Nikki Haley has been pressuring Donald Trump for a debate, but he has yet to even acknowledge her request.
Instead, Trump shook up the election by saying that he wanted to debate Joe Biden... Now.
Talking Points...
- Haley challenges Trump
- Trump challenges Biden
- Analysis
Once it became clear that it would be Haley who would outlast DeSantis in the primary, Donald Trump started to attack Haley. The attacks were nowhere near the level that DeSantis was attacked, but it definitely got her attention.
Donald Trump refused to debate the field during the primary, saying that he would only do a debate if the race tightened up. With Haley now facing off against Trump, the numbers have tightened up, so Haley issued the challenge to Trump:
“And so, he got upset and said that he would take one, and challenge me to one and that he would beat me. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. But what I said was ‘OK, if that’s the case, then get on a debate stage and let’s go.'
“Bring it Donald, show me what you got.”
Trump has completely ignored Haley’s jabs and her call for a debate. Even though Haley tried to hit Trump the same way that Trump hit Biden on his mental cognizance, Trump has not taken the debate. Instead, he fired off a challenge to Biden.
Trump had called into “The Dan Bongino Show” saying that he wanted to debate Biden for the “good of the country.” Trump stated:
“He can’t do it, because he can’t talk. He can’t do anything. He’s ruining our country. And I don’t think he’s going to run — I don’t know if it’s donors or otherwise. It might be his family, it might be something.
“I’d like to debate him now because we should debate for the good of the country.”
Then things got a little weird. Joe Biden was told that Trump wanted to debate him now, and he offered up a bit of a weird response:
“If I were him, I would want to debate me, too.”
As a conservative voter, it was disappointing that Trump did not debate the field in the primary, as there are some questions that I and many other voters wanted answered. Trump, however, treated the primary as though he were an incumbent, rattling off the names of all the recent presidents who refused to debate challengers in primary races; the only difference was they were incumbents.
As disappointed as many of us were, there is no denying the fact the strategy paid off. Now Trump is ready to debate, and a large part of that is that areas that other Republicans could hit Trump on, such as the vaccine, Joe Biden cannot touch him on.
Trump is now treating the primary as though it is over, and it pretty much is, so I get him wanting to focus on Biden and offering to debate him “10 times.” Trump needs to get Biden on the stage to call out his disastrous record as well as get Biden to mentally collapse during the debate, and that will happen. Biden has proven time and again that his clock runs out after about 30 minutes, and that is when I would expect Trump to pounce.
