In six weeks, Donald Trump has gone from mocking President Joe Biden as a feckless debater who can barely speak to praising his talents ahead of their first debate in the 2024 presidential election.
“Crooked Joe Biden is the WORST debater I have ever faced — He can’t put two sentences together!” Trump wrote on his social media platform on May 15. Two days later, he said in a speech to the Minnesota GOP: “He can’t talk. He can’t walk. Can’t find his way off a stage. Can’t put two sentences together.”
But lately, ahead of the debate Thursday in Atlanta, Trump is singing a different tune, saying he has watched Biden’s vice presidential debate from 2012 and appreciated his rival’s abilities.
“He beat Paul Ryan pretty badly,” Trump said in an interview with the “All-In Podcast” that published Thursday. “And I assume he’s going to be somebody that will be a worthy debater. I would say I don’t want to underestimate him.”
Trump’s allies are wary of making the same mistake they made ahead of Biden’s State of the Union speech in March, when Trump world disparaged Biden as a feeble old man and set expectations so low that he easily surpassed them.
This time, Trump’s team is making a last-ditch attempt to flip the script and play the expectations game differently, warning that Biden will be well-prepared for the moment. His team is also working the referees by going after CNN’s moderators and claiming it’s the media, not Trump, that’s lowering the bar for Biden.
“The media wants to lower Joe Biden’s debate performance bar so low he gets a participation trophy simply for standing upright for 90 minutes, but make no doubt about it — Biden will be highly prepared and alert on debate night, relying on the same perfectly calibrated dosage used to deliver his widely praised 2024 State of the Union Address or his 2012 thrashing of Paul Ryan in the VP debate,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said.
The “true benchmark,” Cheung said, is whether Biden can defend his record in office against Trump’s first-term record without any “interference” from the debate moderators.
A Biden campaign official said that Trump is making a “transparent” attempt to blame anybody but himself if he loses the debate and that the campaign is ready to push back.
“We see this as Trump setting the predicate for if and when he has a bad night,” said the Biden official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the campaign's thinking. “When Trump feels he might lose, he sets that permission structure to create excuses for himself. ... He likes to throw a tantrum.”
Trump’s zigzagging rhetoric points to his larger struggle in branding Biden, whom he has spent years disparaging — sometimes as a doddering old fool who is barely aware of his surroundings and other times as a mastermind who is deftly manipulating the justice system to secure indictments and convictions of Trump for criminal activity without leaving a trace of evidence that he was involved.
At a rally Saturday in Philadelphia, Trump alternated between his “sleepy Joe” and “crooked Joe” monikers — the former reflecting the portrayal of Biden he’s now trying to jettison — and even claimed without evidence that Biden could use drugs for energy.
“He’s sleeping now because they want to get him good and strong. So a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the a--. They want to strengthen him up. ... I say he’ll come out all jacked up, right? All jacked up,” Trump said.
A moment later, he added: “But anyway, I’m sure he’ll be prepared. Whatever happened to all that cocaine that was missing a month ago from the White —” he said, before changing the subject. He was referring to a substance found in the White House complex that the Secret Service said last July “tested preliminarily positive for the presence of cocaine.”
Trump similarly called for drug testing in his debates with Biden in 2020 and suggested, again without any evidence, that Biden was “taking something” in the debates. Biden, at the time, mocked the claim, saying: “He’s a fool.”
In Philadelphia, Trump also disparaged CNN anchor Jake Tapper, a debate moderator. His campaign followed that up by sending spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt on the network Monday to repeatedly attack Tapper, until she was cut off mid-segment after she ignored calls not to get personal with network employees. Trump’s team aggressively promoted the segment on social media.
A CNN spokesperson said in a statement Monday: “Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are well respected veteran journalists who have covered politics for more than five decades combined. They have extensive experience moderating major political debates, including CNN’s Republican Presidential Primary Debate this cycle. There are no two people better equipped to co-moderate a substantial and fact-based discussion and we look forward to the debate on June 27 in Atlanta.”
In an interview, Leavitt denied that Trump’s portrayals of Biden as mentally incompetent and yet effective were contradictory, saying, “Two things can be true at the same time.”
“Joe Biden has been cognitively declining,” Leavitt said, while adding, “Joe Biden, at the end of the day, is still a career politician who has been doing this for decades.”