Few rituals in American politics are more absurd than the game of setting expectations before presidential debates.
Campaign hacks lionize the skills and experience of their competitors before the big showdowns, hoping to turn their candidate into the underdog who can defy preconceptions of how the debate might go. The goal is to shape post-debate news coverage, which has traditionally been as important as the exchanges that crackle between candidates in cementing the public's view of who won.
In one of the most ludicrous examples of the genre, an aide to President George W. Bush tried to claim that his 2004 Democratic opponent John Kerry — a rather plodding speaker — was the greatest debater since the Roman rhetorician Cicero.
It won't surprise anyone that ex-President Donald Trump has stretched the debate pre-game spin to even more preposterous lengths than usual ahead of his crucial clash with President Joe Biden in Atlanta on Thursday night on CNN. Trump has spent years portraying his 2020 vanquisher as senile, cognitively impaired and unable to navigate his way to the end of a sentence or off a stage. Trump often does an impression of his 81-year-old rival bashing into walls during his rallies. A Trump spokeswoman blasted Biden as a "brain-dead zombie" after conservative media aired misleading video of him at the G7 summit in Italy.
But someone at Trump HQ in Florida finally seems to have realized that the ex-president is walking into a trap of his own making. Thanks to Trump's mockery, all Biden would have to do to defeat the low expectations Trump set for him is stand up for 90 minutes at the debate. So the former president and his team are now frantically trying to extinguish the impression that Biden is a dud. Trump said on a podcast last week that the sitting president was a "worthy debater" and added, "I'm not underestimating him." One of Trump's potential running mates, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, said Sunday that Biden had "ability" as a debater, since he'd been campaigning since President Richard Nixon was in the White House. "When he needs to, he can step up."
And just in case Biden really excels, Trump is now warning that the president could be "jacked up" on drugs on Thursday night. He used a similar formulation after Biden made a mockery of conservative media predictions that he'd fail to make it through his State of the Union address with a barnstorming performance earlier this year that helped him quell concerns about his age, for a while.
The question of Biden's age and acuity is fair enough. He's visibly slower than he was before taking office. And polls show most Americans think he's too old to serve a second term that would end when he is 86. But Trump, at 78, is no spring chicken either. And his recent gibberish about sharks, windmills and fantasies about how he won the 2020 election that he clearly lost ought to raise questions. But the ex-president's manic energy and extremism have often obscured a focus on his own age.
Most Americans said months ago that they didn't want the presidential match-up they ended up getting. On Thursday night, Biden and Trump might show why.
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