President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have agreed to two debates, one on June 27 on CNN and one on Sept. 10 on ABC News, the first onstage clashes between the former president and his successor in more than three years.
While some of the details were still being hammered out, the agreement to the two debates, reached in a series of social-media posts Wednesday morning, raises the likelihood of the earliest general-election debate in modern history and immediately delivered a jolt of electricity to a campaign that had settled into something of a rut.
Both Trump and Biden believe firmly that if the American people get a look at their opponent on a debate stage they will be less likely to vote for them.
Biden opened the exchange Wednesday by saying he was willing to debate Trump twice before the election, and as early as June, but on the condition that the arrangements bypassed the nonpartisan organization that has managed presidential debates since 1988.
Biden and his top aides want the debates to start much sooner than the dates proposed by the organization, the Commission on Presidential Debates, so voters can see the two candidates side by side well before early voting begins in September. They want the debate to occur inside a TV studio, with microphones that automatically cut off when a speaker’s time limit elapses.
And they want it to be just the two candidates and the moderator — without the raucous in-person audiences that Trump feeds on and without the participation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or other independent or third-party candidates.
It remains unclear whether the Trump campaign will agree to the Biden campaign’s proposed rules, including the mic cutoff and lack of an audience.
Before the Biden campaign’s debate proposal Wednesday morning, at least one behind-the-scenes conversation between aides to both Biden and Trump had taken place, according to four people familiar with the discussion. The two campaigns had mutual interest in both circumventing the debates commission and in excluding Kennedy.
That mutual interest between the two camps did not necessarily mean mutual agreement.
Trump added a new wrinkle when he announced on his social platform Truth Social that he had agreed to a third debate on Fox News on Oct. 2. But the Biden campaign slammed the door on that.
“President Biden made his terms clear for two one-on-one debates, and Donald Trump accepted those terms,” Biden’s campaign chair, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, said. “No more games. No more chaos. No more debate about debates.”
Shortly after the Biden campaign had announced that they would consider invitations from news organizations seeking to host the debates, Biden posted on social platform X that he had accepted an invitation from CNN for a debate with Trump on June 27 in Atlanta.
“Over to you, Donald. As you said: anywhere, any time, any place,” Biden wrote.
Trump quickly responded, telling Fox News Digital that he would “be there” and was “looking forward to being in beautiful Atlanta.”
A short time later, Trump posted on Truth Social that he had accepted the ABC News debate. The Biden team then said the president will attend that one as well.
Biden gave Trump what he has openly clamored for: a televised confrontation with a successor Trump has portrayed, and hopes to reveal, as too feeble to hold the job. The move suggests that Biden is willing to take some calculated risks to reverse his fortunes in a race in which most battleground-state polls show the president trailing Trump and struggling to convince voters that he’s an effective leader and steward of the economy.
Biden recently indicated he would debate Trump but had until now declined to give any firm commitment or specific details. Trump had declared repeatedly that he will debate his successor “anytime and anywhere,” and demanded as many debates as possible.
The public back-and-forth over debates started Wednesday morning, after O’Malley Dillon sent a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates.
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