Biden rubbishes Trump's push for more debates as 'distraction', agrees to face prez at three slated debates
Joe Biden's campaign has agreed to participate in the three previously announced fall debates with President Donald Trump, and is reportedly criticizing the Trump campaign's push for more debates.
Biden will face Trump in debates scheduled on September 29, October 15, and October 22, Biden campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon said in a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates.
The document, obtained by CNN and first reported by The Washington Post, comes after an aggressive push by the Trump campaign last week for more general election presidential debates. The Biden campaign dismissed Trump's push statement from deputy campaign manager and communications director Kate Bedingfield last week. However, this is the first formal communication of the campaign with the commission. A vice-presidential debate is slated for October 7.
"Joe Biden looks forward to facing Donald Trump in a multi-debate series that the American people have come to expect from their leaders; we hope that President Trump would not break that tradition or make excuses for a refusal to participate," O'Malley Dillon wrote in the letter.
Trump, at one point, was considering boycotting the debates altogether, but "his thinking about them has changed as the campaign has been forced to shift because of the coronavirus pandemic," per CNN.
An anonymous source — who claimed to speak with the president on a regular basis — told the outlet that Trump wants to use the debate to highlight Biden's weaknesses and to prove that the former vice president "isn't mentally fit to be president." According to CNN, the Trump campaign is also interested in "having a say in picking the moderators."
In the aforementioned letter, O'Malley Dillon criticized the president's campaign and called their proposal a "debate distraction."
"No one should be fooled: the Trump campaign's new position is a debate distraction," she wrote. "Our position is straightforward and clear: Joe Biden will accept the Commission's debates, on the Commission's dates, under the Commission's established format and the Commission's independent choice of moderators."
"Donald Trump and Mike Pence should do the same," she continued. "That is what every candidate for President and Vice President have done in modern times, Democrat and Republican alike. That is what the Biden campaign is willing to do. Any 'debate proposals' in lieu of that are just an effort to change the subject, avoid debates, or create a distracting 'debate about debates'."
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh shot back in a statement. "It's pretty obvious that Joe Biden's handlers are afraid to send their candidate out without a script and teleprompter handy," adding that "an earlier and longer debate schedule is necessary" for voters to see the contrast between the two candidates.
That said, O'Malley Dillon has also asked the commission if it "has made plans for debate arrangements if Covid control measures threaten to impact the conduct of the debates as planned."
"Nothing should prevent the conduct of debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on these dates; again, we do not want to provide President Trump with any excuses for not debating," she wrote.