Any presidential debate means risk. But for Biden and Trump stakes are sky high

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden’s challenge to debate Donald Trump in June, before the former president has even been awarded the Republican nomination, took many in his party by surprise.

The 81-year-old president is battling perceptions he’s too old for another term. And another faceoff with Trump could be risky. Any slip up or stumble will fuel concerns about his mental acuity and feed into fears Biden is past his prime.

But with Trump leading in many polls – even after his conviction on 34 felonies following a highly publicized criminal trial in New York – Biden is playing one of the few cards he has left.

“Biden needs to remind voters why they voted for him in the first place and why they fired Trump already,” said Jim Messina, who served as former President Barack Obama’s campaign manager during his reelection in 2012. “A head-to-head contrast is the best way to do that.”

The debate will give Biden the opportunity to remind undecided voters of Trump’s tumultuous exit from office – when a deadly contagion was ravaging the country and a violent mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Biden.

Biden’s campaign has also signaled he will hammer home Trump’s criminal convictions and Supreme Court appointments that led to the Roe v. Wade reversal. Trump’s pledges to cut the corporate tax rate and authoritarian rhetoric, such as his vow to only be a dictator on ‘day one,’ will also be fodder for Biden’s debate stage attacks.

“I think it's all upside for Joe Biden, and nothing but exposure and vulnerability for a very, very brittle Donald Trump,” said Center for American Progress CEO Patrick Gaspard, the political director for Obama's first campaign.

Biden has spent much of the past week at Camp David, the presidential retreat just outside of Washington, practicing for Thursday night’s faceoff against Trump in a television studio in Atlanta.

Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain is leading his prep. Biden’s campaign has declined to say who’s playing Trump, although it is said to be Biden attorney Bob Bauer.

Biden’s early prep work typically involves group brainstorming sessions with his staff that hone in on topics and messaging, said Bill Russo, a former longtime aide to Biden who was the deputy communications director for his 2020 campaign. The second phase is about knocking him off his game, Russo said.

“The purpose of doing the mocks is really to kind of make sure that that punch in the face happens not for the first time on the debate stage, in front of a national audience, but behind the scenes," Russo said.

Under terms Biden proposed and Trump agreed to, a studio audience will not be present during the debate. The candidates’ microphones will be muted except when it is a candidate’s turn to speak.

Even so, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who played Paul Ryan in Biden's 2012 vice presidential debate prep, said: “It's worth pausing a little bit just to sort of try to anticipate what kind of spectacle Donald Trump wants to put on.”

Candidates will be provided with a pen, pad of paper and a water bottle. They will be prohibited from bringing props or prewritten material. Campaign aides will also be barred from interacting with the candidates during the two commercial breaks. The faceoff will be moderated by CNN hosts Dana Bash and Jake Tapper.

According to Nielson, more than 73 million people watched the first general election debate in September 2020 between Biden and Trump. A second debate in October drew 63 million viewers.

With much of the American public disengaged in the electoral process, both candidates will try to use the debate to make news and get voters to start paying attention, said Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric.

“I suspect that Biden will find an opportunity to talk about American values and about his policy successes and about the threat that Trump represents to democracy in America,” said Mercieca, a professor in Texas A&M’s Department of Communication & Journalism. “I suspect Trump will try to find an opportunity to humiliate Biden – attacking him personally, calling him weak or old or making fun of his stutter or his son's legal troubles.”

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Both the Biden and Trump campaigns hope that by debating earlier this year, they can awaken tuned out voters and build preconvention momentum.

Trump has foregone traditional debate prep. He’s receiving verbal policy briefings and keeping up with the news, a Trump campaign official said. But he has not done practice rounds against a stand-in for Biden.

After weeks in a New York courtroom, Trump has made campaign appearances in battleground states his priority. His campaign says he will deliver a disciplined debate performance that is rooted in policy.

But as often happens with the unpredictable Trump, the Biden camp is expecting the unexpected.

“The president and the team have to prepare for any and all of them – all of those versions of Trump that might come out to debate,” Russo said.

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The expectations game

Both candidates have spent the weeks leading up to the debate lowering expectations for their opponent, with Team Biden warning that Trump is unhinged and desperately clinging to power, and Trump’s campaign painting Biden as a doddering old man incapable of stringing together a coherent sentence.

But each has dialed back those criticisms in recent days, apparently fearing that they’ve set expectations so low that even a lackluster performance by their opponent would be seen as a victory.

“That framing makes it easier for Biden to exceed expectations, though I doubt many Trump supporters will change their minds and vote for Biden if he looks stronger than they expected,” Mercieca said. “The Trump team has ‘poisoned the well’ in both directions. If Trump looks strong, it's because Biden is old. If Biden looks strong, it's because he cheats. Trump loves a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ frame.”

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After months of characterizing Biden as feeble and mentally diminished, the Trump campaign tried Tuesday to walk that back and reset expectations by praising Biden’s debate skills.

“It’s important to remind people that Joe Biden has been doing this successfully for 50 years,” top Trump aide Jason Miller said in a call with reporters.

Miller read off headlines from stories about Biden’s past debates and recent State of the Union address that characterized the president as delivering strong performances.

“We know that Joe Biden, that after taking an entire week off, he’s going to be ready for this. ... His team’s going to have him ready just as they have in 2008, 2012, 2024,” Miller said.

Top Trump aide Chris LaCivita suggested without providing evidence that Biden would be on performance enhancing drugs. “He’s probably going to be filled with Adderall like he was at the night of the State of the Union,” LaCivita said.

Hillary Clinton, who has debated both Trump (in the 2016 campaign) and Biden (in 2008), wrote in a New York Times guest column on Tuesday that expectations for Trump are so low that “if he doesn’t literally light himself on fire on Thursday evening, some will say he was downright presidential.”

“It is a waste of time to try to refute Mr. Trump’s arguments like in a normal debate,” Clinton warned Biden. “It’s nearly impossible to identify what his arguments even are. He starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather.”

Biden has also had to practice delivering concise answers. “You always have to figure out how to punch out, right, the key points that you want to make,” Van Hollen said.

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The president has a tendency to digress into stories that he caps off with “anyway.” And after a primary debate in 2019, when Biden said he was thrown off guard by a personal attack, he declared: “My time is up, I’m sorry.”

Biden later told CNN he wasn’t used to the format and didn’t want to get into the scrum.

Now he faces the added scrutiny of voters’ concerns about his cognitive ability.

Poll after poll has shown that voters are worried about Biden’s age. At 81, he is the oldest man to ever hold the presidency. Trump, at 78, is just three years younger. Biden’s campaign has tried to address the age issue head on by highlighting his experience and achievements while in office. Biden himself has tried to deflect the criticism by cracking age jokes at his own expense.

But a special counsel report that called into question Biden's long-term memory and incidents in which he has mixed up the names of world leaders have not helped.

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Van Hollen said the same chatter existed before Biden’s most recent State of the Union address. “And he came out swinging.”

Biden’s campaign has said it does not expect the debate to significantly shift polling, even if it does go well for their candidate. The president’s advisers hope the performance, combined with other voter touchpoints such as advertising and grassroots outreach, will convince undecided voters.

The debate will not necessarily determine the outcome of the election, the president’s allies argue.

“There will be another debate,” Russo said. “There will be the party conventions. There will be months between now and voting."

Contributing: Zac Anderson

Francesca Chambers and Michael Collins cover the White House. Follow Chambers on X @fran_chambers and Collins @mcollinsNEWS.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump vs. Biden presidential debate tomorrow is high stakes