I haven’t seen reference to this anywhere else, but as I’ve written before, though I won’t bank on the conclusions the Palmer Report draws from the facts, it usually presents actual facts:
So now the Trump campaign is trying the bizarre desperate last ditch move of demanding that Joe Biden agree to more than the three customary debates. When you consider Donald Trump’s visibly worsening physical health and collapsing cognitive abilities, sending him out there for any debates at all is a risky move. Sending him out there for additional debates is an extremely low percentage play that’s likely to backfire.
Back in the days when there was still hope we’d field a different candidate, I believe I wrote, and I know I said, that Biden was the only potential candidate that Trump would dare to debate, as I thought that Biden was the only one who might not be able to handle Trump.
I don’t believe that anymore, for a number of reasons. First, Trump is declining in real time, is not capable of putting together a coherent sentence, and is not capable of holding himself in check. He will treat any debate like a rally and will expect a wider audience to swallow his lies. In addition, I have to hand it to Biden. It appears he has been quite open to taking advice about his public statements, and that advice has been generally good. It won’t be hard to anticipate Trump’s lines of attack, and it won’t be hard to turn them against Trump. Just as a small example, we can expect Trump, who is obviously in the early stages of dementia, to accuse Biden of precisely that. A response such as “Well, I’m not the one who suggested people inject disinfectant, …(here insert litany of crazy Trumpisms)”. In fact, the best Biden strategy would be to simply keep reminding people of Trump’s repeated failures.
I agree with Palmer that Biden ought to call their bluff, as there’s no doubt in my mind that come debate season the genius’s campaign managers will have zero interest in having any debates, never mind more than three.