What to really expect from tonight’s Biden vs Trump presidential debate

| 2:40 pm EDT June 27, 2024
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In a historically bizarre development, President Joe Biden will be debating recently convicted felon Donald Trump tonight. Biden is seeking reelection on the premise that he’s accomplished a lot of good in his first term. Trump is running in the hope of avoiding prison. If that doesn’t make things surreal enough, throw in the fact that Trump keeps displaying symptoms consistent with severe and worsening dementia in all of his recent public appearances, and the whole thing seems even more bizarre. Yet nonetheless here we are.

The media is largely trying to frame this debate as Biden being on his last legs and having to pull off some kind of miracle. But that’s nonsensical given that Biden has now pulled slightly ahead in most polls, even as Trump has struggled to deal with the narratives about his felony conviction and his worsening cognitive problems.

Trump’s babysitters and surrogates have spent the past week creating the perception that Trump was looking to bail on the debate. I suspected this may have merely been a strategy to lower the bar so that Trump could clear it just by showing up, and now it appears that is indeed the case. But no matter how low the bar may be for him, Trump isn’t going to be able to clear it tonight. This is a guy who doesn’t know who anyone is anymore and often resorts to using gibberish.

All that said, tonight may not move the needle all that much. Biden will outperform Trump, but since that’s the expectation going in, it won’t change much. Trump will need to truly bomb tonight for this debate to have a major impact. If the debate merely ends up being yet another instance of Biden outperforming Trump and nothing more, then we’ll likely see a continuation of the polls incrementally shifting in Biden’s direction in the coming weeks.

One thing to keep in mind: Biden pretty much locked up the 2020 election by taking the debate stage and telling a babbling Trump to “shut up.” Trump is even more despised in 2024. So Biden can win this debate just by putting Trump in his place.