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Donald Trump hasn’t stepped on stage once this election season to debate his Republican rivals, but the ex-president today challenged Joe Biden to show up for multiple face-to-face match-ups.
“I’ll do it right now on your show, I’ll challenge him right now,” Trump gleefully told Laura Ingraham tonight after the Fox News host pressed him in a piece of staged political theater to debate his 2020 foe in 2024. “We can do you, you can do anybody you want, Trump told Ingraham in the pre-recorded town hall as she offered to moderate at least one of the hypothetical debates. “I’ll take anybody from CNN, which is doing very poorly in the ratings by the ways as you probably know. I’ll take anybody because I think you have an obligation to debate.”
Knowing perfectly well that the much-cloistered Biden will have to respond, Trump took his version of a statesman approach. “When you have the final Republican, the final Democrat, you have to debate regardless,” the debate weary candidate assured the crowd in front of him and those watching on TV.
Promising “as many as necessary,” when Ingraham asked Trump in front of a South Carolina crowd how many times he would meet up with the incumbent. “I would like to do it starting now,” Trump added in full general election mode now his nomination is almost assured. “I don’t think he is going to debate though. I really don’t think so.”
Having landed at LAX nearly two hours ago, Biden is in LA today to participate in a deep pocket fundraiser later tonight hosted by Haim and Cheryl Saban and Casey Wasserman.
On his last trip out West, Biden pulled in around $15 million in his up-close and personal get togethers with Hollywood donors. Bringing in $42 million last month according to recent filings, the well-funded Biden/Harris campaign has around $130 million on hand. Tonight, which will then see President Biden give a speech in Culver City on Wednesday before heading to San Francisco for more fundraisers, could break that financial milestone of his last Tinseltown visit.
The advanced age of both Biden and Trump has become one of the biggest issues of the 2024 campaign, with both blundering in public appearances. The usually quick to react Biden campaign did not respond to Trump’s debate challenge Tuesday, so far.
Inflating the polls on a direct results of a Biden v. Trump 2.0, 77-year-old much indicted ex-real estate mogul Trump took another swipe Tuesday at the facilities of the 81-year-old Biden. “He’s declined, but he was always sort of semi-declined,” Trump said. “He has no clue what’s happening.”
The 2024 debates would be on “focused specific topics”, as Ingraham termed it, such foreign policy. Ingraham didn’t mention it, but topic specific debates is actually the way presidential debates have been conducted over the past several decades
Biden and Trump met only twice to debate in their last match-up. Trump dominated the proceedings on September 22, 2020 in Cleveland, Ohio and on October 22, 2020 in Nashville, Tennessee, but his often unhinged performance served to make the former Vice President look more Presidential and in control.
The duo were scheduled to meet on October 15, 2020 in Miami, but that debate was cancelled because then President Trump had Covid-19 and won’t participate virtually.
In what looks like a landslide waiting to happen on February 24 for Trump, South Carolina’s GOP primary will deliver 50 delegates to the winner. “I don’t think she knows how to get out,” the former Celebrity Apprentice host told Ingraham of his remaining rival Nikki Haley, who used to be the Governor of South Carolina before becoming Trump’s UN Ambassador.
Haley mocked Trump’s big debate words tonight
Touching on topics of the recent $354 million fraud judgement he was hit with in NYC last week, side-stepping the death of Russian Opposition leader Aleksei Navalny in a Putin prison last week, and how the war in Ukraine if he was still president. Going on about immigration, his hoarding of classified documents, how America is becoming a “communist country,” his trade war with China, “my revenge will be success” and his legal woes, Trump was joined by North Carolina Senator Tim Scott today in the primetime event.
Appointed by Haley but throwing his support to Trump after his own White House bid cratered, Scott had been very publicly angling for the Veep spot on the GOP’s 2024 ticket. Trump pointed Sen. Scott out in the crowd to big applause, as various names were teased on his short-list.
In that vein, Trump was hoping to write the narrative as Super Tuesday looms and he and Biden have their respective nominations locked up. “This is all coming out the White House,” Trump told his fans on Fox before Scott joined him on stage. “This is all election interference.”
Then there was the Freudian slip from the man who has long proclaimed he won the 2020 election, but it was stolen from him by the “vicious, sick’ Democrats and the so-called Deep State. “They are trying to damage me so they can win another election,” Trump exclaimed to Laura Ingraham tonight.
