Biden and Trump Announce Two Nights of Dread This Campaign Season

And just like that, Joe Biden and Donald Trump have two debates on the books, with the first coming in late June and the second in September.

We’ll see if they actually happen.

The development, after months of questions about whether we’ll see any debates this presidential election, came together in a couple of hours on Wednesday morning.

The Biden campaign’s chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, first sent a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates—a nonpartisan group that has organized the general-election presidential debates since the 1980s—informing it that Biden would not participate in CPD’s debates this fall. O’Malley Dillon explained that the CPD’s debates came too late in the season, after many Americans had already begun voting; that its “model of building huge spectacles with large audiences” wasn’t “conducive to good debates”; and that the CPD did a poor job enforcing debate rules, for things like speaking out of turn or over time, at the 2020 presidential debates.

Instead, O’Malley Dillon proposed that there be a first debate in late June, a vice presidential debate in late July, and a second presidential debate in September. The debates, she insisted, should be organized by broadcast networks that had hosted a Republican primary debate in 2016 and a Democratic primary debate in 2020; that they be “one-on-one” between “the only two candidates with any statistical chance of prevailing in the Electoral College”; and that the candidates’ mics only be on when it’s their turn to speak.

Shortly after the letter came out, Biden’s campaign announced that it had received and accepted an invitation from CNN to debate on June 27, and again on ABC on Sept. 10. Trump agreed to both, as well. (Trump also said he had accepted an invitation for a Fox News debate in October. A Fox News debate is probably not up Biden’s alley.)

Much more thought, including some reported campaign backchanneling, went into this outburst of social media bravado than meets the eye. And the more interesting strategizing, here, is from the Biden campaign.

Despite a popular belief among Democrats that Trump was the one who would skip out on debates, it’s the Biden campaign that’s been doing more hand-wringing. It wasn’t until a Howard Stern interview a couple of weeks ago that Biden committed to debating Trump at all, whereas Trump has been offering to debate more often (“anytime, anyplace, anywhere”). Biden’s age and mental fitness are top concerns for voters, and the prospect of the president struggling to speak extemporaneously before tens of millions of voters, in several debates, carries serious risk. All of the lines in O’Malley Dillon’s letter about how there was too much interrupting allowed in 2020, or what have you—wanna see some interrupting?—read like pretexts.

But the superseding problem facing Biden right now is that he’s losing the presidential race, even against an opponent whose current day job is as the defendant in a criminal trial related to his hush money payments to a porn star with whom he allegedly had an affair. If Biden can’t make himself more popular—and can’t get New York courts to livestream the Trump trial—he needs to find a way to get the camera back squarely on Trump to remind voters why they despised Trump’s presidency. If the June debate goes well for Biden, it could provide the sort of jolt his campaign needs. If the September debate goes poorly, well, there will be time yet for voters to forget it.

And though the first presidential debate would come sooner than it has during any cycle in memory, there’s still more than a month for this plan to go wildly off-track.

Though some details have been agreed to, others will require negotiating. CNN said in a press release today that the debate would be held in Atlanta, with no studio audience present. (Its condition that “a candidate’s name must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency prior to the eligibility deadline,” meanwhile, could put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out of luck.) But it didn’t say anything about mics being cut off or who would moderate, only that such “additional details will be announced at a later date.” ABC News similarly said in a press release that information on moderators, format, and other details would come later.

In other words, potential excuses abound. If the Biden campaign or the Trump campaign decides debating isn’t the right strategy, there are outs to be had and ways to spin it to blame it on the other side. What both sides have achieved today is checking the box that they did agree to debates at one point. They’re not cowards, after all!