Will Trump attend the first presidential debate? Don’t count on it

We’re now a week away from the first Presidential debate, though even calling it the “first” is something of a presumption. Not only does that assume there will be a second (currently scheduled for ABC on 10 September) but it takes for granted that next Thursday’s event will go ahead. A lot can happen in seven days. If you believe the media, Joe Biden is likely to wander off and get lost in his own walk-in wardrobe or Donald Trump will be attacked by a juiced-up Chinese-powered supershark…

There have been a lot of shark attacks, lately. Have you ever noticed that?

Or perhaps neither, but the circumstances of the debate do take us deep into the politics and psychology of the presidential race as it currently stands.

The doubts arise because former President Donald Trump does not have a great attendance record when it comes to debates. After initially dominating the Republican race through a series of belligerent performances in 2016, he skipped the seventh after a falling out with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, and this year skipped all the Republican debates. Although he shared a stage with Biden in 2020, the results were so unfavourable that the GOP announced they would no longer cooperate with the Commission on Presidential debates. Trump had realised that debates did him few favours. It left the arrangements for this year in limbo until back in May when President Biden offered a face-to-face. It was a challenge that the former president could not turn down. “WORST debater I have ever faced,” he boasted on his Truth Social platform. “Let’s get ready to Rumble!!!”

Despite Trump’s apparent enthusiasm, it’s become a point of contention across the commentariat whether the former President will attend. Democratic strategist James Carville thinks it’s an “even bet”. Those odds make about the most sense.

First, the agreed debate format does not suit Trump. After his performances in 2016 and 2020 when he routinely shouted down Hilary Clinton and then Joe Biden, Trump has surprisingly agreed to a format designed to circumvent his strengths. There will be no partisan audience to encourage and validate his bad behaviour. Microphones will be cut after the speaker’s time has ended. The Biden team hope these arrangements will ensure that the debate is focussed on policy, where they feel their candidate is strongest. 

The second reason Trump might find other things to do next Thursday: there is no reason for him to attend. The polls have strengthened for Biden recently but not to the degree his campaign team would have hoped given Donald Trump’s most recent conviction in New York. Despite all the evidence to the contrary (unemployment levels lowest in over half a century, the US stock market at a historic high), many voters in the US are wrongly convinced that America is in recession. Democrats are still struggling to counter Republican messaging, especially across social media platforms such as TikTok.

The 2024 election might be one where voter turnout becomes key, with both sides struggling to motivate their bases. The evidence of Trump’s most recent campaign rallies is that Trump is facing some significant mental and perhaps physical impediments of his own. He is looking older and more dishevelled. Rambling speeches about sharks and boasts about his mental acuity (whilst misnaming his former White House physician, Ronny Jackson, who he called “Ronny Johnson”) do nothing to suggest he could match a technocrat like Biden in a policy forum. This logic is something Trump has acknowledged in the past. “But when you’re 40 points up […] why would I let these people take shots at me?” he asked Fox News last year. The same logic applies now, though the margin is much smaller.

Third, GOP-friendly media has been preparing the ground for Trump’s debate performance. The media have been selectively editing footage of Biden for weeks, something that has uncritically repeated on this side of the Atlantic. Biden was accused of wandering off, of being lost and disorientated, during the G7 Summit in Italy last week. The White House subsequently accused the media of creating “cheap fakes” when it was revealed that the video had been conveniently cut before it showed the President going over to congratulate a paratrooper who had just completed a jump. 

Another video allegedly showed former president Barak Obama helping to steer the President off stage during an event in California last Saturday hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. When not selectively edited, the video shows Biden pausing to listen to the audience calling to him before Obama places a friendly hand on Biden’s arm and they walk off together.

Much of this amounts to pro-active whataboutism as Republicans understand that the weakness of their candidate can be somewhat negated if they convince people of Biden’s evident physical dexterity problems. He has a very obviously stiffened gait due to age-related osteoarthritis, but more telling is his neuropathy in his feet. Anybody who has suffered or seen a family member with this condition will recognise the way he moves is indicative of a person who last lost some feeling in his feet. There is far less evidence that his problems extend to his mental facilities, despite the active promulgation of these rumours by the conservative press.

It’s perhaps indicative of where we are right now that on Fox News this week, Sean Hannity proposed that if Trump does lose the debate, it will be because Biden is taking the same “drugs” which he allegedly took ahead of his State of the Union speech back in March. Then, as now, the Republicans face a problem entirely of their own making. They have constructed a fiction about Biden that at once has some traction in the media but collapses any time Joe Biden is allowed to prove his detractors wrong. 

And that ultimately is the most compelling reason for Donald Trump to skip the debates. Indeed, it might be strategically wise. As we’ve seen, Trump’s difficulty is not his ability to make headlines. That problem, rather, is one for the Biden White House whose media strategy has been lacking recently. A high-profile debate with Trump might boost Biden more than it would help the former President. 

And yet it remains 50/50. 

Despite the evidence of his previous behaviour and the fact that skipping the debate would make strategic sense, Trump is also driven by the twin compulsions of pride and ego. Trump rarely turns down an opportunity to be in the spotlight. His ego will have him convinced that he can outperform Biden or, at least, make enough noise to distract from Biden’s aim to project calm authority. It’s not clear that the arrangements are so rigorous that the moderators, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will be able to control Trump should he decide to shout over the President. Trump relishes bad behaviour and if he does turn up, he can be sure it won’t be the dense, detail-heavy Q&A planned by the Biden team. One thing we know about Biden is that he is pathologically unable to rise above a scrap. Too often he offers to scrap with reporters and do push-ups on stage. Knowing that: Trump will bluster and blow, try to turn it into a rumble and pull the President into the mud. 

What America will make of that is another matter. 

@DavidWaywell

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