Speaking to conservative radio host Dan Bongino on Monday, former President Donald Trump called for a debate with President Joe Biden.
“I’d like to debate him now because we should debate,” he said. “We should debate for the good of the country.”
Speaking to reporters in Nevada, Biden gave an ambiguous response: “If I were him, I would want to debate me too. He’s got nothing else to do.”
Since 1976, there have always been presidential debates between the two major parties’ nominees, but most observers believe Biden will avoid debating before the election in November. Trump handed the Biden team a built-in excuse by refusing to debate his primary opponents, and the White House can always reach into its bag of tricks and whip out something along the lines of “the president refuses to debate insurrectionists or candidates with multiple criminal indictments.”
Biden’s mental health has declined to the point where he believes he recently spoke to former French President François Mitterrand, who died in 1996, and it is highly unlikely that the president’s handlers will allow their man to talk for two hours without a teleprompter. But should Biden insist on debating anyway?
Despite the same names being on the ballot, the 2024 race is quite different from 2020. Biden’s winning strategy four years ago was to “hide in the basement.” The president rarely held rallies or spoke to journalists, which worked because the then-77-year-old represented a return to normalcy after what Democrats and the press successfully painted as a chaotic four years under Trump.
Anthony Fauci had just hijacked Trump’s presidency, and the entire developed world was thrown into an artificial recession caused by lockdown policies. “Normalcy” was a convincing sales pitch. Biden’s tenure in the Oval Office, however, has been anything but normal.
Americans are witnessing an unprecedented invasion at the southern border, taxpayers are on the hook for funding two new proxy wars, and the Biden Justice Department has been weaponized against anyone deemed an enemy of the Democratic Party. Add in the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and an all-out war on American energy production, and you get a president with an approval rating in the high 30s. Trump now leads Biden in the RealClearPolitics average, and the president will have to take risks to change that.
If I were a gambler, I’d bet that the slightly younger and more coherent Trump would best Biden in a debate, but the president would have a series of built-in advantages. Most obviously, Biden would have a loyal army of corporate journalists eager to excuse away blunders and attempt to Jedi-mind-trick voters into thinking the president performed better than he did.
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Then there is the problem of Trump’s mental acuity. The former president misspeaks more frequently than he did while in office. He recently confused primary opponent Nikki Haley with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and a senior moment by Trump on a debate stage would torpedo the GOP’s best case against the president. Biden’s age and mental decline have been discussed so frequently by the Right that if he can avoid a complete collapse on national television, it could ease voters’ fears that the octogenarian can no longer perform his presidential duties.
Poll numbers will likely drive Biden’s decision on whether to debate, but if Team Trump gets its wish, there’s no guarantee it would be an easy win for the GOP candidate.
Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.
