ATLANTA – Rules aimed at making Thursday night’s presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump more civil than their debates four years ago didn’t stop the two combatants from mixing it up.
No audience was present to rile up the candidates during the 90-minute debate hosted by CNN. When the moderator asked a question of Biden or Trump, the other candidate’s microphone was turned off to keep them from interrupting each other.
But the two still managed to fire a barrage of accusations, blaming each other for the rise in inflation and calling each other the worst president in U.S. history.
The debate was held in Atlanta, where Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted last summer on charges of participating in a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
The Fulton County case is just one of four criminal indictments of Trump, including his conviction in New York City last month on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to an ex-porn star to cover up a sexual relationship.
Trump blamed his legal woes on Biden.
“He goes after his political opponent because he can’t beat him fair and square,” he said.
Trump also noted that the conviction boosted his standing with voters.
“My poll numbers went up and we took in more money in the last two weeks than we’ve ever taken in in the history of my campaign because the public knows it’s a scam,” he said.
Biden called out Trump for his response to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by Trump supporters – the subject of one of the indictments facing the former president.
“There was no effort on his part to stop what was going on on Capitol Hill,” Biden said. “He sat there for three hours watching (television), being begged by his vice president and a number of his colleagues to do something.”
The president also brought up the civil lawsuits Trump has lost in addition to the criminal prosecutions.
“How many billions of dollars do you owe in civil penalties for molesting a woman in public, for doing a whole range of things, for having sex with a porn star while your wife was pregnant?” Biden asked Trump. “You have the morals of an alley cat.”
Each said the other should be in jail, Trump for the crimes he has been charged with in the various indictments, and Biden for allowing an influx of illegal immigrants across the southern border.
While the personal acrimony took up much of the middle portion of the debate, the two candidates also discussed the issues.
Trump said the nation’s economy was humming along nicely on his watch until the COVID pandemic struck early in 2020. He blamed Biden for the inflation that followed.
“I gave him a country with essentially no inflation,” Trump said.
Biden said the economic downturn that accompanied COVID was Trump’s fault for mishandling the pandemic.
“By the time he left, things were in chaos,” Biden said. “We put things back together.”
Trump said America’s border was secure on his watch, but a crisis erupted along the southern border when Biden became president.
“We had the safest border in the history of our country,” Trump said. “(Biden) decided to open up our borders … to people from mental institutions, insane asylums, terrorists. … We’re living in a rat’s nest. They’re killing our people in New York, California, and every state in the union because we don’t have borders anymore.”
Biden said a bipartisan agreement he worked out with members of Congress would have fixed the problem, but Trump killed it for his own political gain because he wanted to run on the issue.
Trump defended the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion, arguing it leaves the issue up to the states.
“They’re all making their own decisions,” he said. “The states control it. That’s the vote of the people.”
Biden supported codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law so women and their doctors rather than politicians could make decisions on abortion.
“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 and let each state have a different rule,’ ” he said.
On foreign policy, Trump blamed the messy U.S. exit from Afghanistan on Biden’s watch for encouraging Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Trump also criticized Biden for approving at least $200 billion in U.S. aid to help Ukraine defend itself.
Biden warned that Putin will invade nearby NATO counties and expand the European war if he wins in Ukraine.
“All that money we give Ukraine is for weapons made in the United States,” Biden said.
Biden said his administration is continuing to push the terrorist organization Hamas to accept his three-part plan to end the war with Israel in Gaza. Trump accused Biden of taking a pro-Palestinian position on the conflict.