Live updates: Walz is expected to accept the party’s nomination for vice president at DNC Day 3

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President Biden and former President Trump traded barbs and a variety of false and misleading information as they faced off in their first debate of the 2024 election.

Trump falsely represented the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a relatively small number of people who were ushered in by police and misstated the strength of the economy during his administration.

Biden, who tends to lean more on exaggerations and embellishments rather than outright lies, misrepresented the cost of insulin and overstated what Trump said about using disinfectants to address COVID.

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Vice President Kamala Harris is accepting the Democrats’ presidential nomination Thursday, exactly 60 years after another Black woman mesmerized the nation with a televised speech that challenged the seating of Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

The testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer to the credentials committee in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was vivid and blunt.

She described how she was fired from her plantation job in retaliation for trying to register to vote and brutalized in jail for encouraging other Black people to assert their rights. She told of arbitrary tests white authorities imposed to prevent Black people from voting and other unconstitutional methods that kept white elites in power across the segregated South.

Whether every eligible citizen can vote and have their vote be counted is still an open question in this election, said U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who’s speaking Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He got his first practical experience in democracy at Hamer’s urging in 1966, when he was a college student in Mississippi and she recruited him to register other Black voters.

Hamer has already been the subject of appreciation this week, as the Democrats’ convention began Monday.

▶ Read more about Fannie Lou Hamer

As Biden and Trump prepare, their teams are no doubt looking back at how past memorable debate moments came together, for good or ill.

Notable moments from past presidential debates demonstrate how the candidates’ words and body language can make them look especially relatable or hopelessly out-of-touch. They also can showcase candidates at the top of their policy game or suggest they’re out to sea.

But as one debate expert puts it, “Anything can happen.”

▶ Read more about some standout high moments, low moments and curveballs from presidential debates past

President Joe Biden and his Republican rival, Donald Trump, will meet for a debate on Thursday that offers an unparalleled opportunity for both candidates to try to reshape the political narrative.

Biden, the Democratic incumbent, gets the chance to reassure voters that, at 81, he’s capable of guiding the U.S. through a range of challenges. The 78-year-old Trump, meanwhile, could use the moment to try to move past his felony conviction in New York and convince an audience of tens of millions that he’s temperamentally suited to return to the Oval Office.

Biden and Trump enter the night facing fierce headwinds, including a public weary of the tumult of partisan politics. Both candidates are disliked by majorities of Americans, according to polling, and offer sharply different visions on virtually every core issue. Trump has promised sweeping plans to remake the U.S. government if he returns to the White House and Biden argues that his opponent would pose an existential threat to the nation’s democracy.

With just over four months until Election Day, their performances have the rare potential to alter the trajectory of the race. Every word and gesture will be parsed not just for what both men say but how they interact with each other and how they hold up under pressure.

▶ Read more about what’s at stake in tonight’s presidential debate.

Choosing public service over pure profit, CNN offered to let other networks carry the debate feed; ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, PBS and C-SPAN will all do so. The other networks also have the right to sell their own ad time during the two commercial breaks.

The networks had to agree to CNN’s rules — they must keep CNN’s insignia onscreen and can’t interrupt with their own commentators while the debate airs. Internationally, only CNN is carrying it.

The debate begins at 9 p.m. Eastern and will last for 90 minutes.

On Tuesday, Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan modified Trump’s gag order, freeing the former president to comment publicly about witnesses and jurors in the hush money criminal trial that led to his felony conviction, but keeping others connected to the case off limits until he is sentenced July 11.

Merchan’s decision clears the presumptive Republican nominee to again go on the attack against his lawyer-turned-foe lawyer Michael Cohen, porn actor Stormy Daniels and other trial witnesses. Trump was convicted in New York on May 30 of falsifying records to cover up a potential sex scandal, making him the first ex-president convicted of a crime. It’s not clear whether this will come up in the presidential debate, but it could.

In a five-page ruling, Merchan wrote that the gag order was meant to “protect the integrity of the judicial proceedings” and that protections for witnesses and jurors no longer applied now that the trial has ended and the jury has been discharged.

▶ Read more about his campaign’s response

What people remember from Biden and Trump’s first debate four years ago are likely the interruptions, the shouting and the “Will you shut up, man?”

Then-President Trump arrived at that first matchup in Cleveland seemingly determined to steamroll Biden at every turn, leaving the Democratic candidate exasperated and moderator Chris Wallace scrambling to regain control.

Now, in 2024, many of the rules insisted on this time by Biden’s team — and agreed to by the Trump campaign — are designed to minimize the potential of a chaotic rerun. Each candidate’s microphone will be muted, except when it’s his turn to speak. There will be no studio audience to chime in with hoots and jeers.

If the Biden-Trump debate this Thursday in Atlanta spirals into pandemonium, consider past as prologue.

▶ A look back at that first Biden-Trump faceoff on Sept. 29, 2020

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults say they are “extremely” or “very” likely to watch the debate live or in clips, or read about or listen to commentary about the performance of the candidates in the news or social media, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The poll suggests tens of millions of Americans are likely to see or hear about at least part of Thursday’s debate despite how unusually early it comes in the campaign season. Both Biden and Trump supporters view the debate as a major test for their candidate — or just a spectacle not to miss.

▶ Read more about what our poll could mean for both candidates