President Joe Biden, 81, faces the ultimate test of his mental fitness as he heads into tonight’s 90-minute face-off in Atlanta against 78-year-old former President Donald Trump.
The president will be onstage with only a pad, pencil and a bottle of water, without the assist of the teleprompter and will not be allowed to chat with aides during commercial breaks.
Biden has spent the week holed up at Camp David preparing for the debate with close aides knowing the Atlanta showdown could be a make-or-break moment for his reelection bid.
Each campaign has made hay about the other candidate’s gaffes and stumbles, but polling shows that Americans are more wary of Biden being an effective leader through a second term than Trump and debate experts say the 81-year-old cannot afford to have a senior moment.
While Trump has made verbal flubs of late – this month the White House has had to respond to a trio of what press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has dubbed ‘cheap fakes’ – viral videos that appeared to show Biden wandering off or freezing.
There was the video in Italy that appeared to show Biden looking in the wrong direction during an event with paratroopers – a visual that wasn’t helped by Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni guiding him back to pose for a picture.
In reality, Biden was engaging with paratroopers who had just landed off-screen.
In another video, at a Juneteenth celebration, Biden stares, smiles and watches the musical performance while other attendees danced.
Jean-Pierre pushed back in a press briefing asking why that was a crime.
‘The president stood there listening to the music and he didn’t dance. Excuse me, I did not know not dancing was a mental – was a health issue,’ she said at the June 17th briefing.
‘That is a weird thing to actually flag when if you if you look at the people who around him – if you look at the expanded video of the people who around him, they were not, they weren’t – there were some folks who were not dancing either,’ she added.
A third ‘cheap fake’ occurred when Biden seemed to pause before leaving the stage at his A-list fundraiser in Los Angeles with George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jimmy Kimmel and former President Barack Obama.
The much younger Obama walked Biden, his former vice president, off the stage.
Before the cheap fakes era, Biden fell off his bike in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and tripped up the stairs of Air Force One on several occasions.
He now mostly boards the larger Air Force One taking the shorter set of stairs.
Biden also tripped over a sandbag during a commencement in Colorado last summer.
The Biden campaign has responded by highlighting the moments when Trump, just 3.5 years younger, has seemingly shown his age.
‘Here is a montage of Donald Trump getting confused, lost, wandering off, and waving to nobody,’ an X post from the @BidenHQ account said last week.
The campaign then shared a 2.5 minute-long video of clips of Trump, from during his presidency, departing events before he’s supposed to, or awkwardly standing in place when he’s supposed to be exiting.
The battle over who’s more fit to be president started four years before.
During the 2020 campaign cycle, video of Trump went viral when he tip-toed down a ramp during an appearance at West Point that June.
That led to similar questions about Trump’s fitness, with him having to deny he had ‘Parkinson’s’ disease.
‘I stayed there for hours. And what do I do? I get publicity about walking down a ramp,’ said an aghast Trump to The Wall Street Journal. ‘And does he have Parkinson’s? I don’t think so.’
In an initial tweet about the incident – which took on the name ‘ramp-gate’ – Trump described the ramp as being ‘very long & steep,’ adding that it ‘had no handrail and, most importantly, was very slippery.’