Morning Report — What to watch for as Biden, Trump go head-to-head

Thursday’s debate between President Biden and former President Trump could set the tone for the next few months of the campaign, as the two candidates meet face-to-face for the first time in four years.

Morning Report spoke with The Hill’s Niall Stanage, who will be in Atlanta Thursday to cover the event, about what to expect from Trump and Biden.

“It’s interesting that President Biden seemed to be the main instigator of having a debate so early,” Stanage said. “To me that suggests that he wants to put quite a lot of focus on Trump and change the trajectory of a race [where] most polls have Trump leading the battleground states by a narrow margin.”

The Hill/Decision Desk HQ: Here is how Biden and Trump match up in an average of polls.

In The Memo, Stanage writes that Biden’s campaign believes the debate is an opportunity to remind voters of Trump’s behavior while in office — and that they face a binary choice at the ballot box in November. Two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Biden is expected to put the spotlight on the former president’s role in appointing justices who made the ruling possible.

Trump, meanwhile, is expected to attack Biden’s record on immigration and inflation — topics that have been consistent vulnerabilities for the president.

As both candidates are preparing to go on the offensive, the perils for the 81-year-old Biden are many, especially if any moment sharpens existing doubts about his acuity. Stanage said the 78-year-old Trump’s performance will be harder to gauge, “because he’s so divisive. I expect Trump will be Trump, and that means that his fans will love him, and his detractors will hate him.”

From assuaging concerns about Biden’s age to fending off fact-checks from the moderators, CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, and dealing with no studio audience, political strategists shared tips with The Hill’s Caroline Vakil about how Biden and Trump could or should approach the debate.

A note on scheduling: This week’s debate is historically early and before either candidate is officially nominated. CNN as host June 27 and ABC News on Sept. 10 is an itinerary with rules and details accepted by both candidates and their campaigns. It bypasses this year’s proposal by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has handled debate logistics since 1988.

Typically, presidential debates occur in the fall and are scheduled within the span of a few weeks. This year, Stanage noted, “it was hard to justify [the commission’s] reluctance to bring forward debates before early voting started.” With the scheduling changes, the second presidential debate will take place in early September, so the aftereffects of a good — or bad — performance Thursday are sure to become campaign trail fodder for months.

“If you have a bad night, you can’t recover quickly by going up a week later and having a great debate,” Stanage said. “It’s going to linger for a while.”

Even then, great debate performances don’t often stick in voters’ minds. Gaffes and clever attacks that leave an opponent flat-footed are what people remember weeks and months later, and, Stanage added, “the impact is almost always a negative one.”

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Today is primary day in New York, Utah, Colorado and South Carolina. Here are five things to watch for.

In Virginia, Rep. Bob Good said Monday his campaign would file a legal challenge to “try to block certification” of the Republican primary election in Lynchburg, Va., as he trails his opponent in the vote count (NBC News).

In the Maryland Senate race, Democrat Angela Alsobrooks leads Republican Larry Hogan, the centrist former governor, by 11 points in a new state poll. Hogan went after Alsobrooks in the first attack ad of his campaign Friday, hitting the Prince George’s County executive over her record on crime.

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LEADING THE DAY

CONGRESS

Eyeing Congress’s July 4 break, House leaders want this week to bring three annual spending bills to the floor. Lawmakers are back in the Capitol today with an ambitious schedule to get all 12 appropriations measures done by the middle of next month, coupled with heightened wariness about their penchant for appropriations dramas. The House GOP bills aren’t expected to pass in the Senate or capture support in the White House.  

On the docket this week are measures to fund the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and foreign operations, and the Defense Department. The House Rules Committee today will begin considering controversial amendments that in some cases aim to showcase election-year politics.

When Republicans eventually disclose their proposed bill to fund the Justice Department, it may include retaliatory language some conservatives favor to try to defund prosecutors who have criminally charged Trump in multiple jurisdictions (Politico and Punchbowl News).

Elsewhere in the House Republican ranks Monday, first-term Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), a Freedom Caucus member, took aim at Attorney General Merrick Garland with her pledge to deploy a nearly extinct resolution called “inherent contempt” to punish him for rejecting a subpoena from Congress. Republicans want Garland to turn over audio of special counsel Robert Hur’s interviews with Biden about his retention of classified documents. Hur issued a report and recommended no charges against the president. There are transcripts, but Republicans want the audio on the theory that it might reveal a slow-thinking, cognitively muddled president, one of the GOP campaign themes against Biden.

Meanwhile, legislative battles over taxes have begun. Senate Democrats say their Republican colleagues are blocking a bipartisan package that would expand the child tax credit and give tax breaks to businesses. It’s the second time this year that presidential politics scuttled a major bipartisan deal in the Senate and created a wedge between Trump allies and the business community, The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports corporate tax extensions crafted by Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), part of a now-stalled framework for a tax bill.Senate Republicans, including Finance member Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), did not like the idea of Biden mailing checks to families before Election Day. 

✉️ A bipartisan group of senators, including Wyden, Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), want to overhaul a U.S. Postal Service program that monitors the outside of mail and packages without Americans’ knowledge. They want a federal judge to approve the surveillance. The chief postal inspector, Gary Barksdale, this month turned over a decade of data about the program but declined to change the policy, The Washington Post reported.

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ZOOM IN

COURTS

The Supreme Court’s Monday decision to weigh in on Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban for minors sets the stage for a potentially blockbuster case this fall, write The Hill’s Zach Schonfeld and Brooke Migdon. It marks the first time the justices will consider laws passed by 24 Republican-led states since 2021 that ban treatments including puberty blockers, hormones and surgery for transgender children and teens. LGBTQ advocates say they’re grateful for the opportunity to object to Tennessee’s ban — but are apprehensive about how Supreme Court justices will rule.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange agreed to plead guilty to one felony count related to obtaining and disseminating classified information as part of a deal with the Justice Department. He could be freed after spending five years in a British prison, according to court documents. Assange, who will be 53 on July 3, spent more than a decade fighting extradition to the U.S. A judge must approve the deal.

▪ Axios: Hunter Biden sought a new trial on federal gun charges Monday. A sentencing date on three convictions has not been set.

▪ The Hill: The Supreme Court, working to wrap up its term by early July, will hand down opinions Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week.

▪ The Hill: Here are five things to watch as Trump’s Supreme Court immunity decision looms.

▪ The Washington Post: A Justice Department lawyer arguing for a limited gag order to be imposed on Trump presented an uneven performance Monday during a hearing before federal Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida and apologized. Cannon is unlikely to rule in the next few days. 

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ELSEWHERE

INTERNATIONAL

In Washington, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant Monday on the need for Israel to swiftly develop a robust post-war plan for Gaza and ensure the tensions with Hezbollah do not escalate further (Reuters).

But the viability of a U.S.-backed proposal to wind down the 8-month-long war has been cast into doubt after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this weekend that he would only be willing to agree to a “partial” cease-fire deal. His comments sparked an uproar from families of hostages held by Hamas, and they come at a sensitive time as the two sides appear to be moving further apart over the latest cease-fire proposal (The Associated Press).

The European Union will launch accession talks with Ukraine and Moldova today, the first step in what is likely to be a tough, years-long process toward membership. Ukraine and its neighbor, Moldova, applied to join the EU in 2022 after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine (Politico).

“I am grateful to everyone on our team who worked hard to make this historic step a reality,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Millions of Ukrainians, and indeed generations of our people, are realizing their European dream. Ukraine is returning to Europe, where it has belonged for centuries, as a full-fledged member of the European community.”

Reuters: Two key Trump advisers have presented him with a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine — if he wins the election — that involves telling Ukraine it will only get more U.S. weapons if it enters peace talks.

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THE CLOSER

And finally … 🐵 Physician, heal thyself. Or rather, chimpanzee, heal thyself.

Researchers have discovered some wild chimpanzees in Uganda consume plants used in traditional medicine to combat injuries and illnesses, such as diarrhea and tapeworms. The findings offered strong support for “novel self-medicative behaviors in wild chimpanzees,” the scientists wrote in a new study, adding that further study of chimp behavior could “benefit our own species, potentially leading to the discovery of novel human medicines.”

The research team was surprised by the range of the ailments the chimps turned to plants for — and by the plants’ efficacy.

“Maybe it shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise,” Elodie Freymann, one of the team leaders from the University of Oxford, said in an email to The Washington Post, “because the chimpanzees are incredibly smart and it makes perfect sense they would have figured out by now which plants can help them when ill or injured.”

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