WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
IN A TYPICAL ELECTION YEAR, WE would be seven months away from the first presidential debate of the parties’ nominees. A date and location are already penciled in: Sept. 16 at Texas State University in San Marcos. The campaign teams of President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, would likely schedule days of prep away from the trail, and plan to frame the outcome as a win for their side and an abject failure for the other.
While that scenario could still happen, a likelier one is that the Texas event gets canceled, as do the ones in Virginia and Utah planned for October. In fact, we may have already seen the final presidential debate of 2024—the one that took place back on Jan. 10 in Des Moines, Iowa, between Republicans Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. Trump, as he had for every primary debate, skipped it, refusing to share the same air as his lesser-polling rivals. (Ratings for these events were terrible without Trump.)
And now we appear to be heading to a game of debate chicken, with the campaigns signaling that the likely candidates may never step on the same stage before Election Day.
A spokeswoman for Biden’s campaign said headquarters would have no comment about the debate schedule. Two spokespeople for Trump’s efforts didn’t even acknowledge the question. At other times, when asked directly about the debates, top officials dodged the issue as being premature given neither candidate is yet the official nominee. But chat with advisers who claim to be shaping campaign strategy, and their responses reveal themselves to be an attempt to set expectations for a Trump-Biden debate that could still happen (though probably won’t).
How did we get here? Even before Trump won a single vote or earned a lone delegate in his quest to return to the White House, the Republican National Committee told the long-standing bipartisan group that has organized presidential debates for decades that it was not interested in their planning. If the nominee—presumed even back then in 2022 to be Trump—wanted to
