Pelosi doubles down on her advice that Biden NOT debate Trump

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doubled down on her advice to Joe Biden – don’t bother debating President Donald Trump. 

‘Why even waste everybody’s time listening to what he has to say?’ Pelosi said Thursday evening on MSNBC. 

She said her assessment wasn’t due to Biden’s debating ability. 

‘Why I said he shouldn’t debate him has nothing to do with Joe Biden. Joe Biden will be – he is great as a debater,’ Pelosi said. ‘What it is is about how totally inappropriate, that’s the nicest word I can think of, the president is. He has not even the slight flirtation with truth, fact, evidence, data.’ 

By the time Pelosi appeared on ‘The Beat’ with Ari Melber, Biden had already said Thursday that he would debate Trump.   

‘As long as the commission continues down the straight and narrow as they have, I’m going to debate him,’ Biden said Thursday on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell. ‘The debates are going to take place,’ the former vice president added. 

Biden said he’d be playing the ‘fact-checker on the floor,’ accusing Trump of always ‘lying, lying, lying.’ 

‘I think everybody knows this man has a somewhat pathological tendency not to tell the truth,’ Biden said. 

Pelosi originally floated the idea of Biden walking away from debating Trump at her weekly press conference.   

‘I don’t think there should be any debates,’ Pelosi said.

She added, jokingly, that reporters shouldn’t tell Biden this was her opinion. 

‘I do not think that the president of the United States has comported himself in a way that … has any association with truth, evidence, data and facts,’ Pelosi said. ‘I wouldn’t legitimize a conversation with him,’ she added. 

The House speaker also said Trump would engage in ‘skullduggery’ onstage – a fancy word for underhanded behavior. 

On Melber’s show she added, ‘The president has not shown any respect for the office that he holds. And I don’t expect that he will have any respect for the debates for that office.’  

Trump and Biden are scheduled to face off in three official presidential debates with their running mates, Vice President Mike Pence and California Sen. Kamala Harris, slated to meet once. 

The first debate will take place in Cleveland, Ohio on September 29. 

Next will come the VP debate in Utah on October 7. 

Trump and Biden will then square off again in Miami on October 15 and in Nashville on October 22. 

The presidential election will take place on November 3. 

Trump’s campaign has complained to the Commission on Presidential Debates that the schedule is outdated, as many Americans will be able to cast their ballots before the series of debates concludes. 

Rudy Giuliani, in a letter to the commission penned earlier this month, called the current schedule an ‘outdated dinosaur and not reflective of voting realities in 2020.’   

‘For a nation already deprived of a traditional campaign schedule because of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it makes no sense to also deprive so many Americans of the opportunity to see and hear the two competing visions for our country’s future before millions of votes have been cast, the former New York City mayor wrote.

Giuliani encouraged the commission, which has handled the presidential debates since 1988, to move the final debate to the first week of September instead. 

On Wednesday, Trump also floated he would ask Biden to get drug tested before the debates, commenting on his improvement through the Democratic primary cycle. 

‘I don’t know how he could have been so incompetent in his debate performances and then all of a sudden be OK against Bernie,’ Trump told The Washington Examiner. 

The president made similar comments about asking Hillary Clinton to get drug tested in the run-up to their three face-offs in 2016.