Biden campaign officials were confident before he debated Trump. Then the walls came crashing down

Many of Joe Biden’s advisors had doubts about him holding a presidential campaign debate, arguing that it will merely give Donald Trump a national platform for melodrama. Better, they said, that he left to make outrageous and bizarre comments to his MAGA crowds which can be held up to ridicule.

It was Biden himself who, to the surprise of many, announced in an interview in April, with shock jock Howard Stern, that he would debate his Republican opponent in waiting.

Some in his team agreed this, indeed, was the way to go forward. Biden had given a masterful State of the Union address just a month earlier. The president had just come back from the D-Day anniversary in France showing leadership of the free world, an alliance which would be greatly at risk under Trump, it was to be forcefully pointed out.

A decisive performance in the debate, they felt, would help boost hitherto desultory polling figures.

The decision was taken not only to debate, but debate early, in June, months before normally the case in US presidential elections.

Very little was left to chance, a former senior Obama official who had been asked to help in the Biden campaign told me. The timing, the topics, the venue have all been carefully prepared.

The debate would be held around the second anniversary of the repeal of Roe v Wade by a Supreme Court with the influence of Trump appointees. The overturning of women’s right to choose on abortion, enshrined in law since 1973, had seen a drop in female support for the Republicans, and this would help in attempts to lock-in their votes for the Democrats.

“That makes great sense, a no-brainer” said the official just before the debate. “The Republicans are focusing on men. It was white working-class men who got