The week that will determine the 2024 election

Here we go. This week, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will travel down to Georgia for the first presidential debate. Everything else has up until this point been child’s play.

Trump is already suggesting that the 81-year-old Biden, whom he dubs, “Sleepy Joe”, will be “jacked up” after being “shot in the a**.” And Trump’s spokeswoman — and failed congressional candidate — Karoline Leavitt engaged in an aggressive interview with Kasie Hunt of CNN, the network that will host the debate, during which she claimed that her boss is “knowingly going into a hostile environment on this very network — on CNN — with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well-known over the past eight years in their biased coverage of him.” Republicans are also warning Trump not to fall into “traps” lest he attack Biden as aggressively as he did in 2020.

Anyone who has followed politics long enough knows that this is classic setting of expectations. Trump saying that Biden will be hopped on on stimulants or that CNN will be unnecessarily antagonistic toward him is a way to lower the bar, should he underperform. Trump elected not to participate in any of the Republican primary debates, despite still winning the Republican primary. That says a lot.

Similarly, Biden did not engage in any debates — essentially putting the two men on the same playing field.

Historically, incumbent presidents flop in their first debate. This goes back to Ronald Reagan stumbling over his words in 1984 — a moment that has led some to wonder if he already began to suffer the effects of the Alzheimer’s that would ultimately take his life — and includes George W Bush’s poor performance against John Kerry in 2004, as well as Barack Obama’s weak and anodyne