Which Biden Will Trump Debate?

There is finally some life coming back into the American presidential campaign season. It comes in the form of an agreement between Trump and Biden to debate. The first of the events will take place on June 27th; the second one in September. 

This is welcome news. Some of us were beginning to wonder if the presidential campaign season had lost all steam. Since Donald Trump secured enough delegates for the Republican party convention to be their presidential candidate in November, the campaign trail has been relatively quiet.

That does not mean it has been silent—far from it: Trump continues to hold rallies, and he continues to draw rock-star size audiences. In New Jersey recently, he attracted an audience of well over 80,000 people. This is a state that is considered one of the most left-leaning in the country. 

What has been less intense—more quiet—is the presidential-election style sparring that we normally see between the candidates. When Trump was still working to secure enough delegates for the Republican convention, he and his competitors took jabs at each other and kept the campaign trail hot and lively. 

That is no longer the case, and there are reasons for it. Trump is busy with the increasingly absurd legal cases that have been thrown at him, while President Biden is busy staying awake so he can make a few coherent statements here and there. Trump does not have time for Biden, and Biden does not have the stamina for Trump.

Fortunately, that is changing with the upcoming debates. Trump has challenged Biden on an anytime-anywhere basis, and he got his wishes when CNN decided to host a debate. It will be followed by a second debate in September, organized by another TV corporation, ABC, and maybe even a third in October.

Although these debates are welcome, they raise a serious question about what is really happening on the Democrat side of the campaign trail. There is nothing strange per se with a series of debates between Biden and Trump; what raises questions is that Biden’s health is going to be a major factor in these debates. It will be so regardless of whether Trump brings it up or not.

There is no doubt about Donald Trump and his health and stamina. He brims with confidence, even down to the letters in the debate agreement. This confidence eclipses any worries related to the ongoing trial in Manhattan, where Trump is accused of having falsified business records. The Trump campaign team would never have set dates for debates with Biden if they had any doubts about the outcome of that court case; if he were to be convicted and sent to jail, the humiliation for Trump would have crushed not only his campaign in a New York minute, but the entire Republican party going into November.

While Trump is confident and coherent, Biden has wobbled and obfuscated on almost everything that has anything to do with the presidential campaign. The idea of debating Trump in general has caused a great deal of confusion in the Biden camp, but when it came down to an actual proposal for debates, the Biden camp could no longer dodge the issue. 

In a short video that oozed contrived confidence—and was embarrassingly edited to leave out his usual mumbling—Biden responded sounding as if he was the one who took the initiative. 

Anyone who has seen Biden in official settings in the past year, cannot reach any other conclusion than that the man is grossly unfit for the job. It is impossible to imagine him going into a debate on even remotely the same conditions as Trump. Many of us have dealt with family members with dementia or had professional experience working in elderly care. We recognize that Biden clearly suffers from a bad cognitive disease. He cannot finish a sentence without being heavily scripted or directed by his handlers (never mind staff); he is slow-witted, forgetful, and sometimes obviously absent-minded. 

I am reminded of an elderly family member who was involved in politics for many years. At Biden’s age, she struggled to keep things together mentally. The similarities are tragically obvious, and I would never have dreamed of asking my family member to participate in a debate over politics in that condition. 

If Joe Biden is going to go into a debate and exhibit any kind of clarity and consistency, he will have to be medically prepared—propped up by pharmaceuticals, for short. There is also a high probability that he will need an earpiece through which he can be supplied answers and comments by his handlers. 

In short, what we are going to see in these debates is not an exchange between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but a theatrical exercise where a team of cynically minded Democrats demonstrate to the world what Joe Biden could look like if he were fit to serve as President of the United States of America.

As a conservative who voted for Trump in 2020, I find nothing to gloat about in Biden’s situation. I see no reason to ridicule the man—telling facts about his mental state is not ridiculing him—nor do I feel the urge to scold him for staying in an office he clearly is not fit for. What I do feel, though, is the same frustration and disgust that tens of millions of other Americans feel, over the fact that a group of influential people so desperately want access to the power that the president gives them that they continue to pretend that Biden is actually fit to be president. 

I cannot help but wonder if the people who sponsored Biden in 2020, and who have propped him up since taking office in January 2021, will ever reach the point where the well-being of the country is more important than whatever profits they can make from their direct access to a president with dementia. However, an even more urgent question is how they imagine handling a major international crisis where a president’s sharp mind can be the scalpel that separates peace from human annihilation in a nuclear war.

We have already seen two major military conflicts erupt on the global scene since Biden became president. What if China made a move on Taiwan? What if the signs of instability in the Balkans escalated into armed conflict?

The more I see of the Biden presidency, the more I become convinced that not only is the president incapable of doing his job, but the ones who do it for him—staffers, handlers, or whoever they might be—have no real idea of what they are doing. We got a glimpse of the nightmarish scenario that might unfold when Biden flip-flopped and flopped back again on his support for Israel in the Gaza conflict. What would happen if China launched an invasion of Taiwan, and the U.S. forces in the region are expected to respond in support of the island republic?

In the past, America has been blessed with level-headed, intelligent, and independently-minded presidents: 

• Franklin Roosevelt walked the country into World War II with intelligence and foresight;
• John Kennedy defused the Cuban missile crisis, where the world was only days, maybe even hours, from open nuclear war; 
• Ronald Reagan performed an intelligent balancing act in the often-tense Cold War relations with the Soviet Union; 
• Bill Clinton led the world out of the Cold War era, carefully replacing the uncertainties after the collapse of the Soviet Union with the promises of peace and prosperity;
• Donald Trump wisely avoided pulling America into more armed conflicts—and did so masterfully, without yielding territory to either China, North Korea, or Russia. 

All these presidents were sharp, intelligent, and in full command of their own faculties. They could make split-second decisions knowing full well that the outcome would be scrutinized by history for decades to come. They could lead with strategic vision, leaving no doubt about where America was and where she was going. 

Joe Biden has absolutely none of these qualities, but going into the debates with Donald Trump, his handlers will want the sitting president to come across as the leader that the country and the world can rely on. They know that if Biden is going to have even a remote chance of winning in November, they must make him look like the confident, charismatic, and reliable world leader he is not. 

Suppose they succeed. Suppose the theatrical performance that will be President Biden in the debates with Trump, does so well that he does indeed edge out his predecessor in their rematch election. The man who will then be sworn in as president on January 20, 2025, will be even older, and even further gone into dementia (and God knows what else the poor man suffers from). 

What do they do then? At that point, Biden will be even further from the kind of president America needs—and that the world needs America to have. 

It is almost unfathomable to imagine that there are people working with, and in close proximity to, presidential powers who would risk a disastrous American response to a major international conflict simply to have Joe Biden re-elected. But what are the alternative conclusions regarding Biden’s agreeing to debate Trump? What other goals than getting Biden re-elected could his handlers and his campaign have?

These questions raise the possibility that Biden’s own staff somehow have drawn the inevitable conclusion that he is not fit to be president. However, they cannot simply dump him and quit their jobs—the unique prestige of working for a president or his campaign prohibits any such moves. If they really believe that the man is unfit for his office and want him out, they would have to manipulate the circumstances of the campaign to such a degree that Biden’s exit can look like an organic process.

In short, someone on his team would have to set him up to fail in the debates. 

I don’t see that happening, which leaves me with only the hope that Donald Trump can beat Biden, especially in the first debate (which will set the tone for the next), with enough margin to overcome the scripted piece of performance known as Joe Biden.