President Joe Biden’s campaign has rejected offers to participate in two additional presidential debates, despite former President Donald Trump agreeing to them.
The debates, which would have been hosted by NBC News/Telemundo and Fox News, were shot down by the president’s 2024 campaign, even though Trump accepted the offers, he shared on Truth Social.
“I have accepted a fourth Presidential Debate against Crooked Joe Biden, this time with NBC & Telemundo,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday. “It is important as Republicans that we WIN with our Great Hispanic Community, who Biden has devastated with Crippling Inflation, High Gas Prices, Crime in our Streets, and Border Chaos. ... This is all in addition to our accepting an invitation from Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum of Fox News to host the Vice Presidential Debate at Virginia State University, or another venue, in Virginia, to be named later.”
NBC News confirmed that the network had offered a debate to both campaigns after they agreed to participate in a June CNN debate and a September ABC debate.
However, NBC News shared that a Biden campaign official shot down the idea of more than two debates, saying the “debate about debates is over.”
Trump spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez blasted Biden’s decision in a statement on Friday night.
“The Telemundo/NBC debate would be widely watched by Hispanic voters, but Biden’s handlers are petrified to allow him to defend his disastrous record,” Alvarez said. “Crooked Joe Biden is too ‘cobarde’ to address the Hispanic community and answer for his failures on the debate stage!”
Nothing about Biden and Trump’s upcoming debates is conventional, as both candidates have bypassed the typical process and changed the fighting ground from before a live audience to a TV studio.
The Biden campaign has also accepted an offer for a vice presidential debate hosted by CBS, but the Trump campaign has not, instead accepting a separate competing Fox News proposal for that debate even with Trump not yet announcing his VP.
In a statement last Wednesday, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, also shared that there would be “no more debate about debates” now that the two had been set.
“President Biden made his terms clear for two one-on-one debates, and Donald Trump accepted those terms,” she said in a statement. “No more games. No more chaos, no more debate about debates. We’ll see Donald Trump on June 27th in Atlanta — if he shows up.”