Liberal Establishment Says Biden Must Impose Two Conditions on Debates, Or Else ‘Stay in Your Basement’

July 10, 2020 (EIRNS)—New York Times columnist and Trump-hater Thomas Friedman’s article on his concern over Democratic Presidential contender Joe Biden debating Trump received some attention on Wednesday and Thursday. Friedman argues that the debates are not a “good way” for Biden to “reintroduce himself” after his hibernation at home in Delaware. Trump “needs these debates much more than Biden does.... So Biden needs to make Trump pay for them in the currency of transparency and fact-checking.” (Curiously, Friedman chooses to label these two as “universal principles.”)

First, Friedman opines, Trump has to release his tax records from 2016–2018. Why? Trump’s financial records “could” expose ties to Russian banks and Putin. Second, there would have to be a “real-time fact-checking team” that would occupy the last ten minutes of the debate, to “report on any misleading statements, phony numbers or outright lies either candidate had uttered.”

Friedman doesn’t say who would be the designated “fact-checker,” but he clearly believes that he himself is the omnipotent one best qualified to pontificate on Trump’s supposed lies.

Trump is desperate for a debate, Friedman argues, so he must agree to those two conditions. Friedman concludes: “Otherwise, Joe, stay in your basement.” Friedman, of course, is not the first Democrat praying that Biden will “stay in the basement.”

It is rumored that Trump’s counter was that someone from the fact-checking team would have to be assigned the role of completing Biden’s sentences for him.