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).

BIDEN: "No, I haven't taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? C'mon man. That's like saying you, before you got in this program, if you take a test where you're taking cocaine or not, what do you think huh? Are you a junkie?" pic.twitter.com/f6UMPJq381

— Trump War Room - Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) August 5, 2020

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