In the lead-up to Thursday’s first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle, former president Donald Trump and his aides are doing everything they can to raise expectations for their 81-year-old opponent.
“We believe that many in the media are already prepared to give Joe Biden a participation trophy if he can simply stand upright for 90 minutes, when really what this should be about on Thursday is who has a vision for the future for America and how candidates are able to do with defending their record,” Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller said on a call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, pointing to Biden’s half-century of political experience which includes multiple runs for president and vice president. “After taking an entire week off, he’s going to be ready for this,” Miller said, adding that Biden is “elevating the bar for himself” by hunkering down with more than a dozen aids in Camp David to focus solely on debate prep.
Biden has spent the past five days undergoing intense debate prep away from the White House ahead of Thursday’s showdown in Atlanta. The president’s team has even made a mock debate setup at Camp David complete with production equipment and a makeshift stage, according to the New York Times. Meanwhile Trump campaign advisers are setting the bar a little lower for their own candidate on the debate prep front, telling reporters that the presumptive nominee has spent recent days holding policy-focused sessions with aides and Republican lawmakers as opposed to traditional mock debates with lawmakers playing the part of his opponent.
Raising expectations for Biden is a tough sell from a campaign that regularly mocks President Biden for his age, infirmity, and debate skills. “Crooked Joe Biden is the WORST debater I have ever faced — He can’t put two sentences together!” Trump posted on his social-media site Truth Social last month.
In pre-debate interviews, Trump is sounding a different tune. “He beat Paul Ryan pretty badly,” Trump said on the All-In Podcast last week. “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.” And on Tuesday’s call, Trump’s campaign advisers pointed to a series of headlines from 2012 praising then–vice president Biden’s debate performance against Ryan and from earlier this year lauding his better-than-expected State of the Union address.
The presumptive GOP nominee’s advisers declined to go into granular detail on Tuesday about the campaign’s 2024 debate strategy, but they acknowledged that Trump is likely to hammer Biden’s record, especially on issues like immigration and the economy. And like Trump, the former president’s aides insinuated that Biden’s debate will be boosted by performance-enhancing drugs. He’s “probably going to be filled with Adderall, like he was the night of the State of the Union,” Trump adviser Chris LaCivita quipped to reporters on Tuesday’s call.
“We know that when it comes to the big events, when it comes to debates, when it comes to State of the Union, things of that nature, that they’re going to have Joe Biden completely, super soldiered-up,” Miller said. “He is going to be ready to go. He has a certain memory that kicks in for having done this for 50 years.”