Expert Analysis on First Biden vs. Trump 2024 Presidential Debate

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Few people are as well placed to discuss the current moment and the momentum going into this summer’s conventions than veteran democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, and Marc Lotter, who served as special assistant to President Trump and was director of strategic communications for his 2020 campaign. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. You were in Atlanta. You are in Atlanta where the CNN Debate was held. You were in the rooms watching to be able to talk to us afterwards. So, from your perspective, Marc Lotter, how did your candidate do?

MARC LOTTER, FORMER SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO PRESIDENT TRUMP: I thought Donald Trump did great. He was talking about the issues that matter to the American people and offering a vision to fix the problems that have been largely caused by Joe Biden. I think he showed strength, which is something that the American people have always sought in their presidents, contrasted to Joe Biden, who really struggled and showed a lot of weakness.

AMANPOUR: So, Simon Rosenberg, you know, because you’re there, that the Republicans are very, very happy with the way their candidate did. How about the Democrats? And you are a– not just an adviser, you’re a key strategist.

SIMON ROSENBERG, DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL STRATEGIST AND PUBLISHER, “HOPIUM CHRONICLES”: Yes. Listen, I think Joe Biden has been a very good president who had a very bad night last night. And, you know, how consequential this will be during the course of this long campaign, we’ll find out. But I think the other thing we saw last night, in addition to Joe Biden and being able to make the case for his presidency, which he struggled with a little bit, no question, is that we also saw in Donald Trump a person who’s a bad man, who’s a terrible candidate, and would be a disastrous president for the United States. I mean, the level of lying and falsehoods last night that we heard from him was shocking, even for somebody in the business who’s been following Trump. Virtually nothing he said was true last night. And so, I don’t think it was a great debate for the American people. I don’t think they learned very much that’s really going to help them make this decision, as your own polling showed. But I do think this was a better night for Trump than Biden, and it means that we’ve got work to do in the coming months.

AMANPOUR: So, let me ask you, Marc Lotter, because everybody who was watching and people who take notes and who fact-check basically know that there was this, as I said, fire hose of falsehoods. This is CNN’s particular fact-checker.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIN BURNETT, ANCHOR: So, Daniel, what stands out to you?

DANIEL DALE, REPORTER: What stood out was the staggering number of false claims from Former President Trump. On first count, Erin, I counted at least 30, 30 false claims.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: I guess the question, Marc Lotter, is, does it actually matter to your side and to your candidate when he consistently makes these false claims? And in this case, obviously, the point was not to fact-check in real-time.

LOTTER: Well, ultimately, I think the American people aren’t following the gaffes or the misstatements by either candidate. They want someone who’s going to deal with inflation, deal with gas and grocery prices, secure the southern border, and deal with the wars that are raging in Europe and Middle East all on the watch of Joe Biden. So, you know, when people remember back to the Trump administration, they remember we had a strong economy, no inflation, a secured border, and all of the problems they face right now fall at the feet of Joe Biden. So, I think so many of the voters out there look at these kinds of debates through that prism. And if a candidate on either side makes a misstatement, like Joe Biden saying no troops died on his watch, despite the fact that 13 Americans were killed in his botched Afghanistan withdrawal, they’re probably going to wash a little bit of that under the rug for both sides because they’re unscripted, without a teleprompter, recalling all of this. The bottom line, who’s going to make my life better and the world safer?

AMANPOUR: You know what, I actually — I was going to go on to a little bit more of the optics, because obviously optics and perception are a huge point of this, but I do want to ask you about the economy, both of you, because that is clearly top of mind, not just for voters in the United States, bread and butter issues, cost of living, but all over the world. So, Donald Trump, as you said, Marc, made strong claims. But listen, 16 Nobel prize-winning economists have warned that a second Trump term would reignite inflation. They say Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s. Also, as you know, Marc, and I’m sure you’ve been reading these, he, Donald Trump, had a meeting with executives just in the last few days, and they said remarkably meandering, couldn’t keep a straight thought and was all over the map. And it’s also been pointed out by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld at Yale that not a single person among Forbes 100 CEOs has donated to Trump’s campaign. So, these are facts. How does that, Marc, make him better on the economy?

LOTTER: Well, the Nobel laureates were wrong when they predicted that he was going to ruin the economy in 2016, 2017. I put their value about the same as I do with the 51 intelligence officers that lied to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story. Look, people know that the Trump economic policies worked. They actually lowered people’s taxes. Real, hardworking, middle class Americans saw their taxes go down. They saw the amount of revenue to the federal government go up. We saw jobs coming back. Obviously, we were recovering when the pandemic — from the pandemic as the election took place, and we had no inflation. 1.4 percent when the — when Joe Biden took office. Gas was a little over $2 a gallon. Those are all realities that they can’t change. And I get it. You get a bunch of liberal Ivy — you know, Ivy Tower elites who want Joe Biden to be president. Many people aren’t buying it.

AMANPOUR: Yes. Look, I think you and I both know that most CEOs are not liberal. They might be elite, but there’s certainly — many, many of them have backed former Republican presidents. This is the first time a Republican candidate has received so little backing from them.