President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden during the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, October 22.
Jim Watson and Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images
President Joe Biden challenged former Donald Trump to two one-on-one debates Wednesday ahead of the November election, under several conditions.
“Make my day buddy,” Biden said in a video calling on the presumptive Republican nominee to debate him twice, once as early as next month, the other in September before early voting begins.
Both proposed matchups would take place without the participation of the nonpartisan commission that typically organizes presidential debates.
Trump quickly hit back and accepted the challenge from the incumbent Democratic president in a post on his Truth Social account.
“Just tell me when, I’ll be there,” Trump wrote. “‘Let’s get ready to rumble!!!’
The Biden campaign sent a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates on Wednesday saying it would not participate in the organization’s traditional debates, which were scheduled to take place on September 16, October 1 and October 9.
“The Presidential Commission’s years-long model for these debates is out of step with changes in the structure of our elections and the interests of voters,” wrote Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon , in this letter.
Biden instead proposes debating Trump first as early as late June, when the campaign expects Trump’s secret trial in New York to be over and Biden to be back from the G7 summit.
The debates would exclude any other candidates for the White House, including Robert Kennedy Jr., “and would not waste debate time on candidates with no prospect of becoming president,” O’Malley Dillon wrote.
In Biden’s video, posted on the social media site Now he acts like he wants to debate me again. “.
“Well, make my day, buddy. I’ll even do it twice. So let’s pick the dates, Donald,” Biden said.
“I heard you’re free on Wednesday,” the president said, referring to the day the court is not in session for Trump’s ongoing trial.
Trump in his Truth Social article wrote: “Crooked Joe Biden is the WORST debater I’ve ever faced – he can’t put two sentences together!” Crooked is also by far the WORST president in US history. »
Trump added: “It’s time to have a debate so he can explain to the American people his highly destructive open border policy, his ridiculous new mandates for electric vehicles, the tolerance of crushing inflation, high taxes and a really WEAK foreign policy, which allows the world to “catch fire”. I am ready and willing to debate Crooked Joe at both proposed times in June and September. »
“I would highly recommend more than two debates and, for excitement purposes, a very large venue, even though Biden is supposedly afraid of crowds – that’s only because he doesn’t understand them,” Trump wrote .
To ensure an appearance of fairness, the Biden campaign said it wanted the debates to be hosted by a news organization that hosted a 2016 Republican primary debate in which Trump participated, and a 2020 Democratic primary debate in which Biden participated.
The campaign added that each candidate should be given specific time limits to answer questions and that when a candidate is not speaking, their microphone should be turned off to avoid “a spectacle of mutual interruption.”
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