Within six weeks, Donald Trump was gone irony President Joe Biden As a stalwart debater who can barely speak in praise of his talents ahead of the first debate in the 2024 presidential election.
“Crooked Joe Biden is the worst debater I’ve ever met – He can’t string two sentences together!” Trump wrote on the social media platform on May 15. Two days later, he said in a speech to the Minnesota GOP: “He can’t speak. He can’t walk. He can’t find his way off the stage. You can’t put two sentences together.”
But recently, ahead of Thursday’s debate in Atlanta, Trump struck a different tune, saying he had watched Biden’s vice presidential debate since 2012 and admired his opponent’s skills.
“He beat Paul Ryan pretty bad,” Trump said in an interview with the “All-In Podcast” published Thursday. “And I think he’s going to be a decent debater. I would say that I don’t want to evaluate him.”
Trump’s allies are wary of making the same mistake they did before Biden State of the Union speech in March, when the Trump world denounced Biden as a frail old man and set expectations so low that he easily surpassed them.
This time, Trump’s team is making a last-ditch effort to flip the script and play the expectations game differently, warning that Biden will be well prepared for the moment. His team is also going after CNN’s moderators to work the judges and argue that it was the media, not Trump, who lowered the bar for Biden.
“The media wants to play down Joe Biden’s debate performance so much that he’s getting a participation trophy just for standing up for 90 minutes, but make no doubt about it – Biden will be highly prepared and alert on debate night, relying on the same perfectly calibrated. praised for his 2024 State of the Union speech or his 2012 VP debate beating of Paul Ryan,” said Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung.
Cheung said the “real yardstick” is whether Biden can defend his record in office against Trump’s first-term record without any “interference” from debate moderators.
A Biden campaign official said Trump was “clearly trying” to blame someone other than himself if he were to lose the debate, and that the campaign was prepared to back down.
“We see this as setting the predicate for when and when Trump will have a bad night,” said the Biden official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the campaign’s thinking. “When Trump feels he can lose, he sets up this authorization structure to make excuses for himself. … He likes to be angry.”
Trump’s zigzag rhetoric points to this Biden’s bigger fight in brandinghe has spent years discrediting him—sometimes as a cowardly old fool barely aware of his surroundings, and other times as a mastermind who skillfully manipulated the justice system to secure Trump’s indictments and convictions for criminal activity without a trace of evidence. indicates that he is participating.
At a rally in Philadelphia on Saturday, Trump alternated between the nicknames “sleepy Joe” and “crooked Joe” — the former echoing the image of Biden he’s now trying to shed — and even claimed without proof that Biden may use drugs for energy.
“He is sleeping now because they want to make him good and strong. So, just before debate time, he takes a hit… They want to boost him. … I’m saying he’ll be out quick, right? All of them have raised their heads,” said Trump.
After a moment he added, “But anyway, I’m sure he’ll be ready. Whatever happened to all the cocaine that was missing from a month ago in White—” he said, before changing the subject. He was referring to the substance found in the White House compound. The Secret Service said “Preliminarily tested positive for the presence of cocaine” last July.
Trump similarly called for drug testing in his 2020 debate with Biden and suggested, again without any evidence, that Biden “took something” in the debate. Biden, then ridiculed his claimhe says, “He’s a fool.”
In Philadelphia, Trump also criticized CNN anchor and debate moderator Jake Tapper. His campaign did so on Monday, sending spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt to the network to repeatedly attack Tapper, until he left the midsection, ignoring calls not to get personal with network staffers. Trump’s team promoted the segment aggressively on social media.
“Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are respected veteran journalists who have covered politics for more than five decades together,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement Monday. They have extensive experience handling major political debates this cycle, including CNN’s Republican Presidential Primary Debate. There are no two people better equipped to co-lead an important and fact-based debate, and we look forward to the June 27th debate in Atlanta.
“Both things can be true at the same time,” Leavitt said in the interview, denying that Trump’s portrayal of Biden as mentally incompetent and effective at the same time is contradictory.
“Joe Biden is cognitively declining,” Leavitt said, adding: “Joe Biden, at the end of the day, is still a career politician who has been doing this for decades.”