The first televised debate between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, hosted by CNN, is scheduled to be held in Atlanta on June 27. Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci weighed in on the upcoming debate in a recent episode of the “Rest Is Politics US” podcast that aired on Friday.
Debates Matter: Scaramucci noted that Trump’s support dropped five points in opinion polls following the two debates with Biden in 2020 and the former president never recovered from there. The ex-White House aide said, right now, the Republican candidate’s team is probably showing him videos of those debates.
“They’re explaining to Donald Trump that ‘you were talking wildly over him,’ they’re practicing Trump getting his mic shut off as he goes into one of his full-on stem-winders and they’re trying to tell Donald Trump you can’t do what you did in 2020,” Scaramucci said. He added that Trump hates debate preparations but will certainly practice with a surrogate before he shows up on June 27.
Scaramucci, the founder of investment advisory firm SkyBridge Capital, said former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has met with the Biden team to discuss debate preparation and how Trump conducts his own debate prep. He referred to Biden’s senior advisor Anita Dunn as an “unsung hero” and an “unsung genius” of the Democratic party.
“Not a lot of people know who she is, but she was heavily involved in that debate prep in 2020,” he said.
The financier also recalled a remark by Dunn during a COVID-19 Zoom call in the mid-summer of 2020.
“When Trump’s on the stage with a younger guy and he’s berating them and he’s calling them the nicknames and they’re trying to fight back their stature image-wise from an age perspective … what we’re going to do is if Trump engages like that with Joe Biden, who is a contemporary of his a few years older, same height … we’re not going to do anything; we’re not going to rebut him; we’re just going to let him ventilate,” Dunn reportedly said.
When Biden said “will you shut up man” in the 2020 debate, “it was a moment of genuineness where everybody looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, this guy’s Looney Tunes, the other guy’s an elder Statesman trying to pull the country back together after Covid,'” Scaramucci said.
The Format: With Biden’s campaign calling for mic muting, Scaramucci discussed whether it was the right call from the team.
“Suppose they see the president as malapropping, they see the president as sometimes getting disorganized in his sentences and maybe they want him to talk for two minutes and they don’t want him to talk for more than [that],” he said.
Scaramucci said that Biden team’s thinking is that “we’re going to practice with Joe Biden two-minute sound bites that we’re going to cut clip and broadcast on social media. So, we don’t really see this as a debate as much as we see this as a sound bite machine for Joe Biden post-debate.”
Overall, Scaramucci lamented the lack of granularity or substance in recent presidential debates.
“This is an entertainment contest, this is a popularity contest. this is no longer a hiring decision,” he said.
Trump and Biden will likely face off in one of the closest presidential races in history, with opinion polls showing they are neck and neck.
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