Prediction: Trump Will Weasel Out of the Presidential Debates
Be ready for the excuses to start rolling in.
Photo by Rohan Chang on Unsplash
President Joe Biden and the tax-dodging twice-impeached adjudicated sexual assaulter facing 88 indictment counts out on bail who could soon be a convicted felon former host of Celebrity Apprentice, aka “Donald,” have agreed to participate in two debates.
The first is the earliest ever be held, on Thursday, June 27.
The second, September 10.
I am not normally in the habit of making predictions, but I am going to make one now, which I actually hope turns out to be wrong.
Prediction: Trump is not going to debate.
Sure, he’s agreeing to it now, just as he promised his sycophantic cult followers he was going to testify in his election fraud trial, then didn’t.
Other examples of his ducking out recently include the republican primary debates. He did not attend a single one, boasting he had no need to since “The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency [sic] I had.” He even tried to have them canceled.
If he was too arrogant and confident to stand on a stage and attempt to distinguish himself from other GOP contenders for the White House, how must he expect to fair before an incumbent president with more single-term accomplishments than any in recent memory? If his presidency was in fact “successful,” wouldn’t it be something he would be excited to defend and remind voters?
A brilliant masterstroke from the Biden camp was negotiating a crowd-less first debate. That’s right: no audience. No one to cheer on Donald’s lies. No one to heckle, jeer, or distract either candidate. For someone who thrives off adulation like a tick, this is likely to drive Donald crazy.
The idea for robbing him of an audience began when Biden campaign advisors noted a crowd of Donald’s supporters’ outbursts throughout a CNN town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire last year threw off the moderator.
A Biden campaign advisor stated recently to Politico:
Trump feeds off the crowd, they give him life. We wanted to take that away.
Former Barack Obama aide David Axelrod explained:
If you watch Trump, that is a big part of how he energizes himself. And so I think that it will have some impact on him that he can’t play to the crowd and doesn’t have that kind of energy — that sort of modular energy that a crowd offers. I think that the Biden people, they won in negotiations on three points. It’s a debate without a crowd. It’s a debate without any third- party candidates. And it’s an early debate. And those three things make it about as good a situation as he’s gonna get.
Another aspect sure to disadvantage Donald is the fact microphones will be cut off when someone else speaks. This means neither Biden nor Trump will be able to interrupt each other. This won’t be difficult for Biden, but is sure to irk Donald, whose interjections have become part of his bullying strategy to garner crowd response and throw off his opponents’ momentum. While they were guilty of interrupting each other during their first debate in Nashville in 2020, Donald was responsible for 65%.
Will this prevent Donald from lobbing non-sequiturs, lies, embellishments, and word salad at the president? Absolutely not. But he’s going to look mighty foolish babbling incoherently like a ventriloquist dummy before a silent mic, and it will allow the American public an opportunity to hear Biden tout his successes and vision for the next four years without having to fend off sophomoric interceptions from a petulant man-child.
Donald is already setting up a pretext for ducking out.
Last week he demanded President Biden submit to a drug test before the first debate, referring to the right-wing lie that Biden was “high” during his March 7 State of the Union Address. So prepare for Donald to announce sometime within the next month he will refuse to debate if Biden doesn’t concede to said drug test.
Donald’s campaign is also attempting to claim the narrative by suggesting a third debate hosted by Fox so-called “news” moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum on October 2, but the Biden camp is having none of “playing games.”
Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon stated:
No more chaos, no more debate about debates. President Biden made his terms clear for two one-on-one debates, and Donald Trump accepted those terms.
Aside from his recent refusal of primary debates, Donald complained in 2020 about the moderators and backed out of one then when the format was changed to all-virtual. In 2016, he blamed the Commission on Presidential Debates for providing him a defective microphone that caused “audio problems”.
Ted Johnson reported in a piece in Deadline:
The latest tiff also is a warning that, while two debates have been announced, things could still fall apart. Alan Schroeder, the author of Presidential Debates: Risky Business on the Campaign Trail, wrote on X/Twitter that “news outlets should be careful about treating the Biden-Trump debates as a fait accompli. Debates in June & Sept now appear likely, but there’s still a lot of negotiating to do–and plenty of tripwires along the way.
And, no, President Biden did not rescind his acceptance to debate, contrary to a Facebook post.
I really hope I’m wrong.
The Biden campaign not waiting until the fall to start promoting its message and touting how successful the administration has been the past three years is a shrewd move. A debate before party conventions gives voters who aren’t paying attention yet a chance to see a side-by-side comparison of the two candidates so they can see just how much Donald has lost it.
Of course, Donald is likely going to be a conviction felon by next month, so maybe that will be his excuse.
He could always participate remotely while on house arrest.