Analysis: How a night of fighting words upended the election |

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a five-part series that tells the story of the closing months of the 2024 presidential campaign, starting with the June debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

When the camera sails over the gold dome of the state Capitol building beaming images of Atlanta’s sparkling twilight, and the television lights flare, and 51 million Americans tune in, Democrats everywhere are hoping this will be the moment for the 46th president of the United States.

The moment Joe Biden will stand with his back to a wall of red, white and blue, and fight with tools forged in a lifetime of public service. The moment former President Donald Trump will be exposed as a pretender, pummeled by tough questions and trapped by rules poorly suited to the Republican showman: No audience to rile, strict time limits, and muted mics once the clock expires.

“We’re live from Georgia, a key battleground state… .”

For Democrats, it all seems within their grasp as this first debate, hosted by CNN, kicks off, and the first question is one for which Biden has had months to prepare.

“What do you say to voters who say they are worse off under your presidency than they were under President Trump?” Jake Tapper says, sharing the moderators’ desk with Dana Bash.

“We’ve got to take a look at what I was left when I became president.” Biden rises to the challenge. “Things were in chaos… the economy collapsed!”

The president fires off a list of complaints about Trump mishandling the pandemic, pandering to the wealthy and throwing jobs into jeopardy. Biden boasts about his own employment record for Americans, lowering health care costs and corralling corporate greed.

Trump shakes his head, purses his lips and strikes back. “Inflation is killing our country. It is absolutely killing us!” He paints Biden as a bureaucratic bumbler and himself as the wizard who supercharged business, controlled immigration and conjured economy-boosting tax cuts.

In a green room behind the scenes, Trump’s team is poised for problems. Their man arrived early and seemed at ease posing for photos and strolling into the studio that normally hosts a show about major league baseball. He had walked through days of debate preparations, but he was expected to rely mainly on his instinct for a quick line, an insult, or headline-grabbing statement. Yet, CNN’s Kristen Holmes, who is covering Trump, says his camp knows the risks lurking onstage. “There were nerves going into this debate that Trump was going to tank. That he was going to lose his cool, that he was going to freak out.”

Biden’s team is also unsettled. The president pulled in late — as he often does — nursing a cold his staff will not acknowledge until later. He’s been well-coached, but under a cloud. Just over two weeks before the clash, his son Hunter was convicted of three felony gun charges. Biden has never hidden his affection for his family.

Nonetheless, for the first minutes the debate hits a predictable rhythm. The two men trade swipes and flash their mutual disdain. Then something happens. Biden, who has long talked about overcoming speech issues as a child, begins to stutter. He is searching for words, saying “trillionaires” when he means “billionaires” – correcting himself, then a heartbeat later saying “million” when he means “billion.” They are small mistakes but mounting rapidly.

For months, conservative critics have said Biden’s physical and mental health are failing. They’ve accused top Democrats, even Cabinet members, of hiding his decline. Biden’s defenders have dismissed the imputations as claptrap, more unhinged conspiracy theories from the far right.

Now, with the nation watching, Biden is staring vacantly as if looking for answers in the air. He mumbles. He seems confused. After an agonizing pause, he blurts without context or sense, “Look, we finally beat Medicare.”

Trump measures Biden with his eyes, then tears him apart.

For more than an hour, Biden struggles. He makes clear, coherent points. But each time he finds his footing, he rapidly falls back into mangled sentences and muddled thoughts. Trump dodges questions, parades his thin grasp of policy, and spews his boilerplate falsehoods. But he does it with vigor, smirking at his suffering opponent. One particularly disjointed answer by Biden tees up the clip of the night when Trump replies, “I really don’t know what he said at the end, and I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

Backstage, Trump’s team is celebrating. “They were really happy. They were relieved,” Holmes says, but “they did not realize the impact that moment was going to have.”

Some Democratic debate watchers have a sharper sense of it. “My phone was lighting up with text messages,” CNN’s John King says, noting members of Congress, political activists and voters alike were deeply alarmed. “The air simply came out of the Democratic balloon. Democrats were desperate, and in a panic watching that debate.”

A watch party in California is shaken by the spectacle, a source tells CNN’s Phil Mattingly. Three Democratic governors are there – Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker, and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear – all potential future presidential contenders. “I think they were looking around thinking the whole dynamic has changed and maybe instead of being a bystander or surrogate, I may need to start thinking about if there is another step here,” Mattingly says.

Social media is erupting with gleeful Trump fans making jokes about him committing elder abuse, and dismayed Democrats who had not dreamed it could go this badly. When the men leave the stage, Biden allies huddle for long minutes before heading into the spin room at nearby Georgia Tech to defend his moribund performance. Like their candidate, many can’t find words.

The verdict is undeniable: Trump won hands down.

This is the story of a titanic clash unlike anything most living Americans have ever seen: the 2024 US presidential election. The contest has tested faith in democracy, institutions of government, the justice system and the faith of citizens in each other. Fortunes have risen and fallen at dizzying speeds amid accusations and suspicions, promises and betrayals, which have made it almost impossible to recall events from one week to the next, let alone make sense of what has happened and why and how. The nature of truth and trust, citizenship and cynicism, patriotism and populism have been challenged. Candidates, allies, government officials, activists, journalists, legal experts, and tens of millions of voters have been swept into social and political trenches. Over it all hangs a sword of consequences no matter how the vote lands and whose flag is finally planted on the victor’s field. This tale focuses on the last 131 days – the tumultuous stretch that followed the extraordinary night of June 27, 2024.

Before the debate, enthusiasm seemed unshakeable in the ride-or-die community of the real estate mogul turned reality TV star turned president. Now the energy is supercharged. The GOP that once embraced Ronald Reagan’s elegant, Puritan vision of America as a “shining city on a hill” is mesmerized by Trump’s battlefield ethos where the goal is not mere victory but a sweeping purge of all apostates. Pointing out how far-removed Trump is from traditional conservative philosophy has become heresy, and transgressors are cast into the political wilderness. CNN Political Director David Chalian sums up the Trump effect in a sentence: “He changed the Republican party and made it into his image.”

No one since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s has lost the White House and then won it back, but Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party shattered the hopes of all his primary challengers and created a political juggernaut. With a bit over four months until lines form at polling places, Republican hagiographers undoubtedly come away from the Biden debate with fresh prose for the history books.

On the trail, Holmes sees growing swagger in the Trump team. “I would say that there was a time period in which it felt like Donald Trump couldn’t lose,” she says. “They say that they were never 100% sure (but) it seemed as though he was headed back to the White House.”

To call Trump’s place in his party at this point astonishing is to understate it. Forget for a moment that he came into the 2024 election as a twice-impeached losing incumbent prone to peevish grudges and schoolboy slanders, an unrepentant election denier who sent a violent mob to the US Capitol, and a man who habitually treated truth as a matter of opinion while at times straining the limits of the law. All that would normally scuttle anyone’s hopes of hoisting a major party’s flag.

But again, put that history aside.

Just consider Trump’s stance as summer dawned. A tidal wave of legal charges had inundated him with allegations of classified document hoarding, election meddling, sexual assault and more. Aides, associates and rioters by the score had been jailed for efforts on his behalf. But Trump, who denied any wrongdoing, ridiculed his accusers, defied gag orders, called the justice system corrupt, and turned his mug shots into fundraising coffee mugs. His poll numbers in the GOP primary held.

When a civil case ended with Trump ordered to pay tens of millions of dollars for defaming a woman the court said he sexually abused in 1996, he shrugged and said, “Somehow we’re going to have to fight this stuff.” When Trump was ordered in a civil suit to pay $355 million for fraudulently manipulating the values of his property in his old hometown of New York, he appealed and said of the judge, “He’s just a corrupt person, and we knew that right from the beginning.” When a jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsified business records related to hush money payments to an adult film star, the newly anointed felon nodded to Election Day. “This was a rigged, disgraceful trial, and the real verdict is going to be November 5.”

Surveys had consistently shown most Republicans did not want a convicted man in the White House. But when that convict turned out to be Trump, it didn’t matter. His poll numbers held again.

After the debate, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, many enraged by Trump’s humiliating loss in 2020, steam into the dog days of July convinced he didn’t lose four years ago. Nearly 70% tell pollsters for CNN/SSRS in July that the election results were not legitimate, despite Team Trump failing to produce any evidence of election fraud.

Then the Supreme Court’s conservative wing, reinforced by three appointments in Trump’s term, pushes through broad immunity for any chief executive for any official act. Trump’s lawyers launch a fresh round of challenges to his legal troubles, arguing too many of the cases rely on now-excluded evidence and protected behavior.

Yet the billionaire ex-president never misses a chance to gripe about how badly the world treats him. “Donald Trump knows how to turn every moment into victimhood,” pollster Frank Luntz notes on CNN. “He’s claiming that he’s a victim. He’s claiming that entire force of the government is being used against him.”

At rallies, Trump shouts, “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you!”

So still, his poll numbers hold.

What’s more, Biden’s support is sagging. Despite economists giving the president high marks for steering America out of the post-pandemic doldrums better than most countries, voter frustration over inflation pervades. Many worry about Biden’s age, 81, even though Trump is only three years younger and collectively they are the oldest presidential candidates ever. Unease over conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, the US border with Mexico, and countless body blows to Biden from Team Trump on all sorts of subjects are taking a toll. Pollsters have insisted for months the race is too close for either man to be called ahead, however the math shows Biden consistently trailing in that statistical draw.

To be sure, both candidates face problems. Around the time of their verbal battle in Atlanta, Pew Research found 63% of survey participants calling Biden and Trump alike “embarrassing” and wanting both replaced on ballots. But more Republicans still like their man better than Democrats like theirs, and other polls show the gap widening in Trump’s favor.

Lounging in his golf cart with the debate in the rearview and a “47” on his sleeve, Trump is enjoying a round in Florida when he takes a swing at punditry. “That old, broken-down pile of crap?” he calls the president of the United States in a cell phone video. “He’s quitting the race.”

Democratic anxiety keeps growing. After all, Trump has never won the popular vote, yet he defeated Hillary Clinton and nearly bested Biden thanks to the tilting power of the Electoral College. Now, with Biden’s weak numbers softening even more, Trump is gaining an edge in every battleground. Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The debate even has Trump’s strategists looking at some solidly Democratic blue states and seeing hints of a shift to Republican red. “Once the Trump people processed what had happened,” King says, “they thought, ‘Not only do we have this campaign won, but we can talk about expanding the map.’”

Republicans are whispering of a rout. Democrats who despise everything Trump represents are wondering if anyone can stop him.

When the small drone zips over the farm show grounds hours before the big event, no one seems to care. Same when the pale young man comes to the security checkpoint carrying a rangefinder – a device to calculate trajectories of long-distance rifle shots. Investigators will later say he was noted and largely forgotten after he wandered away. As best they can tell, no one pays attention when the same guy climbs upon an air conditioning unit to shinny onto a rooftop.

And why would they? Riding the wave of post-debate enthusiasm and with the Republican National Convention days away, Trump is bringing his rollicking carnival of populism to tiny Butler, Pennsylvania. “God Bless the USA” is blaring, a sea of pilgrims is chanting the name of the once and maybe future president of the United States.

“Let’s go, Trump! Let’s go, Trump! Let’s go, Trump!”

Then there he is in a red MAGA hat, booming from the podium. “I’m thrilled to be back in this beautiful commonwealth with thousands of proud, hardworking American patriots!”

He spins into his stump speech, backed and flanked by bleachers packed with supporters. He promises better days for this place where manufacturing once ruled, casts millions of immigrants as criminals and mental patients, and pledges to reclaim a stolen country for the roaring crowd.

But minutes in, barely beyond the edges of the conservative Xanadu, some people finally notice something odd: A man in a place where he should not be, acting in a way that does not fit the mood.

“Someone is on top of the roof. There he is. Right there.”

Voices on cell phone videos capture the rapidly rising alarm.

“He’s laying down.”

Onlookers flag security as Trump’s voice echoes. A few officers appear, trotting uncertainly toward the interloper.

“My wife ran up to law enforcement, was trying to tell them, you know, where he was,” Mike DiFrischia will later tell CNN’s Erin Burnett, “but they couldn’t seem to see him because they weren’t in the right spot.”

Nearly two-and-a-half minutes pass. A voice shouts, “He’s got a gun!”

The mysterious man unleashes eight shots from his AR-style weapon in five seconds, blistering toward the stage at more than 2,000 miles per hour. A Secret Service sniper on another roof fires on the gunman. In the crowd around Trump, chaos.

“Get down!”

“They’re shooting.”

“Oh, my God.”

Signs saying “Joe Biden – You’re Fired!” flutter into the air. Some people dive to the ground. Some crane to see the source of the crackling gunfire.

Trump raises a hand to his right ear and sinks behind the podium. Armored and armed officers rush up to bristle around the downed candidate, swinging their weapons in wide arcs. Donna Hutz has come with her family from Ohio and is a few rows behind Trump. “We saw that he had blood on him,” she says, “but people were yelling that he was OK.”

Trump’s ear was clipped by a passing bullet, and it takes a full minute for agents to raise him to his feet. His MAGA hat is missing. He repeatedly demands, “Let me get my shoes!” Then, as agents lock arms to form a human shield and usher him away, the crowd starts chanting again, “USA! USA! USA!”

There are other victims. Corey Comperatore is dead. The 50-year-old firefighter and father of two daughters was on the bleachers to Trump’s right. His wife, Helen, will say his last words were, “Get down.” Two other Pennsylvanians, on the opposite bleachers, are seriously injured: David Dutch, 57, a Marine veteran, and James Copenhaver, 74, a retiree who recorded video in which the shooter can be seen.

Now another cell phone captures people looking at the prone gunman on the roof.

“I think they hit him.”

The downed man is Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20. The local school district says he had “excelled academically, regularly attended school, and (was) a quiet, bright young man who generally got along with his teachers and classmates.” Investigators say Crooks asked for Saturday off from his job at the Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center because he had “something to do.”

They find Crooks’ rifle with a folding stock and removable barrel, explosives in his car, remote detonators, and plenty of signs of preparation. They don’t find a motive.

“He researched Donald Trump, he researched Joe Biden, he researched a number of other people,” says John Miller, CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst, “but then he became singularly focused … once he saw that Donald Trump was coming to a town really near where he lived.”

The fact that Trump avoided a fatal wound by turning his head at the critical moment strikes some of the MAGA faithful as a sign. Preacher Franklin Graham tells The Washington Post, “Trump came very close to having his brains spread over that platform, but God, I believe, protected him.”

Others call it a lucky break on an unlucky day.

Conspiracy theories rise like mushrooms after rain. Some argue the whole affair was a “false flag” operation staged to gain sympathy for Trump. Others insist it was a real assassination attempt orchestrated by his political rivals. There is no evidence for any of that.

President Biden calls Trump, who in turn describes the gesture as “very nice.” On television, Biden says, “A former president was shot, an American citizen killed while simply exercising his freedom to support the candidate of his choosing. We cannot — must not — go down this road in America.”

The Secret Service will be skewered by Republican and Democrat lawmakers alike for failing to establish a safe perimeter, leaving buildings unsecured, and abandoning essential radios. Director Kimberly Cheatle will be forced into resignation. As CNN national security reporter Zach Cohen puts it, “The Secret Service knew they were supposed to be in charge of security for the event, the local law enforcement knew Secret Service was supposed to be in charge, and yet nobody seemed to actually be in charge.”

But like so much that could have gone so badly for Trump, within moments of the gunfire on the Pennsylvania plains, the master showman seizes an opportunity to build on the momentum of his long, remarkable summer. As agents push him to a black SUV, he turns to the crowd, blood running down his face, and framed by an American flag, punches his fist to the sky and shouts.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!”