It’s not that he needs to do the debate, but he did the first because it fed his ego of being a strong man. So, him having to back out of the debate without having a scapegoat will eat at his ego of a strong man. So this word salad he spews setting the stage to duck the debate is as about rationalizing it to his ego far more than any real campaign reasoning. Trump does everything for Trump, and this whole campaign is largely about getting in the White House so he can stay out of the big house (prison).
Edit victim of autocorrect
Is it?
I get that she was a prosecutor, but I’m simultaneously hearing people make this claim and at the same time say they haven’t seen her debate much, or she was unremarkable.
Guess I just don’t want to get my hopes too high. We really need someone quick-witted and who can bat the bullshit down.
I agree, it’s not like she can cross-examine Trump in a debate. She can say her piece during her allotted time (hopefully uninterrupted depending on the format), and Trump can ignore all of it, make up whatever he wants, and speak just as much as her, without any requirement to respond to anything she says.
So while her skills are certainly relevant, I don’t think the debate is necessarily the situation where I would say it’s her specialty. (Doesn’t mean she won’t do great, and I hope she does, but debating with Trump is definitely a “wrestling with a pig” kind of situation most of the time.)
Yeah, seems likely that other republicans knew Biden’s condition was worse than the campaign was letting on and Trump was banking on that for the debate (and election in general).
Well listening to all the conspiracies coming from the Right prior to the debate they expected the Biden we saw at the State of the Union. And afterwards they accused him of being on performance enhancing drugs (because he could make whole logical sentences that Trump is struggling with these days).
Trump had a plan of just spewing a bunch of shit and calling Joe names, full stop. He got lucky that Joe made that easier for him, although he still made more sense than Trump. The Right has been running on the following since Trump announced:
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The immigrants that our economy depends on are out to replace white people/kill and rape white women/bring crime.
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Joe is old/sleepy (and sometimes responsible for things Trump did).
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Bury any mention of Project 2025 because nobody but elite Christofascists will benefit from it, and thus wildly unpopular even with the right.
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Keep Trump out of jail.
Edit ugh spell check
I dunno, I remember that days before the debate, there was an article that was talk about how the republicans were painting themselves into a corner with all of their Biden has Dementia rhetoric because they were setting the bar so low that if “Biden finished the debate with a pulse, he would have won by their metrics”. It’s probably the old case of double talk, really. Biden was simultaneously both a roided out giga brain secret Stalin and a feeble confused old man prepared to die at literally any second.
