Can Trump Lose Debates -- and the Election?

If it happens, it won't be Biden who beats him.

Donald Trump apparently is convinced that he can’t possibly lose a debate to a man he calls “corrupt Joe Biden,” a man who he says is “the worst president in the history of our country,” someone, he claims, who “can’t put two sentences together.”

If they gave out Nobel Prizes for insults, Trump would be on his way to Oslo to pick up the award. But here’s a reality check for the man who thinks Joe Biden should be fired: By the end of the two scheduled debates, Trump may be the one who gets fired — because there are a whole bunch of ways he could lose to Biden, and a lot of them would be self-inflicted wounds. We’ll get to them shortly.

But first, let’s acknowledge that the reason President Biden is suddenly anxious to debate Trump is because it’s become clear that if he wants to win, he can’t run on his record. Too many polls show that voters don’t think he’s doing a good job. So Biden’s political team has decided that his best shot at winning is to make the election not a referendum on his record but a referendum on Donald Trump. And he’s counting on the debates to remind voters who Trump is, and why they voted him out of office in 2020.

The debates won’t make much difference to the partisans who made up their minds a long time ago. Trump’s supporters will vote for him even if every word that comes out of his mouth during the debates is untrue. Biden may think Trump is an existential threat to the country, but the MAGA faithful think Biden is the real existential threat.

And President Biden’s supporters, even if they think he didn’t do well during the debate, won’t abandon him. The alternative is a nightmare as far as they’re concerned — an unscrupulous, immoral man who they are convinced will end democracy as we know it. They’ll stay with Biden even if he mumbles and stumbles through the debates.

That leaves the voters who can still be persuaded to go for one candidate or the other — those moderate voters who are still on the fence. Those are the voters the candidates will be trying to win over — and this is where Donald Trump can, and probably will, get into trouble.