President Biden’s campaign appears to be attempting damage control following the president’s poor performance in Thursday night’s debate, positioning the debate as a chance for the American people to expose former President Trump’s “lies.”
Democrats panicked after Biden’s lackluster performance in the first face-to-face debate between the two major candidates since 2020. Trump was widely seen as the winner of the debate, though some criticized him for not backing his claims with facts.
Calls for Biden to step aside and for someone else to take the lead in the race for the Democratic nomination in November have increased significantly since Thursday night.
Several of Biden’s surrogates have sought to downplay the ultimate impact of Biden’s performance on his chances of winning the presidential election in November, including Vice President Harris, who argued in a post-debate interview that Biden “started slow” but “finished strong.”
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler echoed Harris’s sentiments, arguing the debate revealed Trump’s “extremism.”
“Last night was one of the first times that the American people began to understand the extremism that Donald Trump represents and how harmful a second term for him would be going forward,” Tyler told reporters.
“I think the president was honest about his performance, but in terms of what last night’s debate actually provided to the American people, it made the threat clear. It began to make clear the threat that Donald Trump poses,” he said.
He argued that while the debate may not have eased Americans’ anxieties about the president’s age, it exposed Trump’s lies.
“I think it forced Donald Trump … what Donald Trump did as the debate went on … obviously, he continued to lie all night,” Tyler said, “but as the primetime debate went on, he didn’t have an audience to feed off of, and he started to get more and more crazy and spew more and more lies, reminding the American people why he was fired in the first place.”
The next presidential debate is scheduled for September 10th, after both parties hold their conventions and finalize their candidates.
