Trump deserves to be grilled at the debates

The Biden campaign, and by proxy, the Biden White House, released an unusual ransom list of debate conditions that the media and Trump campaign must meet for there to be any presidential debates this year.

The list of demands include dissolving the Commission on Presidential Debates, a move that the media just one president ago stated would erode trust in the American media. Other demands include no live studio audience and cutting microphones for other participants. The Biden campaign also demanded the debates only be on four networks: CNN, ABC, Telemundo or CBS.

It was an unprecedented and suspicious move that many critics said was meant to vacuum-seal Biden into a protective environment, prevent his infamous gaffes and limit the moments that will show the country more of just how advanced his age and recent lack mental acuity are.

That the Biden campaign made these demands isn’t surprising, though I would argue if the Trump campaign made these demands, the media, networks and the Commission would all laugh them off. What should be a genuine scandal, however, is that CNN, with help from Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, as well as ABC, accepted these ransom demands whole cloth.

Both networks announced two debates, on two dates, and made their audience and the country believe they somehow just stitched this all together at the last minute. Balderdash. These networks have been negotiating and agreeing to these demands from the White House for weeks, as CNN’s Jeff Zeleny admitted, through anonymous sources. Two supposed independent media networks essentially colluded with the White House to a format and list of demands that the White House clearly thinks favors Biden. We’ve seen these lines blurred before, as we did with current MSNBC analyst Jen Psaki, who accepted a job with the network prior to leaving her post as the White House press secretary.

All of this stinks and should be independently investigated. And as much as the Biden campaign was in the right to dissolve the Commission on Presidential Debates, which had become wildly partisan and abusive within the framework of presidential debates (hello, Candy Crowley), it doesn’t change the fact that the Biden White House is clearly stacking the deck, with the help of network media and their star anchors, against Donald Trump.

The problem for Donald Trump is his campaign was involved in these negotiations — and they accepted every single one of the terms proposed by the Biden campaign. Trump will undoubtedly attempt to use this to his advantage, declaring and blustering to his base that the “Fake News Media” set him up and the debates were unfair. He would, of course, be right, but once again, it won’t matter, because Trump agreed to these terms. Whether or not this all helps Biden remains to be seen.

Biden is clearly not the same candidate he was even three years ago. The rigors and time of the presidency have taken their toll on him, both physically and mentally. Trump will no doubt demand his own conditions, like Biden not wear his giant rubber-soled shoes or that he submit to a pre-debate drug test. But it’s too late, as Trump has submitted to both the networks and to Biden.

More likely than not, there will be a stalemate — and these debates, I predict, are probably not going to happen. Should they happen, however, Trump will deserve every bit of biased treatment he gets from CNN and ABC, because he himself volunteered himself to these conditions, once again proving that Trump can be his own worst enemy.