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Incumbent U.S. President Joe Biden and former leader Donald Trump sparred over the key topic of inflation at the first televised debate late on Thursday.
Trump, who served as the 45th President from 2017 to 2021, said that he had left Biden with an “unbelievable situation” in terms of the economy when he had left office.
Biden shot back by saying that Trump’s administration had botched the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had led to the economy cratering.
“The pandemic was so badly handled … The economy collapsed, there were no jobs, unemployment rate rose to 15%. It was terrible,” Biden said at the debate hosted by CNN.
“And so what we had to do was try to put things back together again, and that’s exactly what we began to do. We created 15K new jobs, we brought out a position where we have 800K new manufacturing jobs. There’s more to be done. Working class people are still in trouble,” Biden added.
According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, total nonfarm payroll employment was at 142.6M in December 2020, at the end of the last full year of Trump’s term. Meanwhile, consumer prices for all items rose 1.4% from 2019 to 2020.
In comparison, total nonfarm payroll employment was 157.2M in December 2023, at the end of the last full year of Biden’s presidency. Consumer prices for all items rose 3.4% from 2022 to 2023, as inflation remains elevated due to the upending of supply chains during the COVID pandemic.
“The thing we never got the credit for, and we should have, was getting us out of that COVID mess. (Biden) created mandates that was a disaster for our country, but other than that we had given them back a country where the stock market actually was higher than pre-COVID, and nobody thought that was even possible,” Trump said at the debate.
“The only jobs (Biden) created are for illegal immigrants and bounce back jobs, that bounced back from the COVID. He has not done a good job, he’s done a poor job and inflation is killing our country. It is absolutely killing us,” Trump added.
Earlier, a new Syracuse University/Ipsos American Identity poll found that three in five Americans were likely to watch a Biden-Trump debate.