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Ultimately, it's his call.
This is checks calendar 2024. Candidates don't need to debate, they all have to agree to it. If Trump doesn't want to debate, then it's not going to happen unless they basically give into his demands, because ignoring debates no longer looks bad (which is insane, but here we are).
It's not that he needs to do the debate, but he did the first because it fed his ego of being a strong man. So, him having to back out of the debate without having a scapegoat will eat at his ego of a strong man. So this word salad he spews setting the stage to duck the debate is as about rationalizing it to his ego far more than any real campaign reasoning. Trump does everything for Trump, and this whole campaign is largely about getting in the White House so he can stay out of the big house (prison).
Edit victim of autocorrect
Is it?
I get that she was a prosecutor, but I'm simultaneously hearing people make this claim and at the same time say they haven't seen her debate much, or she was unremarkable.
Guess I just don't want to get my hopes too high. We really need someone quick-witted and who can bat the bullshit down.
I agree, it’s not like she can cross-examine Trump in a debate. She can say her piece during her allotted time (hopefully uninterrupted depending on the format), and Trump can ignore all of it, make up whatever he wants, and speak just as much as her, without any requirement to respond to anything she says.
So while her skills are certainly relevant, I don’t think the debate is necessarily the situation where I would say it’s her specialty. (Doesn’t mean she won’t do great, and I hope she does, but debating with Trump is definitely a “wrestling with a pig” kind of situation most of the time.)
Yeah, seems likely that other republicans knew Biden's condition was worse than the campaign was letting on and Trump was banking on that for the debate (and election in general).
Well listening to all the conspiracies coming from the Right prior to the debate they expected the Biden we saw at the State of the Union. And afterwards they accused him of being on performance enhancing drugs (because he could make whole logical sentences that Trump is struggling with these days).
Trump had a plan of just spewing a bunch of shit and calling Joe names, full stop. He got lucky that Joe made that easier for him, although he still made more sense than Trump. The Right has been running on the following since Trump announced:
The immigrants that our economy depends on are out to replace white people/kill and rape white women/bring crime.
Joe is old/sleepy (and sometimes responsible for things Trump did).
Bury any mention of Project 2025 because nobody but elite Christofascists will benefit from it, and thus wildly unpopular even with the right.
Keep Trump out of jail.
Edit ugh spell check
I dunno, I remember that days before the debate, there was an article that was talk about how the republicans were painting themselves into a corner with all of their Biden has Dementia rhetoric because they were setting the bar so low that if "Biden finished the debate with a pulse, he would have won by their metrics". It's probably the old case of double talk, really. Biden was simultaneously both a roided out giga brain secret Stalin and a feeble confused old man prepared to die at literally any second.
It still very much looks bad. You come across as spineless, especially if you’re not way ahead in the polls.
Oh it looks bad, just not to an insane 30% of Americans who avoid reality as much as they can
I think debates don't really matter anymore because what these people say and do is reported on constantly all day every day. That wasn't how it used to be.
If debates didn't matter, Biden would still be the nominee.
You know that the debate response had nothing to do with the debate topics or responses. Any other press conference that day would have likely had the same response. It wasn't what he was saying that was the problem.
True, but until then, the Biden campaign had done a pretty decent job of keeping a lid on his condition. The debate made it impossible to hide any longer. They just had to YOLO him out there and pray it wouldn't be a fucking disaster.
He's done a decent number press conferences before and since that debate and has seemed perfectly capable during all of them, but the big difference is the debate is a 90 minute event in the evening when Sundowners hits hard, and most if not all of those press conferences have been around mid-day when he's reportedly most lucid. Anyone who's cared for or been around aging individuals with dementia can tell from the debate that he has dementia and its progressed pretty far
That's my point. The debate itself had nothing to do with the issue.
That just happened to be the event where it became more apparent to many people. It could have been any press conference or other speaking event instead.
That IS the issue in American politics. As much as you believe people should be in tune with what is going on, politically speaking… they aren’t. Middle America gets sound bites and moves on. A lot of misinformation hits with them because they aren’t paying attention to how messed up politics actually is.
Things like presidential debates are worth tuning in to because it’s a single event (or 3) where you can get a condensed amount of information from the candidates. Most people don’t saturate their lives with politics. Things are changing because of social media, but that’s not necessarily for the better. Most people just want to live without the weight of the world on their shoulders all the time.
They do matter because a debate can show a lot more than just answers. For example, I think for a lot of folks, the lowest point was when they started arguing about fucking golf. It showed pretty much everyone that these guys are both just utterly divorced from the real problems facing Americans. Most everyone I know IRL was just disgusted with both candidates by that moment. That nobody cared Trump lied isn't a surprise. It'd be like being surprised that the sun rose in the east. It's what Trump does, he's a bullshit artist and everyone knows it, even the people who vote for him. That debate didn't really change anyone's evaluation of Trump. What was a surprise was Joe coming on the stage and just being an unintelligible mess. He did kind of get it together in the back half, but by then, the damage was done. That debate did change plenty of people's evaluation of Biden, myself included.
I watched the whole thing, facepalming the whole way through because it was the most disastrously bad debate performance I'd ever seen, and I've been watching since Kerry/Bush. Look you don't have to defend Joe's honor anymore, he already backed out. And yeah, it was basically like watching the candidates argue over who had a better sports car or greener lawn; it didn't invalidate anything as much as show just how disconnected both of them are from our concerns.
He's not running anymore. You no longer need to pretend he was a good candidate.
That's not necessarily represenative of how they act in person, spontaneously.
I go in assuming all social media is basically a lie.
Why are you getting your news from social media?
I don't lol.
I do read lemmy some now though, and a ton of sources for stuff are (unfortunately) on X
You can absolutely be in the loop on important stuff without going to Twitter.
Stop supporting that shitstain and that Nazi haven by going there.
I'm just saying a lot of real news has to cite Twitter as a source, because it is a source.
No one likes it.
Also the format of the debates is pretty terrible. Giving only 2 minutes to answer on complex social and geopolitical topics only lends itself to trying to make the best sound-bite. I would love to see them experiment with longer form responses (even if that means fewer questions each debate), as well as things like cutaways for adding context and fact-checking.
I would like the debate moderators to be less cowardly and I would like the fact checking. There should be a buzzer when a candidate tells a blatant lie.