Joe Biden has more to lose by debating than Donald Trump does | Opinion

When Joe Biden challenged Donald Trump to debate in June and December, our Democratic president may have handed the election to his erratic predecessor.

The worst that can happen to Trump is that he’ll be exposed as the serial liar and wannabe autocrat he is. Who doesn’t already know that?

For Biden the stakes are much higher. He’s prone to the typical political falsehoods of every politician. If he commits too many, he risks putting himself on the same plane as his dissembling opponent.

Biden also risks exposing himself as too old for the job. People who intend to vote for him have to face the fact that he is not the man he was even a decade ago.

True, Biden aced his State of the Union speech, but that was reading a prepared and practiced oration from a teleprompter even if he did go off script from time to time. Debates require thinking on your feet, exactly the skill that slow Joe doesn’t really have anymore.

If Biden exposes himself as unable to be president, he’s done. Thinking on the run is core to the presidency when a crisis hits. If moderate voters aren’t comfortable with Biden’s brain, they won’t turn out.

Being behind in the polls, Biden needs to regain those voters and more. He needs to keep the never-Trumpers who could write in Mitt Romney. And he needs to lure back those Democrats flirting with Robert F. Kennedy’s third-party bid.

And that’s not the only advantage that Trump will enjoy on the debate stage.

Trump will have two opponents to score points against when he debates first on CNN and later on ABC: Biden and the journalist moderators. Biden needs the moderators not to rile Trump’s base.

Any moderator on stage with Trump will be thinking about how they come across to a very small audience. The other journalists and news leaders they need to impress to advance their careers. Their fellow journalists aren’t looking for the same kind of performance that swing voters are.

And that’s why moderators face a dangerous incentive for them to stride to center stage and take on Trump when the world’s most prominent criminal defendant veers off into fact-free fantasy land as he is prone to do.

That’s fine if the debate moderators are perfect, but if their language is slanted or their facts are off, Trump’s audience will react like they’re on crack.

The fact that national journalists live and work in a liberal coastal bubble only increases the chance that a moderator will step in it. National journalists have a herd mentality that often leads them astray on important facts — on whether cloth masks were protective during COVID-19, on whether the lab leak theory was credible and on whether the Hunter Biden laptop emails were real or Russian disinformation. Their blind spots could all turn into a nightmare for Biden.

Biden is in a tight spot. He’s behind or perilously close in a half-dozen battleground states that he won in the last election. He’s unpopular and plagued by inflation that is slowing, but not gone. He’s losing ground among Black men increasingly tempted by conservatism and young people turned off by his Gaza straddle.

Biden’s best hope is to get Trump to engage on policy issues where the former president is a lightweight. If Biden could corner the Trump on abortion where his position has become a muddled mess of flip-floppery and extremism (We’ll monitor pregnant women to make sure they have their babies. Yikes!), Biden could deliver a knockout bow revealing that the terracotta felon doesn’t know what he really thinks about any important domestic policy issue.

If I were a Democrat, I’d be sweating bullets every hour we wait for that June 27 debate. If Biden crashes and burns, at least there’s time for the convention to replace him with a young whippersnapper of 68 or something.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com