Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said during a Thursday press conference that she doesn’t “think that there should be any debates” between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden because, she argued, Trump doesn’t deserve to be engaged.
“Since you asked about that,” Pelosi said. “I myself — don’t tell anybody I told you this, especially don’t tell Joe Biden — I don’t think that there should be any debates. I do not think that the President of the United States has comported himself in a way that anybody that 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,” Pelosi continued. “Now I know that the Biden campaign thinks in a different way about this.”
She went on to describe Trump’s behavior during the 2016 presidential debates as “disgraceful,” gesturing to the press, adding, “stalking Hillary Clinton like that, I was disappointed that the press didn’t say, ‘Go back to your station. You’re not here—you don’t own this stage. You have your own podium; she has hers.'”
WATCH:
Speaker Pelosi says that she does not think there should be any presidential debates between President Trump and Joe Biden:
"I wouldn't legitimize a conversation with him." pic.twitter.com/KkGSBAWrzy
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 27, 2020
“I think that he’ll probably act in a way that is beneath the dignity of the presidency,” Pelosi predicted. “He does that every day, but I think he will also belittle what the debates are supposed to be about. And they’re not to be about skullduggery on the part of somebody who has no respect for the office he holds, much less the democratic process.”
Alleging that Trump would simply use the debates to undermine the election, Pelosi added, “So if Joe Biden asked me what I thought about it, I don’t think that he should dignify that conversation with Donald Trump.”
Pelosi then floated the idea that each candidate should instead lay out their agenda separately on their own stages, reiterating her belief that the two candidates debating each other would merely degenerate into “an exercise in skullduggery.”
On Wednesday, Trump questioned whether Biden has the mental acuity to capably debate him without pharmaceutical assistance.
As The Daily Wire reported:
“Nobody thought that he was even going to win,” Trump told Washington Examiner reporter Byron York during an interview in the Oval Office. “Because his debate performances were so bad. Frankly, his best performance was against Bernie. We’re going to call for a drug test, by the way, because his best performance was against Bernie. It wasn’t that he was Winston Churchill, because he wasn’t, but it was a normal, boring debate. You know, nothing amazing happened. And we are going to call for a drug test, because there’s no way — you can’t do that.”
Regarding what he thought was going on with Biden, Trump said, “I don’t know how he could have been so incompetent in his debate performances and then all of a sudden be okay against Bernie. My point is, if you go back and watch some of those numerous debates, he was so bad. He wasn’t even coherent. And against Bernie, he was. And we’re calling for a drug test.”
Related: ‘How Does That Happen?’: Trump Wants Biden Drug Tested Before Debates