The candidates need no introduction. We are at a defining moments. 64 years of televised debates, there has never been one like this. Why dont f wont you answer that question . Would you shut up, man . The incumbent president defending his record. Are you with me . A twiceimpeached past president with a criminal record. Guilty. Count 18. Guilty, count 19. Guilty on all 34 felony counts. With pressing issues facing the American People, reproductive rights, the economy, the border, and the preservation of democracy itself you will determine the outcome of this election. Vote, vote, vote. Tonight full Team Coverage with Rachel Maddow, nicolle wall he is, joy reid, chris hayes, lawrence odonnell, ari melber, stephanie ruhle, jen psaki, alex wallingner with california governor german, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and georgia senator Raphael Warnock. Msnbcs special coverage of the first president ial debate begins now. Its happening. Its finally here. Good evening. Welcome to our special live coverage of the first president ial debate of 2024. President joe biden and former President Donald Trump going headtohead in atlanta tonight, their first facetoface meeting of any kind since the fall of 2020. Now, luckily, its not like any big news has happened since the fall of 2020, so presumably they will just pick up where they left off. We know you have every ongs of where to twach this tonight. We are happy, honored you are going to watch it us with. We will have every second of this debate from the opening bell to whatever is going to be left of any of us by the end of it. Im Rachel Maddow here at msnbc headquarters in new york. Joined by my beloved well rested, well hydrated colleagues, joy reid and Nicolle Wallace and jen psaki and chris hayes. We have all been really, really looking forward to this night with the phrase looking forward very loosely defined. Literally tens of millions of americans are expected to watch tonights debate, literally millions of them watching through their hands like this. There really has never been one quite like in American History. For the first time a sitting president and an expresident will debate each other on live tv. That has never happened before. For the first time this first president ial debate is happening months earlier than it ever has happened before. Its happening now in june instead of in september or october, which has been the time the timing for every other president ial televised debate. And of course for the first time one of the two president ial candidates at this debate is a convicted felon, found guilty recently on 34 felony counts. He will be facing the possibility of being sentenced to prison time just two weeks from today. Exactly two weeks after the debate, the first president ial debate of the election cycle. Absolutely bananas. To be totally candid, the reasons this debate tonight is so highly anticipated, the reasons tonights debate may have the highest Television Audience of any debate ever in u. S. History, those reasons are themselves unique. Each of these men is the oldest candidate ever nominated by their political party. Donald trump was the oldest incoming president in u. S. History until joe biden broke that record. Now both of them are running again, four years after they ran the first time. Each of them both show signs of aging. And each spends considerable time needling the other one about seeming old and out of it. It has been a Campaign Topic and a Campaign Tactic used by each side. No one quite knows what it will mean on the debate stage tonight. Also, in ways both related and unrelated to their age, just because of who they are and how they talk, there are worries on both sides about the unpredictability of each of these candidates. They are each unpredictable even in the best of circumstances. That on the debate stage would seem indicate a higher than usual prospect of a catastrophic gaffe or outrage by one or both of them. Also, neither has debated in years. Yes, they debated each other before in the previous election cycle, but the fall of 2020 was a very long time ago and a lot has happened since then and in this election cycle neither one of these candidates participated in primary debates at all. Which is not unusual for President Biden because he is the incumbent president and there was no serious challenge to him within his own party. But it was very unusual for trump, who is not an incumbent president and who ran in a very contested gop primary in which there were multiple debates for the other candidates, which he nevertheless decided to skip. And finally, perhaps the main reason this debate tonight is so highly anticipated, anticipating such a large audience, is because the stakes of this election just feel cataclysmically high. Just to take two examples, this is the first president ial election in the wake of the republicans violent effort to stop the transition of power and keep their candidate in power by force and fraud after he lost the last election. They have nominated that same candidate again and the expectation for a recurrence of those tactics to contest or otherwise defy Election Results again this year is basically a 100 expectation. It is also the first election after the conservative super majority that trump created op Supreme Court with his three Supreme Court appointments, it is the first election since that court overturned roe v. Wade and set off the cascade of increasingly draconian abortion bans across republicancontrolled states with a National Abortion ban potentially on deck and republican attacks on both fertility treatment and Birth Control revving up in multiple states. Now, as for how tonights debate will work, for the first time in more than 30 years, this president ial debate tonight is not run by the nonpartisan independent commission on president ial debates. Instead, its a Cable Tv Network running it, cnn. The debate takes place at cnns studios in atlanta. It will be moderated by Jake Sullivan and dana bash. As i want to emphasize, you can watch every second of the debate here on msnbc with us tonight. Unlike most televised president ial debates over the last few decades, there will be no audience for tonights debate in the room. So that means you will hear and see no crowd reaction. That means that there will be no playing to the crowd for either candidate. The moderators will also have the ability to mute candidates microphones when the other has his turn to speak. There will be no Opening Statements. There will be closing statements. The order of the closing statements was decided by a coin toss. There was a coin toss that President Biden won. He was then given the choice of choosing either the order of the closing statements or which podium he would like to stand at on the stage. President biden decided to choose his podium. He will stand at the podium on the right side of our tv screens tonight. That meant that former President Trump got to choose whether he wanted to go first or second it in the closing statements. He chose to go second. As i said, this is a really different debate than we have had before. So ill just mention i know i went through the rules kind of quickly, we will run through those rules one more time before they kick off so you know what to expect in terms of the format. But, yeah. Here we go. This is quite literally going to be a debate like no other. You guys, im poking fun about the fact that we will be watching through our hands. Jen and nicolle, i want to go to you first. I know in your previous lives you have prepared candidates for debates. Do you feel like that gives you a perspective on what will happen tonight thats more or less fraught than the rest of us feel . I am going to, for the First Time Ever, not answer your question because i want to try to not compare this to anything that ever happened before. So i didnt have to prepare anyone to debate someone who is going to end the american experiment. I didnt have to prepare anyone ever to debate someone who was going to lie everything that he said. I have never had to prepare someone who was reporting for sentencing in a week. I never had to prepare anyone to debate someone that was fundamentally against the idea that the country was founded on. I have ideas how you do it. I have no idea how they did it. My deepest sort of up at night gut aching fear is that we do things like we always do this them. We ask people like me, how did you prep sarah palin, dick cheney, he sat down, there are some things like on the style side did dick cheney negotiate to sit down . He was debating the youngest, john edwards. I dont know why he sat down. But so there is style things that i wonder when i watch this. But there is no parallel to what were about to watch. Definitely not. And they cant pretend its the same as prepping obama to debate mitt romney. First of all, mitt romney, he looks great right now. Lets be honest. I think if youre the biden team though, you have to think about what you can control. You cant control how trump is going to behave. You have to prepare to react to it. You can control how President Biden is or he can control it. And so if you are them, you are thinking about what is the best version of joe biden . The best version of joe biden is empathic, scranton joe, speaking in english, right . And very accessible language. He has a gut instincts about that. When i used an acronym, he would chide me for that. The worst version or vulnerability that i dont know if it keeps me up at night in the same way as the future of our democracy, is proving himself. I know this for working for him for a year and a half. Meaning his vulnerability is when he is like, i need more data points, i need lists of data points. You see him with note cards, note cards that have data on numbers. Numbers, exactly, chris. A long list of numbers. Gdp. Job creation. The infrastructure bill and how many jobs have been created in pennsylvania. If he starts giving those statistics and data, you start to lose the audience. And i think that is a thing if you are on the Biden Campaign you are hoping he doesnt go to prove myself, i have a bit of a chip on my shoulder, im very smart and i have done a lot for this country mode. He goes to empathic scranton joe mode. That is something he can control. He cant control how donald trump behaves. One of the main questions from the biden perspective. How much do you go after trump for being abnormal and how much do you go after him for being a normal republican. What i mean is trump is such a tseng lar figure. If people are not yet decided they dont want him, the question is, the group of people that are still like, maybe, kind of you think no about what a wooerd guy he is. Do they know that he is going to raise your taxes for this tariff plan and cut rich peoples stacks and take another run at the Affordable Care act and probably try to sign an abortion ban . All the normal stuff that nancy pelosi had a theory of case in 2018 which was Affordable Care act, Kitchen Table stuff. In 2022, the theory was dobbs and democracy. Dont run against him like a normal republican. Talk about the democracy issue. These battles have been playing out in circles of Democratic Politics about how much relative emphasis to give those two kinds of attack. Thats the thing i am really i dont have a strong feeling. I think they are both necessary. But navigating that is going to be really interesting because there are a lot of people who know trumps bad but, like, he is literally proposing the most insane sales tax on all International Goods that anyone has ever proposed and no one knows that. But i think that heres what i worry about. And this is something on the other side of democrats. If democrats are defending the price of stuff as being not as bad as it was before and i promise its going to cope getting better, they will lose. If you are defending the price anything, you will lou lose. But if you are not taking the tar off of donald trump every minute of every hour ever every day between today and election day you are losing. Are it was reported this morning trumps tariff plan raises inflation to levels higher than they have been at any point in the economic tumble the last ten years. So it doesnt matter to me, i dont care what he decides it to talk about. But on every single metric, trump would make it worse. Yeah, right. I think its how you take the tar off, right . It cant be the data. I dont think its the tariffs argument. It is though trump has been able to run a sort of this outsider, right . I am going to shake things up, changemaker. And i think if youre joe biden and the biden team, you need to say, like, this guy is not a changemaker. This guy wants to extend tax cuts for Corporate America and the highest income. That was the argument by the way in 2012, that barack obama basically ran against mitt romney on when he was the incumbent president. But that still i dont think its the totality of his only goal in the debate but a moment he could break through with an argument like that. He has a hard time doing on the stump. As is often happens on these panels, i am exactly i dont know where to go. She channels my anxieties, like, directly. A, i dont think i have ever gotten more statler and waldorf texts from friends. I get it. Everybody is saying it. But what i cannot get past, i asked my wonderful intern kendall to look this up, this debate is going to be at cnn headquarters in atlanta. That is 5280 feet, ten minutes on the google maps, away from the Fulton County courthouse. This is in so many ways a return to the scene of the crime, right . For donald trump, literally they are in the state tonight that he tried to steal, one of the states he tried to steal in 2020, literally from the man who will be standing feet from him. It is very difficult for me to get my mind around the fact that joe biden comes back to georgia as only the second democrat to win georgia, other than bill clinton in 1992 and jimmy carter who won it twice, because weighs the governor the of gorgeous, joe biden coming back as a president , a record, talk about things he d for the economy, i still have the stamina to do this, which is his main job, get people who are nervous he doesnt have the energy. But donald trump is coming back as the guy who literally refused to peacefully transfer power to the guy standing just to his right. And that is so bizarre for me. Its so odd that i cant get past it. He is going to to get to strategy. He is going to be standing on stage in a state where he is under indictment on felonies, including a rico he should be on trial right now. If you think about all if events were normal, if the world was still earth one the way it is for the way it should be, he would be on trial right now in a rico case with 18 other defendants in the state of georgia. Fani willis, the person he sicced his people on to try to get her killed for prosecuting him is here. The two poll workers probably are within less than half an hour from where he is tonight. He has returned to the place where he tried to get them killed for just counting votes. Like, he literally is returning to within ten minutes of the scene of a crime. And he is still awaiting indictment for that crime, and how is how are we a country that allows that man to stand with the actual president and debate gas prices and food prices . This is insane. And thats why, if you pulls out a card and gives me data point on anything, i might scream so loud that it comes through i mean i will be screaming with you. Heres the thing. First of all, that he is a convicted felon isnt a point. Its who trump is. Who he is standing across. Not only should he be on trial in georgia. He should have been tried already. So to me this is not a contest of whose policies lower the price of eggs faster. If he doesnt draw the contrast between what person did with the precious privilege of being the commanderinchief, stowing state secrets at his whatever it is, golf club, refusing to give them back. Waving them around in front of his Current Campaign manager, overthrowing an election, i mean, fall the things that trump did outloud and publicly and is running on arent central, if joe biden who said about rudy giuliani, he is a criminal. By the way, this is where we get to what joe bidens job he has two jobs tonight. Number one, the stam. Issue. It is the thing that concerns most people. He shuffles when he walks. He is an old guy, right . I think to nicolles point, his other big job is to turn to that man and say, that is not a president. Whatever else you think that he is, what he is not is an american president. I am an american president. You know what i do . I get up every day and try to figure out how to lower your price, make your life affordable, defend the west. Thats what i do. You know what he did . He tried to overthrow the government. He tried to get our fellow citizens killed. He doesnt care about you. If he comes back in, he is vowing to literally fire 50,000 federal workers, cage migrants, put them in cages. That is not a president. If joe biden cant do that, then he really is in trouble. I would also say, too, that if you think between 2020 and 2024 in georgia, the other thing thats changed is that what happened in georgia is that the republican establishment in the state of georgia did not bend and did not do what trump wanted, which is why he was not able to overthrow that election. I mean, they fired a u. S. Attorney and they arguably committed, according to the state of georgia, who indicted trump for this, committed felonies trying to pressure Election Administrators into not doing their jobs. Whats different now . The reason that case has not gone forward in georgia is because the republican establishment, power structure in the legislature has decided to take fani willis apart,