The president’s political surrogates were spread across Sunday talk shows in preparation for next week’s televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which could help the incumbent Democratic president and former Republican president capture the attention of voters who are still undecided or disinterested in November’s election.
But the candidates are taking surprisingly different approaches, with Biden holed up at Camp David preparing for the debate and Trump’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, reportedly representing him in the mock debates.
Bauer told Politico last week that his job is to “give as accurate a picture as possible of how the other person is going to debate.”
But Trump is not known to have a debate stand-in, and has never practiced for one. Instead, he has continued to campaign. In Philadelphia on Saturday, he continued to speak out on immigration, at one point telling Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White that he would propose pitting a league of immigrant fighters against a “general” league, with the champions from each side facing off against each other.
That has left talk shows mulling over the impending showdown, with campaign surrogates making arguments for and against, raising hopes of a decisive exchange — but also worries that without a live audience to provide a conversation with voters, it could falter.
“We expect President Biden to do a great job, just like he has in the last few debates,” Biden campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Landrieu also referred to Trump’s criminal conviction over hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, saying, “It doesn’t matter how Donald Trump shows up, whether he shows up as a regular insane loser or just sits there and shuts up, people are going to know he’s a twice-impeached, convicted felon, a proven libel and sexual abuser and six-time bankrupt.”
Landrieu said Biden is “very eager to tell his story to the American people,” adding, “This race is going to be close. We all know that.”
Landrieu said Trump “wakes up every day thinking only about himself and his rich friends. He thinks seriously about how he would use his power to hurt people if he were president of the United States again.”
Landrieu added that Biden “want to be really clear about the differences between these two men that everyone is going to see again on Thursday.”
The Democrats were endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a member of the Biden reelection campaign’s national advisory committee. With Monday approaching the second anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which stripped federally granted abortion rights, Warren is seeking to bring reproductive rights to the forefront of the upcoming presidential election, a stance that could help Democrats maintain control of the Senate and blunt the Republicans’ grip on the House majority in 2022.
Warren said that if Biden is re-elected and Democrats gain control of Congress, the party could protect and restore access to abortion, contraception and in vitro fertilization.
“Roe v. Wade [the] “We are once again going to overturn the laws of this country,” Warren said. “I want you to understand this, and I want to say it as clearly as I can: If Donald Trump is elected president, he and his radical Republicans will close abortion, contraception and IVF in every state in this country. [conservative] state. “
Trump said his running mate will appear before an audience in Atlanta on Thursday. The race has reportedly been narrowed down to three candidates: North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.
Trump told reporters on Saturday that he had made a decision but had not yet announced it. “In my opinion, yes,” Trump told reporters at a cheesesteak restaurant in Philadelphia.
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Meanwhile, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, once seen as a potential running mate for President Trump, continued to try Sunday to recover from a harrowing passage in her recently published book in which she described shooting and killing a dog because she claimed it was a danger to her family.
Noem’s confession came shortly after Biden’s German shepherd, Commander, was banished from the White House after biting 34 Secret Service agents during his 18-month reign of terror.
Noem said Thursday’s showdown will be an “important debate” and “a great opportunity for President Trump to talk about his policies and how good the policies were when he was president.”
Still, Noem acknowledged that she had not received the vice presidential selection papers from Trump that others have reportedly received: “I’ve spoken to the president, and we know that it is only the president who decides who will be the vice president,” she said diplomatically.
The front-runner, Burgum, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the Biden campaign had made a serious effort to lower expectations. Burgum challenged the debate moderator to ask tough questions, including about Biden’s claim during his last debate with Trump in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop furor was “Russian disinformation.”
Although many of the claims about its contents have not been verified, the laptop was admitted into evidence at the recent trial of Hunter Biden, who was convicted on three federal firearms charges.
“If he was good at lying about something from four years ago, the question is what he’ll do this time,” Burgum added.
