President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump spent months sparring on the campaign trail, caricaturing, blasting and tearing each other down in interviews with reporters and paid ads.
On Thursday, the two men will face off in a CNN debate in Atlanta, their first meeting since they last faced off on stage in 2020 and since Trump tried to overturn Biden's victory in subsequent votes. The event will be a golden opportunity for both men to lay out their attacking lines and policy arguments before a national audience.
Here's what we know about how each player will try to gain an advantage.
Trump's main line of attack
Since emerging as the Republican presumptive nominee, Trump and his campaign have focused on attacking Biden over immigration and the economy, issues that polls show are top of mind for many voters.
Immigration
Trump has made immigration a central issue in his campaign, just as he did during his political rise in 2016. He is almost certain to blame Biden for a surge in illegal border crossings and criticize the president's policies as overly permissive.
Trump has cited several high-profile criminal cases that authorities say involve immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally to argue that Biden's immigration policies are encouraging violent crime, even though broader statistics don't back that up.
And in his efforts to stoke fears about immigration and put the issue at the center of his election campaign, Trump has falsely portrayed everyone who crosses the border as violent criminals or mentally ill. (Families with children have made up about 40% of migrants who have entered the US this year.)
Trump has sought to undermine the coalition that helped elect Biden, accusing without evidence that illegal immigrants in the country are taking jobs from working-class black and Hispanic voters and blaming Biden for it.
Trump is also likely to attack Biden's recent executive order on immigration, which blocks migrants from seeking asylum at the southern border in the event of a surge in crossings. Trump argues that the order still encourages migrants to enter the country and that it is too little, too late. Of course, Biden needs to reinstate Trump-era tough border policies, he says.
Biden's rebuttal: With Republican support, Biden got a long-awaited border deal through Congress in February, but Trump quickly told allies to abandon the pact, saying it was bad politically to take immigration off the table, allowing Biden to shift the blame for the border crisis onto others.
“The American people will know why it failed,” the president said at the time, a theme that is likely to feature in the debate. He also criticized Trump for echoing Adolf Hitler's comments that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.
Economy and cost of living
Trump and his campaign have consistently tried to use negative sentiment about the economy to attack Biden. In speeches, Trump frequently criticizes the president for doing too little to address the rising costs of food and housing, arguing that increased government spending has caused those costs to soar and blaming Biden administration policies for fueling inflation.
More recently, Trump has tried to link his immigration messaging to the economy, arguing that Biden's handling of the migrant surge has driven up costs — a claim he makes without citing clear evidence.
To bolster his case, Trump frequently cites the cost of gasoline and energy, arguing that costs have fallen dramatically under his administration and promising to address the problem by increasing oil drilling.
Trump has frequently asked voters whether the country was better off under his administration, pointing to the economic growth he inherited and that continued during his time in office. But he often ignores the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the U.S. economy during his final year in office, an impact that some economists say was exacerbated by his decisions to prioritize short-term economic growth over long-term stability.
Biden's rebuttal: Biden returned to his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, this year to highlight his working-class background and denounce Trump as a puppet of wealthy politicians rather than a friend of ordinary people.
During the debate, the president is likely to adopt a similar “Main Street vs. Wall Street” approach, trying to deflect criticism from Trump by highlighting his administration's efforts to reduce consumer costs on things like prescription drugs, bank fees and air travel.
The big question for Trump is to what extent he will attack Biden's mental and physical health.
On the campaign trail, Trump has mocked Biden's physical features, imitating the way he walks and talks and claiming his rival is mentally unfit to be president — attacks that have been met with raucous laughter and cheers at Trump rallies.
Trump will likely again argue that Biden is unfit to be president, but with Biden at the podium next to him, it's unclear how tough he will be, or whether he will say things that make him seem like the cartoons his supporters love. And if Trump makes a gaffe of his own, as he has done so many times before, it could backfire by drawing attention to any slip-ups Biden makes.
Biden's main line of attack
Biden and his campaign have signaled early and often that they plan to attack Trump on the twin issues of abortion and democracy, with polls showing voters have more confidence in the president than his predecessor.
Right to Abortion
Democrats have honed a simple message when it comes to abortion: “Donald Trump did this.” And that doesn't just apply to overturning Roe v. Wade.
Since the 2022 Supreme Court decision, Biden and his allies have blasted Trump over abortion bans in Arizona and Florida, an Alabama court decision that jeopardized the use of in vitro fertilization and efforts to restrict access to birth control.
“Let's be clear: There is only one person responsible for this nightmare, and he owns it and brags about it: Donald Trump,” Biden said at a campaign event shortly before Florida's six-week abortion ban went into effect.
Protecting abortion access has strong bipartisan support, as shown by successful ballot initiatives in Republican-leaning states, and Biden made broader claims on the campaign trail that Trump was trying to set the country back on women's equality, including by allowing states to monitor women's pregnancies and prosecute them for having abortions.
Trump's rebuttal: After months of conflicting messages, Trump said in April that he believes abortion rights should be up to the states and that he wouldn't sign any bans if Congress came up with them. He has criticized strict abortion bans but has falsely claimed that most Americans are comfortable leaving abortion regulation up to the states. He also did not answer questions about mifepristone, a drug widely used for medication abortions.
Democracy
Few topics excite Biden more than the threat he believes Trump poses to American democracy.
The president gave a speech, and his campaign produced an ad dedicated to the issue, in which he condemned Trump's role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, highlighted the former president's comments that he would not be a dictator “except on his first day in office,” and accused him of encouraging political violence.
“Folks, what's at stake in 2024 is our freedom, our very democracy,” Biden said in Detroit last month. “That's no exaggeration.”
The president called out Trump by name and challenged him to a fistfight at several points while discussing the brutal assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Trump's rebuttal: Trump has frequently claimed Biden talks about democracy to distract from his own policies, and has accused Biden of being a greater threat to democracy, citing Biden's unsubstantiated claims that the president orchestrated four criminal cases against him and is weaponizing the Justice Department to prosecute and persecute him.
The big question for Biden is whether to call Trump a “convicted felon.”
Biden has been generally reserved when talking about Trump's conviction in the Manhattan hush-money case, with some Democrats urging him to be more forthcoming and loudly denounce his opponent as a “convicted felon.”
On stage in Atlanta, Trump will have the opportunity to highlight the conviction but is almost certain to repeat false claims that the president was behind the attack.
