Hey Donald: See you next Wednesday!
So the President and Donald Trump have provisionally agreed to two live debates, have they? The first is to occur next month and the second in September. I have no doubt that the President will keep his word. I can’t imagine why Trump would want to.
According to one of the President’s stipulations, the debate is to take place in an audience-free venue. Trump’s monkeys claim this is because Joe Biden is “afraid to face the American people.” That’s a pathetic little lie on its face, a lie easy to refute. The President faces crowds all the time, spontaneously cheering crowds without any plants. No, the reason Biden wants no audience is because an audience planted with MAGAs would be something Trump could play to. Bullshit is harder to spot when it’s occasionally interrupted by frenzied cheering. Just ask Hitler.
In a brilliantly conceived ad, Joe Biden dared Trump to debate him. “Make my day, pal,” a fit and lean Joe Biden says through a perfectly executed Clint Eastwood squint, glaring directly into the camera, “I’ll even do it twice. Let’s pick the dates, Donald, I hear you’re free on Wednesdays.”
That’s for the first debate. Trump’s criminal trial runs weekdays with Wednesdays off. So that will probably work for the debate in June. For the second debate, the one in September, Trump will either need permission from his parole officer or his warden to attend. Joe Biden will probably have the considerable advantage of debating a convicted felon by then, a felon who will be disallowed from voting for himself.
But those are just the external facts. The internal facts are that Joe Biden could whip Donald Trump in a debate with one hand tied behind his back. We know this because he already did, in 2020. That’s not just because Biden is far smarter and cognitively sharper than Trump. It’s also because Biden has the truth on his side, and facts that are supported by hard evidence — like statistics, documentation and day to day experience — are impossible to refute.
Even if Trump doesn’t slur his words, or talk about former President “Jimmy Conners,” he’s lost the debate before he’s started, because he has no facts to summon to his side. Above all, every time Trump tells a lie, Biden can refute it with facts. For example, Trump will try to portray himself as a victim of a corrupt administration that is abusing due process to derail his campaign. All Biden has to do is point out that Trump was indicted by a jury of his peers backed up by Republican witnesses. Many of those witnesses used to be members of Trump’s administration, you know, “all the best people.”
Trump would have to be insane to debate Joe Biden. That Trump is insane just might be the case. If Trump has an intervening moment of clarity he will try to weasel out of the debates on some idiotic pretext. After all, Sleepy Donald is a known coward. But he just might be crazy enough to go through with it. I hope so. It’s going to be one hell of a show. It’s going to be a slaughter. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.