Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Will There Be A U.S. Presidential Debate This Year?

President Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Reuters/AFP

Tom Kludt, Vanity Fair: “We’ll Find Out the Night They Have the Debate”: A Trump–Biden Face-Off Is Yet Another Uncertainty in a Turbulent Election Year

The campaigns are at loggerheads over the debate schedule—as Team Trump proposes moderators. Bartiromo? Hewitt? Muir? Still, media insiders are optimistic. “Huge TV audiences,” said one. Trump’s “going to skip that?”

NBC anchor Chuck Todd was skeptical last year that President Donald Trump, who has spent years battling institutions and shredding norms, would agree to the general election debate schedule. Todd said he doubted “there will be debates as far as the way we’re used to them,” and that Trump “is just not going to agree to anything that somebody else suggests.” At that time, Trump was in a position of electoral strength. On Wednesday, however, Todd told me that “Trump is in the position where he needs more debates,” finding himself in the same precarious spot as Jimmy Carter in 1980. “Not only is Trump going to participate, he’s going to ask for more,” Todd said. “They’re already trying.”

A pair of network-news executives I spoke to this week also expect Trump will participate this year, even as he knocked the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates on Wednesday as “left-leaning” on Fox News and—unlike Joe Biden—has yet to commit to the three-debate plan unveiled last October. The executives cited the president‘s sagging poll numbers as a looming factor in the decision, with the debates potentially representing the last opportunity to resuscitate his campaign. Such expectations for the familiar election-year ritual, of course, come in an unprecedented cycle that has seen the national conventions upended and fundraisers held via Zoom.

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WNU Editor: The above author is confident that former Vice-President Biden will participate in this year's US Presidential debates, and that it is President Trump who is the unknown factor. I am not sure if this Vanity Fair columnist is watching how Biden is performing on TV. Case in point. This morning's interview with a sympathetic reporter went off the rails very quickly (see below).

5 comments:

RussInSoCal said...

If Trump had said what Biden said to that black reporter, there would be racial and mental-competence klaxons thundering from now until No 3.

Biden has been a weird, arrogant, bigoted moron his entire political career.

Anonymous said...

It's elder abuse and they should stop it. Just let him retire in dignity. Wtf

Anonymous said...

Biden thought that the mental competence question was a "When did you stop beating your wife" type of question. So he turned it around and and asked the reporter "When did you stop beating your wife" question of him. His choice of scenarios was very poor. Anyone else but a national level Democrat, who was considered important to the cause would have been fried, if they had uttered question.

Anonymous said...

NOW COMPARE THAT TO THE DEBACLE INTERVIEW WITH AXIOS...TRUMP TROUNCED AND A LAUGHING STOCK FOR SHEER STUPIDITY

Anonymous said...

Nah, the Axios interview just revealed liberal lies and liberal double standards.

As Rush points out liberals point to Reagan and Tip O'Neil and pretend that they had disagreements but at the end of the day the two Irishman could belly up to the bar together. Nothing could be further from the truth. Liberals were nasty then and they are nasty now.

Liberals called Reagan an amiable dunce among the nicer things they did=.

They called GWB a monkey and a shrub.

Liberals have a long history of insulting Republican president going back 4 decades. Lewis did not go to GWB's inauguration nor Trump's. After all that Trump is supposed to heap effusive praise on a race baiter?

We all remember how John Lewis lied in 2010 and how he tried to stir shit up. There was video of the incident and still he lied.