Mr. Trump, for his part, likes his chances. He believes, despite clear and convincing evidence, that he is pretty good at debating. “I think I won every debate” in 2016, he said this month. At the very least, he can be confident that just about any misstep will be drowned out or denied by his apologists. Still, Mr. Trump — who cannot be pleased with polls that show, in the wake of his felony convictions, some attrition among independent voters — appears to be aiming for a knockout blow.
Mr. Trump will be unalterably himself: nasty, relentless, brazenly dishonest. The real variable is his opponent, who forever seems one stumble away from oblivion. But the risk is worth taking; clearly, the Biden team feels that something must be done to shake things up. According to Gallup, Mr. Biden’s approval rating flatlined about a year into his tenure, and nothing has moved head-to-head polling averages more than a point or two — not a vigorous State of the Union address, not a strong economy, not Mr. Trump’s convictions on 34 counts. Apart from August’s Democratic convention, which will be as devoid of drama as the party can manage, the debates are Mr. Biden’s best opportunity to command a national audience before November.
The predebate commentary has focused, to a large degree, on Mr. Biden’s halting appearance. This is a concern, but he has another, perhaps less obvious, liability: He is a poor storyteller. Catchphrases and callbacks are the currency of debates, but they are also how Mr. Biden tends to communicate as president. He has consistently failed to tell the story of his tenure and these times — how far the nation has come since 2020, where it’s going and what would happen during a second Trump term. He shows, instead, an undue faith in the power of a well-worn anecdote (“My dad used to say, ‘Joey …’”) or a tired phrase (“the soul of America”), each an open door that leads nowhere, really, except to another phrase (“This is the United States of America”). His speeches are a kind of crude pointillism in which the landscape or the portrait never quite coheres.
It is not a surprise, therefore, that Mr. Biden is eager to confront Mr. Trump with his own words; there are so many to choose from. “The things he said are off the wall: ‘I want to be a dictator on Day 1,’” Mr. Biden explained in an interview on June 6. “All I have to do,” he added, “is hear what he says, remind people what he says and what I believe and what he believes. He’s about him. I’m about the country.”
But that is not all Mr. Biden has to do. While he does need, of course, to define the contrasts between him and Mr. Trump, that cannot be achieved by a volley of phrases. “Dictator on Day 1” has been endlessly replayed since Mr. Trump said some version of that last December, and it has had no apparent effect on his electability. Neither did his call in 2022 for “termination” of the Constitution.
