In his imagination, Donald Trump is a man of incredible bravery. In 2018, for example, after a gunman killed 17 people in a Florida high school, the Republican boasted that he would’ve had the courage to run into the school during the mass shooting. In remarks to the nation’s governors, the then-president said at the time, “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
It was a difficult line to take seriously, but it was a peek into a weird perspective: In Trump’s mind, he’s effectively an action star. People were supposed to believe the septuagenarian president would’ve voluntarily run into an ongoing deadly crisis, where he’d confront a teen armed with an assault rifle, carrying with him nothing but his wits and his bare hands.
Trump’s reality, of course, is far different. The former president is better known for promising to take the stand in court cases, only to back down with the pressure on. He’s also the candidate who thought it’d be a good idea to agree to a presidential debate in September, only to ditch the idea when Democrats rallied behind a candidate that scares him. NBC News reported:
Former President Donald Trump on Friday said he would no longer participate in a September debate on ABC, opting instead to propose a debate against Vice President Kamala Harris on Fox News on Sept. 4. The former president said the ABC debate was agreed to when President Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee “but has been terminated in that Biden will no longer be a participant.”
There were some headlines over the weekend about Trump “agreeing” to debate Harris, but that’s not quite what happened. Rather, what Trump decided to do was back out of a debate he and his team had previously agreed to, while simultaneously proposing a different event, the details of which he prefers.
The Republican originally said he’d appear at a Sept. 10 debate on ABC News, without an audience. The GOP nominee has abandoned that commitment, instead saying he’s prepared to appear at a Sept. 4 debate on Fox News, “with a full arena audience.”
It’s not altogether clear whether Trump ran this by Fox News — the network had pitched the idea of hosting a possible event on Sept. 17 — though it’s also possible that the former president is working from the assumption that Fox will simply follow his directions.
For Harris, all of this is apparently absurd: The incumbent vice president has said she’ll stick to the plan that Team Trump originally agreed to, and she’s asking the former president to honor his commitment. That, evidently, isn’t likely to happen.
After months of “anywhere, anyplace” chest-thumping, Trump posted an item to his social media platform that read, “I’ll see her on September 4th or, I won’t see her at all.”
None of this comes as too big of a surprise. Almost immediately after Biden ended his re-election campaign, the GOP nominee started backing away from a possible debate. On Friday morning, before formally ditching the existing plan, Trump told Fox Business, “I mean, right now I say, why should I do a debate?”
At some level, the former president probably realizes this makes him look like a coward, but in the electoral calculus, he’s apparently concluded that it’s better to look weak than show up on a debate stage and look worse.
So where does this leave us? While presidential debates have become a common staple in recent decades, in the not-too-distant past, such events were rarities. In the 1964, 1968 and 1972 election cycles, for example, Americans did not see the major-party nominees share a stage.
Unless Trump musters the courage to change his mind, 2024 will be a throwback to that bygone era.
