President Joe Biden told Howard Stern on Friday that he would “be happy to” debate his Republican rival Donald Trump, marking the first time the president has explicitly said he would debate Trump this election cycle.
During an hour-long live sitdown with the famed shock jock, Biden was asked whether he would agree to a general election face-off against Trump, prompting the president to insist he was up to the challenge.
“I am, somewhere, I don’t know when, but I am happy to debate him,” Biden stated.
Biden’s agreement to go one-on-one with his predecessor comes after the five major television news networks and the Associated Press prepared an open letter begging both the Trump and Biden campaigns to participate in open debates prior to the election.
“We, the undersigned national news organizations, urge the presumptive presidential nominees to publicly commit to participating in general election debates before November’s election,” the letter reads.
Trump, in a seeming effort to distract from his ongoing criminal trials, has tried pressuring the president into agreeing to a public shadow while urging the Commission on Presidential Debates to add more debates to the schedule. The ex-president has repeatedly taken to his social media site Truth Social to say he is willing to show up “anytime, anywhere, and anywhere” while mocking Biden for not yet committing to any debates.
Of course, at the same time, the ex-president backed out of participating in any of the GOP primary debates this election cycle. Throughout the primary, he repeatedly declared that he saw no reason to debate his Republican opponents because he was leading in the polls, calling them “losing candidates” who were “not going anywhere.”
The commission, meanwhile, has tentatively scheduled three presidential debates in September and October of this year. Meanwhile, it was the Republican National Committee that unanimously voted to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates in April 2022, citing their dissatisfaction with the way the 2020 presidential debates were handled.
Prior to seemingly committing to a debate during his Stern appearance, the president and his campaign have deflected questions over whether he’d agree to any faceoffs this fall. After Trump called for the two to debate “immediately” in February, Biden attempted to troll his opponent by telling reporters: “If I were him, I would want to debate me, too. He’s got nothing else to do.”
Following Biden’s insistence to Stern that he was “happy” to debate the former president, Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita reacted by tweeting: “Ok let’s set it up!”
When reached for comment, a representative for the president’s campaign pointed back to Biden’s statement and said it speaks for itself.
