Presidential debates can define a candidate with a single quip, gaffe or meme – how will Trump and Biden fare?

Let’s get ready to ramble!

Tuesday night’s presidential debate will answer a lot of questions — and the candidates may too. Is Joe Biden the zombie the president and Fox News have painted him to be? Can the fast-talking president be fact-checked in real-time? Will Fox News standout Chris Wallace manage to keep things civil?

While those riddles won’t be solved until the cameras start rolling at 9 p.m. ET, a look at debates past raises the bar for the 74-year-old president and his 77-year-old Democratic challenger.

The first televised debate set the precedent for all to follow in 1960 as a calm, collected John F. Kennedy stated his points while a pasty Richard M. Nixon looked like a man with a lot on his mind and sweat on his brows. What the candidates said may not have been as important as how they looked saying those things. Kennedy won the election by less than 1%, but Nixon bounced back finally winning the White House in 1968 and being re-elected in 1972 before leaving in disgrace two years later.

There may have been no better a speaker in the White House than Ronald Reagan who booted Jimmy Carter out of the White House with a line the Harvard Kennedy School called “one of the most important campaign questions of all time” in a presidential debate.

“Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan asked voters a week before the election.

In a bold move, Reagan ran on Carter’s record of the previous four years.

“Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?" Reagan asked in his only debate with Carter. "Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was. do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years?”

According to the former actor, if the country had improved under Carter’s presidency, the Georgian farmer-turned-politician deserved to be re-elected. Voters agreed Carter’s presidency had not made the country better and put “The Gipper” in office for his first of two terms.

Well, there he goes again.

Seeking re-election in 1984, Reagan brought the zingers for his debates against Walter Mondale. In addition to invoking the phrase “There you go again," which he also used when Carter got on a roll four years earlier, the 73-year-old incumbent used humor to assure voters he wasn’t too old for the job, despite several mental lapses he had during their first debate.

“I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan said. "I am not going to exploit for political purposes mu opponents youth and inexperience.'

His 56-year-old opponent joined in the laughter that ensued. Reagan won 49 states in the election.

Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush struggled to connect with voters as effectively as his boss when he ran for re-election in 1992 and was defeated by Bill Clinton, who assured the electorate “I feel your pain” during a recession.

Time may have run out on Bush during his town hall debate with Clinton and Independent candidate Ross Perot when he was caught checking his watch as though he had better things to do. It didn’t help that Bush, a wealthy man who admitted he didn’t know the price of milk in that debate, struggled to give an example of how the recession had hurt him personally. Clinton knocked that question out of the park with stories of people he’s met who had been forced to change the way they live because of the poor economy.

Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, didn’t fare much better in debates. Though the Bush-Quayle ticket won in 1988, the 41-year-old Indiana politico became a punchline after claiming he would be ready to assume the presidency if need be because he’d spent as much time in Congress as President Kennedy before the Democratic icon was elected in 1960.

Democratic candidate Mike Dukakis' running mate Lloyd Bentsen calmly cut Quayle down to size.

“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine,” Bentsen said. “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Staring like a deer caught in the headlights, Quayle told Bentsen that comment was uncalled for. The cheering crowd disagreed. Quayle’s political career was never the same, but he did go onto become VP after Bush won.

George H.W. Bush wasn’t the only Republican candidate to be shot down by President Clinton. In 1996, the two-term Democratic president defeated Sen. Bob Dole who offered voters "a bridge to the past. Clinton countered by offering to build a “bridge to the future” during his campaign. During their debate, Clinton was given an opportunity to exploit Dole’s age, 73, which had been an issue. He did and he didn’t take the bait.

“I can tell you that I don’t think Senator Dole is too old to be president,” Clinton said. “It’s the age of his ideas I question.”

Dole, who turns 98 on his next birthday, is alive and well in Kansas.

Measured, bright and composed, President Obama’s patient style of debate got him past GOP candidates in John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012 respectively.

McCain, who famously defended Obama at a rally when a GOP supporter began a racist tirade about the first black presidential candidate, accused his opponent of not extending the same courtesy.

“Congressman John Lewis said Palin and I were associated with segregation, deaths of children in church bombings,” McCain claimed. “That to me was so hurtful. And Obama, you didn’t repudiate those remarks."

Obama carefully distanced himself from that incident, but reminded voters that McCain had chosen an incendiary running mate whose rhetoric wasn’t doing either candidate any favors.

“Lewis... without my campaign’s awareness, said he was troubled with what he was hearing at some of the rallies your running mate was holding,” Obama said. “Shouting things like ‘terrorist’ and ‘kill him’ that your running mate didn’t stop or mention. I think Lewis' point was that we have to be careful with how we deal with our supporters.”

McCain reportedly expressed regret over making the bombastic Alaskan governor his running mate in his book “The Restless Wave.”

Palin, like President Trump, was excluded from McCain’s 2018 funeral. She called the snub a “gut punch.”

It’s anyone’s guess what Donald Trump will say at Tuesday’s debate, but trailing Democratic frontrunner Biden in the polls, the incumbent will be looking to score points. Trump’s shining moment in his 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton came when the Democratic candidate — who also led big at this point— said it was good that a man with Trump’s fiery and erratic demeanor didn’t run the nation’s justice system.

“Because you’d be in jail,” Trump said to the satisfaction of his fans in the audience.

While investigations into various Clinton dealings resulted in no criminal charges, Trump continued implying without facts that his opponent was a criminal, which resonated with his crowd. The chant of “Lock her up!" became a rally cry at Trump gatherings.