Trumping the Debate

How Donald Trump thinks he can’t really “lose” the debate—or the election.

Images courtesy of Vogue

The debate is in two days, and many are openly wondering if Trump is now planning to back out. The latest accusations by him and his campaign spokespersons are growing more shrill and unhinged, and some of his key allies like Sean Hannity have openly suggested he could pass on the first debate.

Before we assume that he’ll back out, we need to recognize that these moves are from a familiar playbook, one that leaves the option of bailing on the table but also accomplishes its primary goal, even if Trump decides to go ahead with the debate on Thursday.

Think of it as a prize match fight. But instead of training for it like a normal contender, Trump claims that the refs are biased toward his opponent and the match is rigged. After weeks of trash-talking his opponent as weak and stupid, suddenly with days to go Biden is not only a “worthy” opponent but also must be on performance-enhancing drugs. What else could explain his performance, right?

To understand Trump’s manipulation of the narrative, we need to first review how we got here. Then we can walk through the latest absurd accusations and importantly remember how every one of them is also a damning confession. That will help us understand how Trump is seeking to set up a win/win situation out of a lose/lose one. Knowing that, and getting it out there to the public, will help keep him from his goal.

“Any time, any place, any where”

For months, Trump had taunted Biden about not agreeing to debates. Like a schoolyard bully, Trump declared he would face Biden “any time, anywhere, any place.” Never mind that “where” and “place” mean the same thing.

But Biden surprised Trump by accepting his terms. Trump’s people were caught off guard, and before they could walk back anything, Trump posted on Truth Social that he accepted the challenge. But this meant he wound up agreeing to a very unfavorable format. There will be no live audience, the CNN moderators aren’t friendly to him, and mics will be cut off while the other candidate is talking.

The correct move would have been to start to downplay expectations around himself while setting the Biden bar higher. After all, if everyone is expecting Donald Trump to run circles around “Sleepy Joe” Biden but the very opposite happens, it will feel like a crushing defeat, like a No. 1 seed losing to a nothing team.

But Trump isn’t much for strategic thinking. Instead, Trump continued to falsely portray Biden as addled and frail, barely able to stand up, let alone face a scrapper like himself. At his rallies, he called Biden “a low-IQ individual” and “the worst, most incompetent, most corrupt president” in U.S. history. This is nonsense of course, and a major projection, but the Trumpy drumbeat continued. 

As I wrote about earlier, the GOP even deceptively edited videos of Biden at the Normandy celebrations and the G7 summit to make him appear weak. And Republicans amplified false rumors online that Biden had requested a chair to sit in during the debate, a claim CNN had to deny.

But as debate day draws near, Trump has abruptly shifted gears, perhaps realizing at the eleventh hour that his flock believes he can run circles around the President. Now he claims Biden is a “worthy debater” and even muses that he might even be better off losing to him on purpose. 

And some of his top surrogates, including VP contender Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, have begun to help raise Biden up. “This guy has got the ability,” Burgum said of Biden on CNN this Sunday. “We have seen him in the State of the Union this year, that, when he needs to, he can step up.”

But these expectation resettings are coming far too late. Baked into the brains of many voters is the patently false idea that Biden cannot form complete sentences and won’t last 90 minutes on stage against Trump—all of which are untrue if you’ve seen Biden live at all in the past few months. Viewers are likely to see a very different man on stage than the one portrayed in memes on social media and on Fox. And this helps explain the next attack.

“Just the right mix of stuff”

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) was the White House physician known for running a pill mill out of his office, doling out amphetamines like Adderall and Provigil. So it’s entirely predictable, using our “every accusation is a confession” rule, that Jackson would be the principal source of a baseless accusation against Biden.

Said Jackson about Biden on a recent podcast with Don Trump, Jr.,

“Some of those are drugs that are engineered to try and help with your cognition. Some of them are just to try and make you more awake—the amphetamine-type drugs like Adderall and things of that nature, and then there’s things like Provigil that increase your alertness. So, I think they’re probably trying to find just the right mix of stuff that can wake him up and make him a little bit more alert and with it.”

Jackson made a similar unfounded accusation on Fox. 

And he even wrote a letter to Biden demanding that he submit to a drug test before the debates. Trump shared that letter to his followers on his platform, Truth Social.

Trump Campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt picked up this idea. “If his team wants to prove that he’s not being artificially stimulated for big nights like these, then they should agree to a drug test,” she told Newsmax, wondering why Biden won’t accept such a thing.

This is some basic trolling, and the hard and fast rule is to never wrestle with a troll beneath his own bridge. Accepting a drug test would only lend more credence to Trump’s wild claims, create wilder conspiracy theories, and turn the event into more of a circus than it already is. 

And it’s not like Trump hasn’t leveled the exact same silly accusation before. As Tim Miller of the Bulwark podcast observed on MSNBC, “It’s worth reminding everyone that he tried this exact same playbook in 2020 in a losing debate. You just don’t remember that because time is a flat circle, these news cycles flash away. But he already tried this ‘Joe Biden is on drugs’ thing. It didn’t work then because Joe Biden is a teetotaler, and it’s just absurd.”

It’s also worth noting that it was Trump who refused a Covid test before the debate back in 2020 and then tested positive just days later, having possibly exposed Joe Biden to the disease. Trump is hardly in a position to be leveling demands for medical tests of any kind before debates.

As for cognition tests, the capper on the Ronny Jackson story is pure gold. At a recent rally, Trump challenged Biden to take a cognitive test, bragging that he had recently passed one administered by his physician, Ronny “Johnson.” He repeated the name several times incorrectly. Yes indeed, he got the name of his own cognitive test doctor wrong. Here’s a clip of that can’t-make-this-up moment:

A “rigged” debate

Trump and his allies are broadly suggesting that the debate is rigged, just like he has said about every contest he’s ever been in, from the Emmys to the 2016 Iowa Primary to the 2020 general election. In this case, it’s the CNN moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who Trumpworld claims are hopelessly biased. 

“I’ll be debating three people instead of one half of a person,” said Trump last week at a rally in Racine, Wisconsin, characteristically mangling the math.

The gist of the MAGA beef with the moderators was on full display during an interview of campaign spokesperson Leavitt on CNN. The interviewer, Kasie Hunt, cut off Leavitt and ended the interview after warning Leavitt against repeatedly attacking her colleague Jake Tapper for his alleged bias when the question was about Trump.

You can watch the exchange here:

Leavitt promptly went on Fox to argue that this proved the Trump Campaign’s point. The episode “shows that exactly what we’re saying is true, that CNN is not a friendly Trump network, and it won’t be friendly to him on Thursday night,” Leavitt said on FOX Across America. Never mind that CNN earlier had gifted Trump an entire town hall with a weak moderator and a friendly MAGA audience, all to widespread criticism from the left.

Trump ally Steve Bannon then had Leavitt on his show and used the terminated CNN interview to argue that Trump should pull out of the debate. He declared that if CNN didn’t apologize to Leavitt for shutting her down, Trump should cancel his appearance on the network this Thursday.

Host Jesse Watters of Fox went as far as to claim that CNN had “slapped a gag order on the Trump Campaign” just prior to the debate because Trump surrogates and spokespersons couldn’t go on the network and criticize the moderators.

Commentator Ron Filipkowski noted that this is, once again, straight out of the Trump playbook. Back in 2023, Trump said he wasn’t interested in any primary debates and that even Fox was a “hostile network” to him. Specifically, Trump claimed he could not trust Bret Baier as a debate moderator because he was unfriendly and never smiled during his interview of him.

Piecing it together

As I mentioned at the top, Trump is trying to set himself up a win/win situation out of a lose/lose one. 

The lose/lose one was this: In order for Biden not to overperform, Trump would have had to seriously lift expectations around his opponent, which to him would feel like a painful concession. He simply doesn’t want to say Biden is amazing, sharp and with it—not after years of saying the exact opposite. It goes against every instinct he has. Plus, if he did that and still lost the debate badly, it would feel doubly humiliating and pointless to Trump.

But in his mind there’s a win/win he can reach for. He can bad mouth Biden as a loser and a weakling while making up claims about his alleged amphetamine use (again, accusations are confessions). That way if Trump panics and needs to pull out of the debate, he has given himself solid reasons to do so. Joe Biden is cheating! And the networks are biased!

And if Trump doesn’t pull out yet still underperforms expectations—or Biden overperforms low ones he helped establish—he can at least still blame the moderators, or Biden’s alleged performance enhancing drugs, or even the microphone if he needs to, rather than accept the fact that Biden gave the more solid performance. Trump would always rather pull Biden and the entire debate down further than lift him up.

Like the election, Trump knows that, using this tactic, he can’t really “lose.” After a losing performance, he can always claim it was rigged against him. This takes away the winner’s victory and sets up an unfalsifiable claim: I would have won had they not cheated.

That’s what Trump is, and has always been, about. And like the election, that no-lose outcome is precisely what he’s trying to set up now with the debate.