Joe Biden committed to participating in three planned debates against President Trump while criticizing the president for trying to add an additional debate.
“Joe Biden looks forward to facing Donald Trump in a multi-debate series that the American people have come to expect from their leaders; we hope that President Trump would not break that tradition or make excuses for a refusal to participate,” Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote Monday in a letter to the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, the Washington Post reported.
It was the Biden campaign’s first communication with the debate commission, as the former vice president earlier this month passed the Democratic National Convention delegate threshold to become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
The communication comes days after Politico reported that the Trump campaign was trying to add a fourth debate with Biden to the schedule, hoping to hold a debate before early and absentee voting starts in some states and complaining that two of the debates are scheduled for Thursday evenings, conflicting with NFL games. The thinking is that Biden will perform poorly in debates and that Trump can better define him and his record in voters’ minds.
But the Biden campaign is not agreeing to more debates.
“No one should be fooled: the Trump campaign’s new position is a debate distraction,” O’Malley Dillon said in the letter. “The Trump position seems to be saying that he will debate if he can pick the moderators: clearly the President, who largely conducts interviews only with favorable news outlets, is afraid of facing questions from a neutral moderator. The Trump campaign proposal for elaborate negotiations is merely an effort to dodge fair, even-handed debates.”
The three presidential debates are scheduled for Sept. 29, Oct. 15, and Oct. 22. One of the debate commission chairmen said last week if the two candidates agree on participating in a fourth debate, they will work to make it a reality.
O’Malley Dillon asked the commission to ensure measures were in place to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. “Nothing should prevent the conduct of debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on these dates; again, we do not want to provide President Trump with any excuses for not debating,” she wrote.
And she asked that the commission keep one debate in a town-hall format, a regular feature in past election cycles.
“During his primary campaign, Vice President Biden welcomed direct questions from uncommitted voters on a frequent basis, and we think it is time that President Trump faced such questioning himself,” she wrote. “We know that voters have many, many questions for the President.”
