Trump may skip some Republican debates, but advisers see a Biden face-off as key

WASHINGTON - On July 17, the head of the Republican Party travelled to Donald Trump’s private club and home in Bedminster, New Jersey, to make a personal pitch for him to join in the party’s first sanctioned debate of the presidential nominating contest.

One of the arguments that the Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman, Ms Ronna McDaniel, made to Trump that day was that by skipping the debate, he would give President Joe Biden an excuse to get out of debating Trump should they meet again in 2024, according to two people familiar with their conversation.

Trump apparently disregarded the warning: He told people close to him in recent days that he had made up his mind not to participate in the first debate, though he has not ruled out debates later in the year. Instead, he sat for a taped interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, which is expected to be posted online on Wednesday.

Still, it’s an argument that appealed to a key focus of the Trump campaign as it looks ahead to a possible rematch with Mr Biden: getting both men onstage. Trump has repeatedly said publicly that he wants debates with Mr Biden, and Trump’s advisers view face-offs with the incumbent president as vital to Trump’s chances of winning.

It is unusually early to begin considering the contours of a general election debate, with months still to go until the Iowa caucuses and not a single vote cast in a primary race so far defined by Trump’s four criminal indictments. But with both parties heading in the direction of renominating the same candidates as in 2020 – Mr Biden and Trump – some thinking has already gone into potential matchups, at least on the Trump side.

The strong desire of Trump and his advisers to see him debate Mr Biden may lead to Trump undercutting work by the RNC, which has spent the last two years searching for an alternative to the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) for hosting general election matchups. Every presidential race since 1976 has had at least two televised debates, and the CPD, which is run by members of both parties, has overseen the process for every election since 1988.

The Republican Party sought to end that streak after 2020. But people with knowledge of the matter said that Trump is open to returning to a CPD debate if that format is the only way he can ensure a debate against Mr Biden.

One Republican strategist with knowledge of the Trump team’s thinking, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorised to disclose private conversations, put it bluntly: The party committee “will not control the party nominee’s debate strategy in the general election.”

But the party is trying to do just that. The “beat Biden pledge” that the RNC is requiring candidates to sign to participate in primary debates also stipulates that they agree to participate only in RNC-sanctioned general election debates. Trump has not yet signed it because he has not agreed to attend a primary debate.

The Republican strategist added that “the end goal is as many debates as possible between Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” and that the Trump campaign would do whatever was necessary to achieve that goal.

A senior Biden official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the matter publicly, said that there have been no senior-level staff meetings about debates yet, nor any discussions with the president himself.

But people in Mr Biden’s orbit had their own frustrations with the CPD in 2020, in particular its handling of Covid-19 protocols. The belated revelation that Trump had at least once tested positive for the virus just days before participating in the first debate only deepened their concern.

A Trump spokesman and an RNC spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Since 2021, the RNC has been pushing the CPD for changes to how the debates are held. And, over the past year, it has actively looked for a non-CPD debate host.

But the debates are negotiated between the nominees’ campaigns and the commission, meaning the decision to participate is ultimately up to the nominee, and that the RNC cannot force his or her hand.

In the past, candidates have skipped primary debates. And Mr Biden, like other incumbents dating back to Gerald Ford, is declining primary debates. But there’s little precedent in modern history for an incumbent president skipping general election debates, save for Jimmy Carter.

There have been no discussions between the CPD and any of the campaigns as of yet, according to the commission.

“The CPD starts discussions with the campaigns only after the nominating process has concluded,” Mr Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr, the CPD co-chair and a former chair of the RNC, said in a statement.

The group is expected to reveal the locations, dates and criteria for the general election debates in October. Typically, the CPD hosts three sanctioned debates after both nominees have been selected at the party conventions.

Issues with the commission predate 2020, as its monopoly on general election debates has for years been a source of frustration for nominees from both parties. That is especially true for Republicans, who have complained bitterly since the 2012 presidential cycle about one of the moderators, Ms Candy Crowley, then of CNN, fact-checking the Republican nominee, Mr Mitt Romney, in real time during a debate with the incumbent president, Mr Barack Obama.

In 2020, Trump’s team was enraged that the then-Fox News host Chris Wallace, whose coverage Trump often railed against, served as the moderator for the first CPD debate. When the CPD announced that the second debate would be virtual, the Trump team was apoplectic, and Trump announced he would not participate. Mr Biden followed suit.

The decision to conduct the second debate virtually came after Trump appeared to be under the weather at the first debate on Sept 29, 2020, then posted on Twitter less than 72 hours later that he had tested positive for Covid-19.

Since then, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has published a memoir about his tenure, in which he states that Trump had a positive Covid-19 test three days before the debate, followed by a negative one. The assertion raised questions about when Trump’s team knew he was sick and whether it was kept from the CPD so that Trump did not have to cancel his appearance.

In addition, Mr Biden’s team was angered – and complained to the CPD afterwards – when several members of the Trump family, except for first lady Melania Trump, removed the masks they were required to wear to be in the audience as they sat in the front row for that first matchup.

The senior Biden official said that the Biden team felt a lot of people were put at risk at the time, and that it was likely that the president’s campaign would press for its own specific rules. One possibility that could be raised would be conducting the debate without a live audience, given what happened recently when CNN hosted a New Hampshire primary town hall-style event with Trump. The former president fed on the laughter and applause from a cheering audience as he tried to dominate during his 70 minutes of prime time.

The official did not say whether Mr Biden, an institutionalist who has typically been averse to breaking with tradition, would be inclined to skip a debate.

A spokesman for Mr Biden declined to comment.

The sense that Trump could open himself up to the possibility of Mr Biden choosing not to debate because Trump chose to skip at least one primary face-off has been underscored in recent days by Republicans with rival campaigns.

After The New York Times reported on Friday that Trump had told aides he would not join next week’s event, Ms Christina Pushaw, an aide to Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, highlighted a post on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, that Trump’s adviser Jason Miller had written in August 2020 about Mr Biden: “If Joe Biden is too scared to debate, he’s too scared to run the country.”

Trump and his advisers believe that debating his primary rivals at this point does little for him politically, given how far ahead he is in primary polls. However, national polls show that he would have a tight race against Mr Biden, and aides think Trump can draw a favourable contrast to the president.

Mr David Axelrod, who was a top adviser to former president Barack Obama during both of his presidential campaigns, said that the challenge for Mr Biden’s team is that even if the two camps agree on debate criteria, Trump refuses to follow rules.

“I think the fact that Trump is utterly irresponsible and turns every event into a circus and a platform for disseminating disinformation is the basis for saying: This isn’t worthwhile,” Mr Axelrod said.

He explained that Trump’s belief that the debates could bolster him may be misguided, pointing to the Sept 29, 2020, debate, in which Trump was widely panned as having been too aggressive.

“He doesn’t necessarily help himself, either,” Mr Axelrod said. “That first debate really hurt last time.”

But Mr Axelrod said that the notion that Mr Biden could use Trump’s avoidance of debates as a reason to avoid them himself was a “valid” question, noting that “whether you feel in a close race you could get away with that – and whether the public would accept it – is another question.” NYTIMES