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

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

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 Biden’s leadership — the buzzwords in Bidenland are choice and contrast — and warn that a second Trump term would be more radical than the first.

Trump has been eager to debate, too. He sees Biden as cognitively diminished since they last clashed on the debate stage in October 2020. Trump is savouring the chance to lay into 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.

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 person and his record as their own.

The Trump team believes an election that is a referendum on Biden’s tenure — including long periods of high inflation, increased migrant border crossings and instability abroad — will result in a victory.

For Biden, making the debate about Trump means confronting him on his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, his willingness to pardon people convicted in the riot — whom Trump has called “hostages” — and his promise to be a “dictator” on “Day 1”.

And one more — Trump’s new status as a convicted felon. The Biden campaign has begun to cast Trump’s legal woes under a broader umbrella that the former President is running mostly for himself.

For his part, Trump wants to avoid being dragged into a long back-and-forth on those topics. He has prepared for the debate with a series of discussions with allies and advisers that his team likes to brand “policy sessions”. Biden has been readying himself at Camp David.

New York Times News Service