Joe Biden’s Campaign Tells Donald Trump “No More Debate About Debates” After Ex-POTUS Says He’s Agreed To A Third Matchup Hosted By Fox News

Ted Johnson
·2 min read
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Hours after Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s campaigns swiftly finalized plans for two presidential debates, the president’s team is already warning that his rival is “playing games.”

“No more chaos, no more debate about debates,” Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement this afternoon.

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It came after Trump posted on Truth Social that he had agreed to another debate, beyond the two, that would be hosted by Fox News on Oct. 2 and moderated by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

Earlier today, both campaigns said that they had agreed to participate in a June 27 debate hosted by CNN and a September 10 debate hosted by ABC News. Biden released a video this morning challenging Trump to two debates, much earlier in the election year schedule than have traditionally been held.

“President Biden made his terms clear for two one-on-one debates, and Donald Trump accepted those terms,” O’Malley Dillon said in the statement.

The Biden campaign also said that the debate host should be a network that had sponsored a 2016 Republican primary debate and a 2020 Democratic primary debate, terms that exclude networks like MSNBC and Fox News.

As O’Malley Dillon noted, Trump has a long history of complaining about the debates. He skipped all of the Republican primary debates this cycle, and even called for them to be canceled. In 2020, he complained of the choice of moderators and backed out of one of the second general election debates when the format was changed to an all-virtual event. At the time, Trump was recovering from Covid. In 2016, he claimed blamed audio problems on a defective mike and suggested that the host of the debate, the Commission on Presidential Debates, did it on purpose.

The latest tiff also is a warning that, while two debates have been announced, things could still fall apart. Alan Schroeder, the author of Presidential Debates: Risky Business on the Campaign Trail, wrote on X/Twitter that “news outlets should be careful about treating the Biden-Trump debates as a fait accompli. Debates in June & Sept now appear likely, but there’s still a lot of negotiating to do–and plenty of tripwires along the way.”

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