President Joe Biden announced Friday that he is willing to debate former President Donald Trump, the expected Republican nominee, before the November election, a departure from his previous reluctance to commit.
“I am somewhere; I don’t know when, but I am happy to debate him,” Biden said in an interview with radio talk show host Howard Stern.
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The Biden campaign had previously not stated if Biden would participate in any debates. For weeks, Trump has insisted he will debate Biden “anytime, anyplace” and mocked him for hesitating to commit.
The commission has scheduled three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate for September and October. The first presidential debate is set for September 16 at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Earlier this month, the Trump team urged the Commission on Presidential Debates to add more debates and move up its fall schedule as soon as possible, pointing out that more than 1 million Americans will have likely voted in the first debate.
“The time to start these debates is now,” the campaign stated in an April 11 letter to the bipartisan commission.
The Biden team dismissed Trump’s frequent pleas for early debates as political games. “If I were him, I’d want to debate myself.” He doesn’t have anything else to do,” Biden told reporters in February.
Trump refused to debate his Republican opponents in the GOP primary, citing a lack of meaningful competition for the presumptive Republican nomination.
The Republican National Committee informed the Commission on Presidential Debates in 2022 that its 2024 contender would not participate unless they made modifications to the process of selecting moderators and scheduling debates before early voting began in any state. During his 2020 presidential campaign against Biden, Trump claimed the commission was biased against him without providing any evidence.
