One year ago, on June 27, 2024, in Atlanta, President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump marked a historic turning point in American politics, leading to his withdrawal from the presidential race and Trump’s eventual victory.
Biden entered the CNN debate stage already facing questions about his mental fitness. Special counsel Robert Hur’s February 2024 report had described Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” when declining to prosecute him for illegally possessing classified materials.
The president had spent several days at Camp David in Maryland preparing for the debate. Trump had demanded Biden take a drug test before the event, claiming he might use performance-enhancing supplements. Biden mocked the challenge on social media, posting: “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.”
Then, reality hit the main stage — and the four-year media cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline collapsed on live television. During the 90-minute debate, Biden struggled with verbal missteps and lost his train of thought multiple times. His voice sounded raspy and weak. He was confused, and it wasn’t just a “senior moment”, plain and simple.
When discussing tax policy, Biden said: “Making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the—with the COVID. Excuse me. With dealing with everything we have to do with—look, if [long pause] we finally beat Medicare.”
On border security, Biden delivered a lengthy response that trailed off.
“We find ourselves in a situation where when he was president, he was separating babies from their mothers put them in cages, making sure that the families were separated. That’s not the right way to go. What I’ve done since I’ve changed the law, what’s happened? I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally, that’s better than when he left office. And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the total initiative relative to what we can do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.”
Trump pounced — and it was the end of the Biden re-election campaign.
“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 responded.
It was exactly one year ago tomorrow that Biden imploded on stage in his debate with President Trump. All Trump had to do was give him a little kick – like he did here in one of the funnier moments in the debate. pic.twitter.com/jH6fxy0MHA
— FischerKing (@FischerKing64) June 26, 2025
The debate triggered immediate panic among Democrats and a meltdown among mainstream media figures who’d tried for years to cover up the decline.
“My phone really never stopped buzzing throughout. And the universal reaction was somewhere approaching panic,” MSNBC host Joy Reid said.
“This was a game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party. It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. And they’re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket, and they’re having conversations about what they should do about it,” CNN’s John King admitted.
“My job now is to be really honest. Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight, and he didn’t do it. He had one thing he had to accomplish and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age. And he failed at that tonight,” Former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill said.
“The voice, open-mouthed look, and visual contrast between President Biden and former President Trump all have Democrats I’m talking to nearly beside themselves watching this debate,” CNN’s Kasie Hunt wrote on social media.
Major media outlets called for Biden to step aside. The New York Times also wrote that Biden was a “shadow of a great public servant.”
Fellow Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that Biden should “reflect on this debate performance and then announce his decision to withdraw from the race.”
“If he were CEO, and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America, any Fortune 500 corporation in America keep him on as CEO?” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked.
The Drudge Report ran headlines reading “OPERATION: REPLACE BIDEN” and “DEMS SCRAMBLE WITH 130 DAYS TO GO! DEBATE CATASTROPHE.”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre initially defended Biden’s candidacy. When asked on July 3, 2024, if Biden planned to exit the race, she said: “Absolutely not.”
But under pressure from Democratic insiders like then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Biden ultimately dropped out of the race on July 21, 2024, less than a month after the debate. He announced his decision in a Sunday afternoon message posted to his social media account and immediately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris became the Democratic nominee with just over 100 days remaining in the campaign. She did not compete in any primary elections and was rushed through the nomination process without facing opposition at the convention.
Trump went on to win the 2024 presidential election, defeating Harris in a landslide.