Former President Donald Trump smells blood in the water, and with good reason.
His likely 2024 opponent, President Joe Biden, is being handled with kid gloves by the puppet masters of his administration. He appears frail, feeble, confused, and utterly incapable of handling the rigors of a standard adult workload.
And that's on a good day.
Concerted media efforts for the last five or six years aimed at gaslighting everyone into believing that Biden was vigorous and healthy, when all of us who have watched an elderly loved one slowing slipping through the stages of dementia, Alzheimer's, or general cognitive decline, knew exactly the opposite to be true. Their lies were undoubtedly well-intentioned in their own minds, having convinced themselves it was absolutely critical to get Trump out of office. Does that justify the elder abuse that they have subjected Biden to? Not in my estimation, no. But they seemed to think it did, and that's why we find ourselves in this current cultural moment: a feeble, frail president and a challenger eager to humiliate him.
First came Trump's appearance in a town-hall interview with Fox News' Laura Ingraham, where he threw down the debate gauntlet:
"Frankly, I think we have an obligation. When you have the final Republican, the final Democrat, you have the two people, you have to debate regardless of polls," Trump said.
Trump added he'd be willing to do "as many as necessary."
"I would like to do it starting now," Trump said. "I don't think [Biden's] going to debate though. I really don't think so."
Trump is almost certainly correct. Biden is not going to debate because he can't. The current president struggles to field softball questions from sympathetic hosts. With a hostile opponent who possesses a penchant for combative interruptions and personal insults, Biden would undoubtedly be unnerved and unsettled to the point of embarrassment.
Knowing that to be the case, Trump continued his full court debate press at CPAC. But Democrats know it too, which is why so many of us are anticipating that the party will officially replace Biden with a different candidate at their summer convention, if not before.
But even if they don't, there is another avenue the Biden team can exploit, and it's all thanks to Trump's own strategy (or lack thereof). Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) highlighted it, as he encouraged Biden to forgo any debates with his predecessor, arguing,
"The fact that former President Trump was unable to conduct himself in just a minimally reasonable way" during the 2020 debate "and that he's refusing to debate any of his primary opponents this time would make a pretty strong case for not dignifying him as a candidate by sharing a debate stage," Coons said.
Yep. This is why while so many people were praising Trump's calculating strategy to avoid getting on the same stage as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (and the others, though DeSantis was likely the only serious competition), several others were pointing out this would be the consequence.
Simply put, your protestations that "candidates have an ‘obligation' to voters to appear on a debate stage" sound hollow when you have purposefully denied them that for the sake of your own campaign. Don't criticize Biden for doing the same thing you just did.
Trump's lone remaining competitor, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has picked up on it, posting recently to Twitter:
The truth is that Mr. Trump's comments to Ingraham and the CPAC audience were completely correct. Political parties have ruined this country in ways that you might be tempted to say no one saw coming.
Except, of course, George Washington himself saw it coming and warned us all about it explicitly in his farewell address.
Honestly, the American people deserve to see unscripted candidates debating ideas with one another in both the primary and general elections. Instead, we often settle for party-orchestrated dog-and-pony shows facilitated by some of the media's worst.
