Former NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd said on a Thursday podcast he will die holding the belief that former President Joe Biden’s inner circle purposely set him up for failure in his June 27, 2024, debate against President Donald Trump.
The debate, which took place on CNN, was the earliest ever held during a general election and was a disaster for Biden, who often stood with his mouth agape, seemed to freeze up and tripped over words. Todd, on “The Chuck ToddCast,” suggested the most logical reason for Biden’s team setting up the debate was to expose his decline and get him out of the race in time for a different nominee. (RELATED: It Was A Tough Morning For Biden Over At The New York Times Opinion Section)
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“I will go to my grave believing that the debate was intentional … [Biden Senior Adviser] Anita Dunn and [Biden Campaign Chair] Jen O’Malley Dillon will deny it till they’re blue in the face, and if I were in their shoes and I did it, I’d deny it until I was blue in my face, okay? … There was no other reason,” Todd said. “This idea, ‘Well, we needed to shake up the race.’ In late June? Who shakes up a race in late June? … They knew when the nomination was going to be and they knew they needed to deal with this with an opportunity to make a change if it was necessary.”
“I have always believed this. And again, I know it’s not fair to Jen and Anita … they may be listening now cursing us … if you didn’t do it, then you should have. Like, I endorse what you did,” he added. “Because it was pretty clear from [CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s] reporting and [Axios reporter Alex Thompson’s] reporting in the book [‘Original Sin] that the Biden circle was never going to admit the problem and that the only way you were going to force a change was sunshine. This is not about reporters reporting more shit. No, this was about people seeing it for themselves.”
Dunn said on the “Playbook Deep Dive” podcast in August that they chose to do the early debate because they wanted Trump to receive more “scrutiny” for his rhetoric and policy agenda. She also denied that Biden’s debate showing was “catastrophic,” though she acknowledged it was “bad.”
O’Malley Dillon backed Biden staying in the race in a July 19 interview on “Morning Joe” and downplayed the fallout from the debate, according to Politico.
“Absolutely the president’s in this race … We know that we’ve slipped a bit from the debate, and we know that the president has to prove to the American people exactly what he believes,” she said.
Biden dropped out of the race just two days after O’Malley Dillon’s interview and endorsed former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost all seven battleground states and the popular vote to Trump in November.
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