With videos circulating on social media in recent weeks suggesting President Biden’s mental health is declining, and a recent report in the Wall Street Journal adding fuel to that speculation, low expectations for Biden’s performance ahead of next week’s debate with former President Trump could hinder his chances of victory.
Trump may also be trying to keep expectations low for Biden by criticizing his age and abilities in a recent interview, in which he called for Biden to take a drug test before appearing in a debate and said that if he succeeds, it will be due to an enhanced performance.
“If he stands up, they’re going to say it was a great performance,” Trump said at the National Rifle Association convention in Dallas last month.
But one expert said the “low expectations” could be used to Biden’s advantage.
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On the left is President Biden and on the right is former President Trump. (Win McNamee/Getty Images | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“Biden exceeded expectations in the 2020 debates, the State of the Union address and in press conferences that spoke to his intellectual acuity, so I would be cautious to assume he will perform poorly or to underestimate his potential performance,” presidential historian and author Tebi Troy told Fox News Digital.
“That doesn’t mean he’s always going to be at his best, and I fully acknowledge that he’s not the same guy he was in 2012 when he had a very effective debate with Paul Ryan,” added Troy, a former senior Health and Human Services official in President George W. Bush’s administration. “But if you lower your opponent’s expectations, it’s easy for them to strategically exceed those expectations, and that’s something to be concerned about.”
Thursday’s presidential debate will be the first between the leading Republican and Democratic candidates, the first in decades as neither Trump nor Biden have participated in their party’s primary debates.
Troy, who is also a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, believes the real problem for Biden next week is that “it’s easy to stand up to Trump when he’s president, but now Biden is in office and people are still unhappy with certain things.”
“They’re unhappy about illegal immigration, they’re unhappy about inflation, they’re unhappy about the perception that Biden doesn’t know what’s going on and that his way of doing things is not the best. So it’s a little hard to have a successful ‘memory campaign’ in this environment,” he said.
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Former President Trump arrived at Trump Tower on Thursday, May 30, 2024, after being convicted of 34 counts of first-degree falsifying business records. (Felipe Ramares for Fox News Digital)
Meanwhile, a Republican strategist told Fox News Digital that “the bar is very low” for Biden and “his completing his sentence would be a success in the eyes of Democrats.”
“After the State of the Union, everyone was saying it was a huge success for him, and that’s simply because he pulled it off with some notable missteps. There were some missteps, but I don’t think voters can forget and they have to really understand what Joe Biden was actually saying. His State of the Union address was one of the most divisive speeches I’ve ever seen,” the source said.
“What voters should really be looking at are his policy positions,” the source continued. “His platform in the 2020 election was to unify the country, and I think a lot of voters can get behind that. But we’ve seen the exact opposite during his presidency. I think Donald Trump can make a very compelling case on that. Plus, he could stumble a few times.”
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President Biden speaks at a campaign event at Pullman Yard in Atlanta on March 9, 2024. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the White House has called the president’s online videos “cheap fakes” and has tried to discredit them by editing them out of context, slowing them down and fast-forwarding them.
“Discredited right-wing critics President Biden “The Trump campaign, which has promoted other lies that have already been debunked, including that the 2020 election was stolen, clearly feels threatened by a wide range of bipartisan fact-checkers who have exposed the cheap and false smears they have been forced to rely on, because the last thing they want to discuss is Joe Biden’s policies to cut taxes for working families and keep violent crime at historic lows,” White House press secretary Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital this week.
The president’s mental capacity has been at the center of political debate this month after a bombshell report in the Washington Journal, denied by the White House, revealed that Biden’s aging was evident in private meetings, with many saying it was obvious, and that many members of Congress had doubts about his mental capacity.
Fox News Poll: Trump’s approval rating in Arizona rises to 51%, up from 49% in March
A new national poll from Fox News showed that as of Thursday, positive views of the economy had inched up to the highest level so far during Biden’s term, making him the favorite to face off against former President Trump for the first time since October.
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Since May, the presidential race has changed by three points. Last month, Trump had a one-point lead, but today Biden leads by two points, 50% to 48%, within the margin of error. Biden’s current 50% approval rating is his highest this election cycle. The last time Biden led Trump was in October 2023, when he led by just one point (49% to 48%).
Fox News Digital’s Dana Blanton contributed to this report.
