Donald Trump is largely determined by a belief in preventive delegitimization. Fearing possible election defeat, the Republican has consistently taken steps to delegitimize the process and explain away potential losses. Fearing possible legal backlash, he has also repeatedly attempted to delegitimize the legal system to validate possible negative outcomes.
For whatever reason, Trump approaches almost every challenge with the same thought: “If I fail, it can’t be my fault.”
With this in mind, it’s not surprising that the former president applies the same model to Thursday night’s debate against the president. Joe Biden — which the presumptive GOP nominee is preparing for by making preemptive apologies for the possibility that the event might not go his way.
In recent days, Trump and his surrogates have condemned the format of the debate — apparently indifferent to the fact that his own team negotiated the terms of the event — while going after the CNN anchors who will moderate the debate.
As for the possibility that his Democratic opponent might be able to “stitch two sentences together,” Trump also seems eager to preemptively delegitimize Biden’s debate performance. The New York Times reported:
“I say he’ll come out all worked up, right?” Trump said Saturday, referring to the sitting president, after telling his supporters that Biden will get “a shot in the ass” shortly before the debate. The former president added shortly after, “What happened to all that cocaine that disappeared from the White House a month ago?”
Trump made a similar statement a week earlier in Wisconsin, suggesting that Biden not only used illegal drugs but actually stole cocaine found in the White House.
He also has plenty of support from the usual suspects: the Republican National Committee, among other thingshas stated as fact that the sitting president is “following an intensive doping regime,” and several right-wing members of Congress have called on Biden to take a drug test to resolve allegations that Trump fabricated from whole cloth.
Last month, Republican Rep. Greg Murphy of North Carolina went so far as to tell Fox Business he had secret knowledge about Biden’s dependence on illegal substances, which he refused to reveal on air.
To be fair, all of this is pretty crazy, even by today’s Republican standards, though it’s not entirely new. As regular readers may recall, Trump was concerned about his debates against Hillary Clinton, so he said the former secretary of state might be taking performance-enhancing drugs.
Four years later he did it again. In September 2020, the then-president whined incessantly about his suspicion that Biden was also on drugs. When asked during a White House press conference whether the attack was an attempt at humor, the Republican replied: “No, I’m not kidding.”
But in 2024, Trump and his allies have embraced the bizarre theory with even greater vigor and enthusiasm.
The former president pre-emptively delegitimizes elections so that he can rationalize defeats. If he loses, he says, “I told you democracy is rigged.” If he wins, he says, “The fact that I overcame rampant deception makes my victory all the more impressive.”
The same goes for the courts. When he is convicted, he says, ‘See? I was right all along.” If he is acquitted, he says: “My success was even more impressive because I had to deal with a corrupt system.”
And now the model is being applied to debates. If Biden excels, Trump wants to be able to tell his followers: “I’ve said all along that the debates are rigged, that the moderators were dishonest and that my opponent is a drug addict.” If the former president does well, he will declare, “I won the debate despite the fact that the process was rigged and Biden had an unfair pharmacological advantage.”
Trump could invest more time and energy into ensuring the debates run smoothly, but he apparently finds it much easier to focus on making preemptive excuses for the possibility of losing.
This message updates our related previous reporting.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
