Donald Trump doesn’t want to wait until he officially wins the Republican nomination for president; he wants to meet President Joe Biden on the debate stage “immediately.”
Appearing on The Dan Bongino Show this week, Trump called for an immediate start to the debates between him and Biden — the two frontrunners in the race for their party’s nomination — “for the good of the country.”
🚨President Trump officially challenges Joe Biden to a debate, offers to take his spot in the Super Bowl Interview
“He can’t do it because he can’t talk. He can’t do anything” pic.twitter.com/427Mef2i5w
— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) February 5, 2024
Biden was asked about Trump’s comments, and he took little time to respond.
“If I were him, I’d want to debate me, too,” Biden said while in Las Vegas. “He’s got nothing else to do.”
Biden was trying to insult Trump, who has a lot on his hands these days. Even though he isn’t facing much of a challenge in the Republican primary — with Nikki Haley as the only other official candidate in the race — he is staring down multiple criminal cases.
The comments from the president also served as an acknowledgment that he eventually will face off against Trump in the upcoming general election. That means that the two should hypothetically meet on a stage to debate the main issues facing the country.
However, while the two major party candidates are all but decided, it’s not a foregone conclusion that a debate will happen.
Trump skipped every Republican primary debate, holding separate individual events for himself instead. But, that was mainly because he believed he didn’t stand to gain much in the GOP primary by doing so.
That being said, the Republican National Committee did withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates back in April 2022, calling the commission “biased” while voting unanimously to do so. How general election debates would happen without the RNC’s participation is in question, since the commission has produced and sponsored every debate for president and vice president since the late 1980s.
For its part, the Biden campaign hasn’t committed to participating in future debates, either.
“The campaign is going to take a look at the schedule, and we can have those conversations,” Quentin Fulks, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in December. “But, as of right now, our focus remains on building a campaign and infrastructure.”
