Donald Trump has agreed to debate Joe Biden twice. Once in July on CNN and once in September on ABC. Why would he agree to go on those networks where every moderator they will select will run the debate as blatantly against Trump as they possibly can? They’ll shamelessly tilt the questions for Biden and against Trump. They’ll cut out his microphone whenever it might save Biden from an embarrassing moment and they’ll end by declaring that their in-studio polls show that Joe Biden won handily and Donald Trump is Hitler.
Now all of this is true. And Donald Trump knows all these things. And yet he accepted the debates immediately. I’ll assume that he believes that he has more to gain by these debates than lose. But is that true? I was thinking about what kinds of things the moderator could direct against Trump and score points against him. Obviously, they’ll concentrate on January 6th and abortion. But they might also throw in some COVID questions. After all, many on the Right are fairly angry at Trump for letting Fauci and his minions make our lives hell even before Biden got into office. Reminding people of that could be a way to hurt Trump.
Someone in the media suggested that Trump hasn’t completely agreed to all the conditions of the interviews and that he might still refuse at the last minute. Maybe that’s true and could explain why he has no qualms about being set up by the news channels. But refusing after the fact would represent an embarrassing retreat. People might think he’s afraid to debate Biden.
Two possibilities for accepting seem to me the most likely. The first is that he’s worried about his chances in the race and hopes for some kind of lucky break during the debate that would increase his chances of winning the election. Although Trump has led almost throughout the election period there are still several swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that are very close. And Trump needs at least one of these states to win. Maybe he thinks that these three states are among the ones that will be strongly influenced by a good debate performance. Because of how much Trump has at stake in the criminal cases against him, winning the presidency is almost a life and death situation for him. Maybe the extra chance to impress these voters seems extremely important to Trump for this reason.
A second reason why he may be so anxious to debate Biden is that he is convinced that he can utterly humiliate him on the debate stage and this will serve as the knockout punch for Biden’s candidacy. I think this may be the more likely reason.
Now it remains to be seen how all this turns out. After all this is a very dynamic scenario. Let’s start out just by looking at Joe Biden’s health. Based on how these things are handled by the Biden camp, Dopey Joe will be doped to the gills with some kind of cognitive booster; caffeine, amphetamines, Ritalin, whatever. Based on no information at all, my guess is Joe stroking out must be at least a reasonably high possibility. And even if he doesn’t keel over there’s no guarantee that the stuff coming out of his mouth won’t be in the, “cannibals ate my Uncle Bosey” level of daffiness. If either of those two scenarios play out, I’d call it a win for Trump.
But the opposite scenario can also occur. Biden could just stand there and spin lie after lie with absolute insouciance. This would match up to what happened back in the 2020 debates. The moderators took Biden’s side and his lies ended as the debate’s points against Trump in the press.
But things have changed quite a bit since 2020. Regardless if the moderators throw softballs at Biden, I assume Trump will go off script and attack Biden on all the various failures of his administration; inflation, immigration, crime and war. And Trump is one of the most vindictive guys around. With a little luck he’ll sting him enough so that Biden will take off on some self-justifying lie that will amaze even the moderators in its stupidity and obvious unlikeliness. Maybe that’s Trump’s biggest hope in all this. That he can wind up Biden enough to make him act like a nut on stage.
So, I’ll be watching in July. Should be interesting.