also previously pledged to end the war in Ukraine, though he’s offered no details on how he would do so.

In addition, Trump has said he would restore his “wonderful” travel ban on individuals from several majority-Muslim countries to “keep radical Islamic terrorists out of our country” after Biden overturned the ban in 2021.

Read more about Biden and Trump’s stances.

The Biden campaign is planning to air an abortion-focused ad during one of the commercials breaks in CNN’s presidential debate tonight, a campaign official told CNN.

The push comes as President Joe Biden is looking to use the debate to draw a contrast with former President Donald Trump on the issue of reproductive rights. 

Democrats believe abortion rights can prove galvanizing for voters in November and have worked relentlessly to tie new restrictions on the procedure to Trump, accusing him of fomenting “cruelty and chaos” following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Biden’s campaign ads have often included personal testimonials from women impacted by state abortions bans. Following the Supreme Court’s dismissal of an appeal over Idaho’s strict abortion ban on Thursday, the campaign released a new TV spot featuring an Idaho obstetrician who left her state out of fear of potential criminal charges for treating patients with the restriction in place.

“These laws are truly barbaric. They are putting us back decades, if not centuries,” Dr. Lauren Miller says in the ad. “Donald Trump did this. He put women’s lives in danger.”   

Supporters of former President Donald Trump await his arrival at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta for the CNN Presidential Debate with President Joe Biden on Thursday.

Former President Donald Trump is on his way to Atlanta for tonight’s debate. He is joined by several of his top campaign advisers, including Chris LaCivita, Susie Wiles and Jason Miller.

Miller has run point in Trump’s debate preparations, including arranging and sitting in on policy sessions and briefing the former president on logistics, multiple sources told CNN. Miller has reviewed hours of past debates of President Joe Biden, including the face-offs with Trump in 2020, as well as previous performances.

Despite the Trump team’s efforts to downplay his preparations for tonight’s debate, senior advisers insist he will be ready to show up. Much of Trump’s preparation for the debate has come in the form of conversations with close advisers, as well as former administration officials and issue specialists, many of whom have provided talking points to the former president. Trump has also reached out to allies for opinions on the debate and what they think the focus will be.

Many of Trump’s potential vice presidential picks are already on the ground in Atlanta, doing media interviews and holding events. These same potential candidates — including Sens. JD Vance and Tim Scott, and Reps. Byron Donalds and Elise Stefanik — are expected to be in the spin room tonight following the debate, as they are jockeying to join Trump on the ticket.

President Joe Biden greets supporters outside his hotel ahead of the first presidential debate of the 2024 elections at CNN's studios in Atlanta on June 27. 

After a full week of intensive debate preparations at Camp David for President Joe Biden, the hours leading up to tonight’s historic presidential debate have felt a bit like the calm before the storm.

Biden just made an off-the-record stop to greet supporters in Atlanta ahead of the CNN debate, engaging with a crowd that could be heard chanting, “Here we go Biden, here we go,” and clanging cowbells.

Only a few advisers remained with Biden at the presidential retreat earlier today, and the small team did not hold any mock debates Thursday, CNN was told. The president declined to say anything to reporters as he emerged from a week of intensive preparations and made his way to Atlanta a few hours ago.

Asked to describe the general vibe on Air Force One, one Biden adviser who flew with the president simply said: “Feeling good! We’re ready to go.”

That buoyant note of optimism, of course, does not capture the herculean task that now lies ahead for the president. The run-through debates are now over. The team has done everything they can to refine his message, attack lines and vision; they’ve run through every version of Donald Trump that could appear tonight. 

And now, in a few hours, it is entirely on Biden to execute everything that he and his team have practiced over the past week.  

The adviser said Biden’s state of mind over the past week could best be described with these two words: “focused” and “determined.”

CNN’s Sam Fossum contributed reporting to this post.

Patrick Jones, Shasta County supervisor and gun shop owner, displays a Sig Sauer Pistol on February 24 in Redding in Northern Califonia's Shasta County.

In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the most comprehensive gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years.

The law, passed shortly after a White supremacist massacred 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, allocated more than $750 million to help states implement crisis-intervention programs, closed certain loopholes in existing gun-control legislation and required more thorough reviews for people aged 18 to 21 who wanted to buy firearms.

Biden has said he wants to go further.

He made a similar promise while running in 2020 but has not been able to get Congress’ support.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has said he would undo the work that Biden has done related to gun control.

The former president also promised in the speech that the government would not infringe on citizens’ Second Amendment rights and that he would push Congress to pass a concealed carry reciprocity.

Read more about Biden and Trump’s campaign promises.