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00:00Well, Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of falsehoods from insulin costs to blue states
00:05executing babies at birth and claiming Joe Biden wanted to quadruple people's taxes.
00:10This at the first presidential debate held in Atlanta. The CNN moderators were criticized for
00:17not correcting Trump or Biden when either made false statements. They debated over immigration
00:23taxes and their own presidential track records over the course of 90 minutes. Biden struggled
00:29to deliver lines and counter Trump. Take a listen. We have a thousand trillionaires in America,
00:37I mean billionaires in America. And what's happening? They're in a situation where they
00:42in fact pay 8.2% in taxes. If they just paid 24% or 25%, either one of those numbers,
00:49they'd raise $500 million, billion dollars, I should say, in a 10 year period. We'd be able
00:55to wipe out his debt. We'd be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do,
00:59child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system,
01:04making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able
01:11to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with.
01:18Uh, look, if we finally beat Medicare. Tough viewing Biden at age 81, only three years older
01:29than Donald Trump, but rather than dispel concerns about his age, he made it a central issue. For more,
01:34let's speak to our foreign editor, Ketavan Gorjastani, also our former White House correspondent.
01:39Hello to you, Ketavan. Um, what did you make of Joe Biden's performance? It was a very tough
01:44night for Joe Biden. If the goal of the Biden campaign was to alleviate the concerns of some
01:50of their voters about Joe Biden's fitness for office, that certainly did not help. This debate
01:58more likely served as a way to remind people of his weaknesses, of those concerns,
02:05because as you said, he was simply at some times just not there, unable to finish a sentence,
02:12on losing his train of thought, unable to land some of the attacks that seem to have been
02:19prepared. Remember, he prepared at least for a week in Camp David doing mock debates. So this was
02:24a man who was presented as someone who was extremely prepared. And it wasn't just what
02:31he was saying or how he was delivering it. The visuals were also very bad for Joe Biden. That
02:36split screen really showed a sort of tired Joe Biden at times when he was listening to Donald
02:43Trump. He had his mouth open. He was gazing out in the distance. And in contrast, Donald Trump
02:50seemed way more energetic, way more in charge. And you said it, they're only three years apart,
02:56but it seemed that they were much more different in their age when you looked at your screen,
03:04even without the sound. And even on the topics where you would have thought that Joe Biden would
03:10have been good, his strengths, the issues that matter to his voters, like abortion, like democracy,
03:18all of those things, he wasn't able to really land those attacks to show why he was so different
03:25from Donald Trump. That was also the goal of this debate, that the Democrats wanted,
03:31that Joe Biden's team wanted. It was to show the difference between the two men. But that's not
03:37probably the difference that they wanted to display on that debate night. And so you saw
03:44really after that debate, even though Joe Biden himself said we did well after that debate,
03:51his vice president, Kamala Harris, said, yes, it was a slow start, but then he showed substance.
03:58The problem is the perception. And if voters were watching those 90 minutes, the substance
04:05sort of got drowned out by the delivery, by the performance, by the visuals. All of those things
04:13sort of erased all of the substance or the policy that he wanted to display.
04:18Yeah. And more and more Democrats questioning his name actually being on the ballot in November.
04:24This was something that was sort of a rumor in the previous months, things that were thrown
04:30around. But now this discussion has sort of come to light a little bit, even in public,
04:36some Democrats questioning whether Joe Biden should be the candidate. Now, it is almost
04:42impossible for Joe Biden not to be the candidate, but not completely impossible. There are really
04:48two options. One is the Democrats. Some of the leadership, his family tell him you need to step
04:56down and he agrees to step down. That opens an open convention. That doesn't mean that Kamala
05:03Harris would automatically replace him on the ticket. It's just an open convention. And the
05:08delegates will have to vote for another candidate. And that person will need to get a majority of
05:15the four thousand candidates. The problem, more likely, is if he doesn't agree to step down,
05:22which he has dismissed many, many times before. He said he was going and he said it again after
05:27the debate. We're going to keep going in that case. The issue is that the delegates that Joe
05:34Biden won and he won almost ninety nine percent of the delegates, they are pledged, meaning they're
05:40supposed to vote the way their state voted. And so they are supposed to give their voice to Joe
05:46Biden. That said, they are pledged. They're not fully committed, meaning if they defect en masse,
05:53then they could possibly elect somebody. But then there is another huge question, which is who?
06:01Because right now there are no clear other options. One of the names that was floated around,
06:06for example, is the governor of California, Gavin Newsom. He's one of the top surrogates
06:11of Joe Biden. He was in the spin room defending Joe Biden, and he dismissed the idea that he
06:17was going to not have Joe Biden's back till the end. And running out of time real quickly,
06:22Donald Trump's performance. What did you make of it? Well, Donald Trump's performance was not so
06:27much a victory of Donald Trump. It was a defeat of Joe Biden. And the lackluster performance by
06:34Joe Biden sort of overshadowed what Donald Trump did. He said he did very well in the sense that
06:42people were wondering if he was going to be the sort of unhinged Donald Trump that we saw four
06:46years ago. He was not. He stayed sort of un-messaged on immigration, on the economy,
06:52hammering Donald Trump. That said, he also expressed many, many lies. You mentioned some
06:58of them, for example, on abortion. And he was asked three times whether he would accept the
07:04results of the 2024 elections. Three times he deflected. He said yes, he would accept if he
07:11felt the election was fair, and then went back to saying that the 2020 election was stolen.