For decades, candidate debates have been pivotal moments in US presidential elections, helping to make or break voters’ opinions of the contestants’ personal style and demeanor, as well as their political skills. However, Biden’s team has not given any request for months about his desire to participate in the traditional debate, which is usually held in front of an audience and moderated by a well-known journalist.
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“I’d be happy to debate him,” Biden told radio host Howard Stern. “Okay, let’s organize it!” Trump campaign adviser Chis Lasivita wrote in X in response to the president, BGNES reported.
Presumptive Republican nominee Trump has declined to face his primary opponents in any debates in the 2024 cycle. But he has signaled his desire to take on Biden, who beat him in 2020, by saying on social media -earlier this year that he was ready to hold a presidential debate with Biden: “Anytime, anywhere!”
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Biden, who has denounced Trump as a threat to democracy, said last month that any agreement to debate with the real estate mogul “depends on his behavior.” The nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates has already set three dates and locations for Trump and Biden to face each other for the 2024 showdown — at American universities across the country in September and October.
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But Trump attacked the commission as biased toward Democrat Biden when it planned to move the third and final debate to a virtual format in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Then-President Trump himself had appeared in the second 2020 debate against Biden just three days before he tested positive for Covid. At the time, Biden had said he would not engage in another in-person debate with Trump while the Republican was still ill.
Such a debate could be a useful opportunity for both the 77-year-old former president and the 81-year-old current president to show stamina, as Biden is still haunted by Trump’s old nickname “Sleepy Joe” — and Trump has faced online taunts when he appeared to nod during his criminal trial in New York last week.
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