When Donald Trump pitched a fit about the second debate and ended up pulling out of it, I honestly thought that would be the end of it? Trump was likely already Covid-positive during the first presidential debate three weeks ago, and he STILL hasn’t disclosed when his last corona-negative test was before that week. So when a still feverish and ‘roid-ragey Trump threw a tantrum about the second debate going virtual, I thought that would be the end of debates. Not so much – the “third” debate is still supposed to happen IN PERSON on Thursday, October 22. But the Trump campaign has been laying the groundwork for a likely Trump withdrawal:

With 15 days to go until the election, and Trump losing by double digits in most national polls, the third presidential debate represents the final chance for the campaign to change anyone’s mind. And yet, for some reason, Team Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to pull out.

In a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien demands that the last debate be about foreign policy, rather than the announced topics (Fighting COVID-19, Climate Change, Race in America, American Families, National Security, and Leadership). While Stepien acknowledges that such issues “are serious and worthy of discussion,” and actually do touch on foreign policy, he writes, embarrassingly, that “almost all of them were discussed at length during the first debate won by President Trump over moderator Chris Wallace and candidate Joe Biden.”

Then he claims that Biden is “desperate to avoid conversations about his own foreign policy record” and accuses the CPD of “pro-Biden antics” which don’t actually exist outside the deranged heads of the Trump campaign. Then he whines about the fact that there’s been talk of cutting candidate’s mics during the proceedings, which only arose because Trump interrupted Biden so many times during the first debate that it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to zap him with a cattle prod so his opponent could get a word in edgewise.

[From Vanity Fair]

I don’t know if this is an attempt to lay some groundwork for an eventual cancellation? Trump looked pathetic for cancelling the virtual second debate. All of the whining about mics being cut off – an extreme measure introduced solely because of Trump’s interruptions – is more like a child’s attempt to see where their parent’s limits are, what they can get away with, you know? But yeah, obviously Trump doesn’t want to talk about the coronavirus or race or climate change. He wants to just scream “Burisma!!” and “But His Emails!”

Also: Trump is already criticizing the debate moderator, NBC News’ Kristen Welker, a longtime political reporter. Trump called her a “radical Democrat” who has been “screaming questions at me for a long time…. She’s always been terrible & unfair, just like most of the Fake News reporters, but I’ll still play the game.”

Trump is out here preemptively attacking Kristen Welker, the moderator of the upcoming presidential debate, as "a radical left Democrat, or whatever she is." pic.twitter.com/pss1wUmeSa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 19, 2020

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Avalon Red.