Washington: US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that she doesn’t believe there should be any presidential debates between sitting President Donald Trump and 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
“I don’t think that there should be any debates,” Pelosi said on Thursday during a press conference on Capitol Hill. “I do not think that the president of the United States has comported himself in a way that anybody has any association with truth, evidence, data and facts.”
“I wouldn’t legitimize a conversation with him nor a debate in terms of the presidency of the United States,” she added, Xinhua news agency reported.
The top congressional Democrat instead proposed that the candidates take separate stages and answer questions about their policies in a “conversation with the American people” rather than “an exercise in skulduggery” but acknowledged that the Biden campaign “thinks in a different way about this.”
Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said that they “certainly agree with Speaker Pelosi on her views of the president’s behaviour,”
“But just as she has powerfully confronted that behaviour in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room, Joe Biden looks forward to doing the same on the debate stage,” Bates added.
Trump and his campaign have sought to cast doubt on Biden’s mental fitness and pushed for more debates and for them to take place sooner.
In a recent interview with ABC News, Biden, 77, said that he thinks “it’s a legitimate question to ask anybody over 70 years old whether or not they’re fit and whether they’re ready.” “But I just, only thing I can say to the American people, it’s a legitimate question to ask anybody,” he said. “Watch me.”
On Wednesday, Trump said he will request both Biden and himself take drug tests before the first presidential debate in September, suggesting without providing any evidence that drugs had improved the former vice president’s debate performance against Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in March during the Democratic primary.
“We are going to call for a drug test,” Trump said during an interview in the Oval Office with the Washington Examiner. “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.”
The Commission on Presidential Debates has scheduled three debates between Biden and Trump and one between Vice President Mike Pence and Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, in coming two months.
