What to Watch at the First Trump-Biden Debate

The candidates are the same. The circumstances are very different.

The first presidential debate of 2024 between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday offers both men the rare chance to tilt the direction of a race that has so far been defined by its stability.

Mr. Biden sought this historically early confrontation to force into focus the stark difference of their competing visions for America. His team wants to nudge voters away from seeing 2024 as an up-or-down vote just on Mr. Biden’s leadership — the buzzwords in Bidenland are choice and contrast — and warn that a second Trump term would be more radical and vengeful than the first.

Mr. Trump has been eager to debate, too. He sees Mr. Biden as cognitively diminished since they last clashed on the debate stage in October 2020. Mr. Trump is savoring the chance to lay into Mr. Biden’s record on the border and inflation in particular.

There is little mutual respect between them. The animosity is expected to be palpable inside the audience-free CNN television studio in Atlanta, where they will debate for 90 of the most consequential minutes of the campaign.

Here is what to watch for:

Can Trump make it about Biden? And vice versa?

The debate is a first in modern history because both candidates have already been president.

Voters know them. But many voters don’t like them. And so the imperative is to talk as much about the other guy and his record as their own.