Not up for debate, Joe
Pelosi firm on advice vs. Trump
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is standing by her statement that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden should not debate President Trump.
Pelosi (D-Calif.) was asked Friday on CBS’s “This Morning” if she still stood by her assertion in August that Biden should not take part in any of the three scheduled presidential debates.
“I do. Not that I don’t think he’ll be excellent. I just think that the president has no fidelity to fact or truth,” the California Democrat said, adding that she believes the commander in chief also lacks “fidelity to the Constitution of the United States.”
“He and his henchmen are a danger, but their comments are a danger to our democracy,” she said. “Why bother? He doesn’t tell the truth.”
In August, the speaker told reporters, “I don’t think that there should be any debates.”
She continued at the time that she did not want anyone to “legitimize a conversation with [Trump]” because he lacked “any association with truth.”
Asked during her interview Friday about her longtime feud with the president, Pelosi argued that their differences were, in one way, helpful to her.
“Well, I don’t care what he says about me. Every knock from him is a boost for me. If he wants to help me raise money, he can keep knocking me,” she said.
“I’m speaking the truth. Our Constitution is at the mercy of people who have no allegiance to the Constitution of the United States,” she added.
At a campaign rally in Virginia Friday night, Trump earned laughs by predicting the bar for a Biden debate performance would be very low. “One thing we know. If he does just OK, they’re gonna say — the fake news — they’re gonna say ‘It was the single greatest debate performance in history.’
“‘It was unbelievable, far better than Winston Churchill in his prime,’ ” the president joked.
“‘Winston Churchill was nothing compared to Sleepy Joe.’ ”
Biden has said that while he does intend to debate Trump, “very competent people” had urged him not to do so without a fact-checker on stage.
“I think everybody knows this man has a somewhat pathological tendency not to tell the truth,” he told MSNBC in August, adding, “as long as the Commission [on Presidential Debates] continues down the straight and narrow as they have, I’m going to debate him.”