- Trump has been refusing to debate his primary rivals, but he says he wants to debate Joe Biden.
- But some allies of the president are warning that may be a bad idea.
As Democrats look toward an expected rematch between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden later this year, some are warning that agreeing to debates are a bad idea.
"I would think twice about it," Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-highest ranking Democratic senator, recently told The Hill. "It's just an opportunity for him to display his extremism."
Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a close ally of Biden, told the outlet that Trump's conduct at the 2020 debates and the former president's refusal to debate his GOP primary opponents "would make a pretty strong case for not dignifying him as a candidate by sharing a debate stage."
Trump, meanwhile, has shown an eagerness to debate Biden that he hasn't shown toward his rivals, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former Ambassador Nikki Haley.
"Oh, will I look forward to that," Trump recently told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. "How about 10 debates?"
That's despite the Republican National Committee voting in 2022 to withdraw from debates held by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a nonpartisan organization that conservatives have accused of bias.
Typically, the commission is the sole organizer of presidential and vice presidential debates.
"They are totally corrupt, and they're terrible," Trump told Hewitt. "With that being said, I would do 20 debates even if it was organized by them."
In 2020, the presidential debates between Trump and Biden were broadly seen as chaotic and damaging to the former president's reelection bid — one was even canceled due to Trump's COVID diagnosis.
At the same time, some Democrats are concerned that future debates between Trump and Biden could go off the rails in a way that benefits the former president.
James Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, told The Hill that Biden should debate Trump, if only because it's an expectation that voters have.
"It's kind of expected of a presidential candidate," said Carville. "Not debating would certainly accentuate the age problem."
Thus far, Biden's campaign has not committed to general election debates.
Quentin Fulks, a top Biden campaign official, told reporters last month that the campaign would "look at the schedule" of debates but that the campaign's current focus was "making sure we continue to build out a campaign and infrastructure that's going to be able to be competitive in 2024."