Biden team hoping for a Trump meltdown in first televised debate

The Biden campaign is hoping for a Donald Trump meltdown in the first televised debate between the two candidates ahead of the November election.

President Joe Biden will take part in his first 2024 debate with the former president, now a convicted felon, on June 27, which will be aired on CNN. A second faceoff is set for September 10, hosted by ABC.

Trump refused to take part in any of the GOP primary debates, writing on Truth Social: “The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency I had. I will therefore not be doing the debates.”

But Team Biden hopes that the former president’s time on stage will remind the public what Trump’s White House years really looked like.

“The ‘out of sight, out of mind’ concept of President Trump is real. I think people forget the way he interacts, the way he communicates, the inaccuracies of the things he says and promises to the American people,” Democratic strategist Amanda Loveday, an adviser to the pro-Biden political action committee Unite the Country, told NBC.

“A debate like this deletes distraction and allows for people to see them next to each other and answer questions back to back and be able to compare them.”

Biden campaign officials believe that such comparison between the two candidates will give the current president an edge at a time when he is falling behind in the polls.

“I don’t think that he’s going to come off as diminished and meek,” Angelo Carusone, president of the left-leaning journalism watchdog group Media Matters for America, said of Biden. “My sense is that people will see that comparison and they’ll hear somebody making coherent arguments and Trump saying some really random stuff.

“Seeing him unfiltered for a little bit of time is important for