Veteran New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman on Wednesday said Donald Trump’s messaging ahead of the debate between him and President Joe Biden on CNN indicates he is aware of the stakes of the live event.
Ahead of Thursday’s faceoff in Atlanta, Trump has pivoted from setting expectations extremely low for Biden to saying the president will be a “worthy debater.” Meanwhile, his Republican allies have been pushing baseless claims that Biden will be taking performance-enhancing drugs to be able to take part in the event.
“This is what Trump does with everything that is an open question for him, is he tries to frame it so that no matter what happens, if he doesn’t do well it’s because the system was set up in some way against him,” Haberman told CNN’s “Situation Room.”
The fact that he is doing the same here indicates “Trump knows that this debate needs to go well for him and needs to go badly for President Biden,” she added.
Besides, Haberman noted that, as Trump has himself admitted, he needs to be less aggressive than he was during the two candidates’ first debate in 2020 and also present voters with his vision for the country, resisting the temptation to use the debate as yet another forum to air his grievances about the criminal cases against him.
“The more he talks about that it just moves it to the front and center issue set and reminds voters of concerns that they have about him,” Haberman said.
Meanwhile, Biden needs to prove he’s able to handle the “rigor” of a presidential campaign despite concerns about his age in order to win the debate, she said. Biden, 82, is the oldest president in U.S. history and would be 87 by the end of a potential second term.
“Biden has to show that he can stand there for an extended period of time,” Haberman told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “He has to essentially reprise his State of the Union speech.”
“It’s much easier to be the insurgent than the person in power,” Haberman continued.
