Biden must debate Trump, but not until he recants
President Joe Biden should insist as a condition for debating former president Donald Trump during this fall’s election campaign that Trump recant his big lie that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by fraud and other illegal activity.
Lest this suggestion be thought of as partisan cover so that Biden does not have to debate, let me be clear that Biden needs a debate more than Trump does.
Biden must debate
Trump is ahead of Biden in polls in the crucial swing states. Biden is closing the gap and can make inroads on some issues — blaming Republican intransigence for the problems at the border and emphasizing how inflation is coming down.
But he cannot win without laying to rest the crucial issue of his fitness for office. And he cannot do that without holding his own in a debate with Trump.
Furthermore, if Biden were to insist, I believe Trump would readily meet it. He is desperate to debate Biden, whom he sees as so infirm and vulnerable that a debate will seal his win. Winning the Presidential election is all Trump cares about. He would comply with a demand to recant.
Trump has dramatically changed course like this before. In 2016, after years of making false birther claims, Trump simply announced that President Barack Obama had been born in the United States. He has no shame about what he says.
Why is Trump’s recanting the big lie so important? There are two reasons. First, the big lie has poisoned American public life. Millions of Americans believe that Biden was not actually elected president and that future elections cannot be trusted.
Unless this belief is reversed, our constitutional democracy is doomed. If elections are rigged, why should people oppose a military coup or the declaration of martial law?
Trump must recant
Second, as important as that unpoisoning of American public life would be, there is an even deeper reason that Trump must be made to tell the truth. We live in a post-truth age only because we allow it.
The simple truth is that the 2020 Presidential election was an ordinary American election. There was no organized fraud. There was no conspiracy of persons ineligible to vote. There was nothing wrong with the voting machines.
Undoubtedly, as in any election, some rules were bent for partisan gain — the three day voting extension by Democratic justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court comes to mind — but a United States Supreme Court very favorable to Trump kept watch in 2020 to limit any such efforts. The overall result was not affected.
Trump won a narrow election in 2016 because he ran a smart campaign. He lost in 2020 because he ran a stupid campaign — refusing to take credit for the rapid development of life-saving vaccines, for example.
We have come to accept that lies can be told without any consequences. That acceptance is destructive to democratic life. Biden can insist on the truth of a crucial and straightforward fact. He was elected in 2020 fair and square. Maybe Trump’s admission about the 2020 election will be the beginning of a return to sanity in American public life.
Am I asking the impossible of Trump? After all the lying, how can Trump now tell the truth?
Trump is a master of dissembling. If it suits him, he will just say, “I believed there was fraud at the time, but I can see now that this was not the case.”
This is not far from what may actually have happened. If you go back to Trump’s speech to the crowd on Jan. 6 or his telephone conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, it is obvious that he was not engaging in a criminal conspiracy to commit election fraud.
He sounds like he honestly believed that the election had been stolen and was trying to get state officials and the public to put a stop to it. That is what he said.
At first, Trump may have believed the crazy stories about fraud. But I’m sure he knows better now. Now he is just lying.
The damage must be undone
The criminal cases pending against Trump will not deter him from admitting that the 2020 election was not stolen. Those cases depend on Trump’s state of mind then, not today, four years later.
And it would be simple enough to persuade both prosecutors involved in the election interference cases — Jack Smith in the federal case and Fani Willis in the Georgia state prosecution — not to use any admission that Trump makes. Both presumably understand how important Trump’s recanting would be to the country.
Furthermore, does anyone still believe that these criminal cases will matter if Trump is elected in November, or that they will prevent him from being elected?
The most important task in American politics today is to undo the damage caused by the big lie. Joe Biden can force Donald Trump to do exactly that. Joe, don’t debate until Trump recants.