In six weeks, Donald Trump has gone from mocking President Joe Biden as a lousy debater who can barely talk to praising his talents ahead of their first debate in the 2024 presidential election.
“Crooked Joe Biden is the WORST debater I have ever seen – he can’t put two sentences together!” Trump wrote on his social media platform on May 15. Two days later, in a speech to the Republican Party in Minnesota, he said: “He can’t talk. He can’t walk. Can’t find my way from a stage. I can’t put two sentences together.”
But lately, ahead of Thursday’s debate in Atlanta, Trump has been singing a different tune. He says he watched Biden’s 2012 vice presidential debate and appreciated his rival’s abilities.
“He beat Paul Ryan pretty badly,” Trump said in an interview with the “All-In Podcast” published Thursday. “And I assume he will be someone who will be a worthy debater. I would say I don’t want to underestimate him.”
Trump’s allies are wary of making the same mistake they made ahead of Biden’s State of the Union address in March, when the Trump world disparaged Biden as a weak old man and set expectations so low that he easily surpassed them.
This time, Trump’s team is making a last-ditch effort to flip the script and play the expectations game differently, warning that Biden will be well prepared for this moment. His team is also working on the referees by going after CNN’s moderators and claiming that it is the media, not Trump, who is lowering the bar for Biden.
“The media wants to set the bar for Joe Biden’s debate performance so low that he gets a participation trophy just for standing upright for 90 minutes, but have no doubt: Biden will be very prepared and alert on debate night, relying on the same perfectly calibrated dosage used to deliver his widely praised 2024 State of the Union address or his 2012 drubbing of Paul Ryan in the VP debate,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said.
The “real measure,” Cheung said, is whether Biden can defend his record in office against Trump’s record in the first term without any “interference” from the debate moderators.
A Biden campaign official said Trump is making a “transparent” attempt to blame someone other than himself if he loses the debate, and that the campaign is ready to push back.
“We see this as Trump setting the tone for if and when he has a bad night,” said the Biden official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the campaign’s ideas. “If Trump thinks he might lose, he sets up that consent structure to create excuses for himself. …He likes to throw a tantrum.”
Trump’s zigzagging rhetoric points to his larger struggle in branding Biden, whom he has disparaged for years — sometimes as an doddering old fool barely aware of his surroundings and sometimes as a mastermind deftly manipulating the legal system to secure charges and convictions to secure. of Trump for criminal activity without leaving a trace of evidence that he was involved.
At a rally Saturday in Philadelphia, Trump alternated between his nicknames “sleepy Joe” and “crooked Joe” — the former reflecting the image of Biden he is now trying to jettison — and even claimed without evidence that Biden could use drugs for energy .
‘He’s sleeping now because they want to get him good and strong. So, shortly before the debate, he gets a chance in the… They want to strengthen him. …I say he’ll come out all worked up, right? All hyped up,” Trump said.
A moment later he added, “But either way, I’m sure he’ll be prepared. Whatever happened to all that cocaine that disappeared from the Whites a month ago…” he said before changing the subject. He was referring to a substance found in the White House complex that the Secret Service said last July “preliminarily tested positive for the presence of cocaine.”
Trump similarly called for drug testing in his 2020 debates with Biden and suggested, again without evidence, that Biden “took something” in the debates. Biden mocked the claim at the time, saying, “He’s a fool.”
In Philadelphia, Trump also disdained CNN host Jake Tapper, a debate moderator. His campaign followed up by sending network spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt on Monday to repeatedly attack Tapper until she was cut from the mid-level segment after she ignored calls not to get personal with network employees. Trump’s team aggressively promoted the segment on social media.
A CNN spokesperson said in a statement Monday: “Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are highly respected veteran journalists who have collectively covered politics for more than five decades. They have extensive experience moderating major political debates, including CNN’s Republican Presidential Primary Debate this cycle. There are no two people better equipped to moderate a substantive and fact-based discussion and we look forward to the June 27 debate in Atlanta.”
In an interview, Leavitt denied that Trump’s portrayal of Biden as mentally incompetent yet effectively contradictory, saying, “Two things can be true at the same time.”
“Joe Biden has declined cognitively,” Leavitt said, adding, “Joe Biden is ultimately still a career politician who has been doing this for decades.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
