Trump lied and misled. He still won the debate against Biden. (2024)

Minutes into the event, which was hosted by CNN, viewers were forced to confront their presumptive presidential nominees: a 79-year-old former president who's a convicted felon with a penchant for lying and an 81-year-old current president whose raspy voice and stumbling words did little to convince voters that he could push through a second term.

In the end, facts may not have mattered at all.

"Debates can be lost at any moment, but they can only be won in the first 20 minutes," Evan Siegfried, a former GOP strategist and crisis-communications specialist, told Business Insider. "Unfortunately, Joe Biden lost all chances of winning."

In true Trump form, it didn't take long before he started spewing misleading or false information about his opponent's presidential record and his own.

Trump said the US economy was incredibly strong throughout his term. In reality, the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a recession that caused employment to plummet. Economic growth, even without factoring in the pandemic, has actually been stronger under Biden, the Associated Press reported.

Trump said Biden is weak on border security and has opened the floodgates for immigrants. In reality, Biden has enacted restrictions on asylum applications, and the Migration Policy Institute said he's on track to match the number of deportations carried out by the Trump administration.

Trump also lied about the US's trade deficit with China. "We have the largest deficit with China," he said. The deficit is at its lowest level since 2009, The New York Times said.

Daniel Dale, CNN's fact-checker, said Trump made about 30 false or misleading statements during the debate, while Biden made nine.

But lying on the record has become expected behavior for Trump, and on Thursday evening, he delivered.

For Biden, the debate could've been an opportunity to flex some of the strides he's made during his administration, and he succeeded a few times — but he didn't convince viewers he's still fit for the job.

A constant narrative that's been swirling around Biden is that the political veteran is too frail for a second term, despite the president's insistence and the assurances from his White House doctor.

A report from the special counsel Robert Hur in February said that Biden's memory and advanced age were reasons not to charge the president for his handling of classified documents.

Going into the debate, the hope was that Biden would prove he was still mentally and physically fit for the job.

Throughout the debate, Biden's voice was raspy, and he sounded at times like he was struggling to hold in a cough. He stumbled through his answers and rebuttals, and in a few cases, his statements were incomprehensible.

"We finally beat Medicare," Biden said at one point. Trump pounced on the president's gaffe.

"His voice sounds terrible; he looks terrible," Siegfried, the ex-GOP strategist, told BI.

Even prominent Democrats agreed that Thursday was not Biden's night.

"I think there was a sense of shock, actually, on how he came out at the beginning of this debate," David Axelrod, a former senior Obama White House advisor, said on CNN. "How his voice sounded — he seemed a little disoriented at the beginning of the debate. He did get stronger as the debate went on, but by that time, I think the panic had set in."

Still, the full effect of Thursday's debate will be hard to determine since it was held so far out from the election, Siegfried said.

"That's a question we can't answer because we've never had a debate this early," Siegfried told BI. "Remember, Obama stumbled in the Denver debate against Mitt Romney in 2012, and people started saying, 'it's over,' but a few weeks later, he got right back up on the horse and showed that it was just a one-time thing. We're not going to have this until the next debate in September."

"It's going to be months of this narrative," he added. "And it's been a narrative that's been out there for the length of his presidency."