Amid the circulation of videos on social media in recent weeks which appear to show President Biden\u2019s mental acuity dwindling and a recent Wall Street Journal report adding fuel to the speculation, low expectations for his performance ahead of the debate next week against former President Trump could buck his chance of victory.<\/p>\n
And Trump may be helping Biden set expectations low by dinging him on his age and acuity in recent interviews. Trump has called for Biden to be drug tested prior to taking the debate stage, saying that if he does well it will be due to performance enhancements.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018If he\u2019s standing, they\u2019ll say it was a brilliant performance,\u2019 Trump said at the National Rifle Association (NRA) Convention last month in Dallas.<\/p>\n
However, \u2018low expectations\u2019 will be used to Biden\u2019s advantage, according to one expert.<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019d be wary of assuming that Biden\u2019s going to have a bad performance, or of talking down his potential performance because he has surpassed expectations at the 2020 debate, at the State of the Union address, and at the press conference where they were talking about his mental acuity,\u2019 presidential historian and author Tevi Troy told Fox News Digital.<\/p>\n
\u2018That doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s always all there, and I fully recognize that he is not the person he was in 2012 when he debated very effectively against Paul Ryan,\u2019 added Troy, who served as a senior HHS official in the President George W. Bush administration. \u2018But when you lower the expectations of your opponent\u2019s performance, it\u2019s easy for the opponent to exceed those expectations strategically. It\u2019s something to worry about.\u2019<\/p>\n
Thursday\u2019s presidential debate will be the first between the GOP and Democratic frontrunners, since neither Trump nor Biden participated in party primary debates \u2013 a first in several decades.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Troy, also a senior researcher at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, believes the real problem for Biden next week \u2018is it\u2019s easy to run against Trump when Trump\u2019s in office, but now Biden\u2019s in office and people are still unhappy with one situation.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018They\u2019re unhappy with the illegal immigration, they\u2019re unhappy with inflation, and they\u2019re unhappy with the sense that Biden doesn\u2019t have it and doesn\u2019t know what\u2019s going on or isn\u2019t on top of his game. So, the \u2018memory campaign\u2019 is a bit of a hard thing to pull off in this circumstance,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, a GOP strategist told Fox News Digital \u2018the bar is so low\u2019 for Biden, \u2018so him making it through a sentence is seen as a success in the eyes of the Democrat party.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018After the State of the Union, everyone was saying it was a great success for him, simply because he made it through with a few notable stumbles. He had a couple, but I think voters can\u2019t forget, and they have to truly understand, like, what Joe Biden is actually saying. His union address was one of the most divisive speeches I\u2019ve seen,\u2019 the source said.<\/p>\n
\u2018What voters really need to focus on are his policy positions,\u2019 the source continued. \u2018The platform that he ran on in 2020 that he\u2019s going to unify the country. And I think a lot of voters can get behind that. But we have seen the exact opposite during his entire time as president. And I think Donald Trump can make a really good case about that. And on top of that, just being able to stumble him up a couple times.\u2019<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the White House is working to discredit videos of the president online, terming them \u2018cheap fakes,\u2019 which are edited out of context, slowed or sped up.<\/p>\n
\u2018The discredited right-wing critics of President Biden who spread other debunked lies, including that the 2020 election was stolen, are clearly threatened by the wide range of nonpartisan fact-checkers that have pulled back the curtain on the cheap fake smears they\u2019re forced to rely on \u2013 since the last thing they want to discuss is Joe Biden\u2019s agenda to cut taxes for working families and keep bringing violent crime to historic lows,\u2019 White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital this week.<\/p>\n
The president\u2019s mental acuity has become the center of political discourse this month after a bombshell Washington Journal report, which the White House dismissed, revealed that many lawmakers on Capitol Hill had questions about Biden\u2019s mental acuity after many said his aging was apparent in private meetings.<\/p>\n
As of Thursday, President Biden is the frontrunner in a hypothetical matchup against former President Trump for the first time since October, as positive views of the economy inch up \u2014 hitting their highest level thus far in the Biden presidency, according to a new Fox News national survey.<\/p>\n
Since May, there has been a 3-point change in the presidential race. Trump was ahead by one point last month, while Biden is up by two points today: 50%-48%. That\u2019s well within the margin of error. Biden\u2019s current 50% support is his best this election cycle; he hasn\u2019t been ahead of Trump since October 2023 and that was by just 1 point (49%-48%).<\/p>\n
Fox News Digital\u2019s Dana Blanton contributed to this report.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
Amid the circulation of videos on social media in recent weeks which appear to show President Biden\u2019s mental acuity dwindling and a recent Wall Street Journal report adding fuel to the speculation, low expectations for his performance ahead of the debate next week against former President Trump could buck his chance of victory. And Trump <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":20122,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20121","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}