After Tuesday’s chaotic debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden , House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks the Democratic presidential nominee should skip the remaining two debates, The Hill reported.
“I think one and done,” she said on Thursday during a conversation with Bloomberg TV’s David Westin.
Pelosi previously suggested that debating Trump would provide legitimacy to him, and she appears to be holding to that belief.
“I myself did not think that Joe Biden should dignify debate with the president who has no commitment to fact, evidence, data, demeans the office he holds,” she said.
“I never thought he shouldn’t do it because I didn’t think he would do well. I thought he shouldn’t do it because I thought something like this could happen.”
Per New York Daily News , Pelosi claimed that Trump’s Tuesday debate performance was a new low for the controversial president and did not reflect well on the U.S.
“It was a sad occasion for our country. It broke my heart.”
The debate’s moderator, Fox News host Chris Wallace , admitted that the discussion went off rails and claimed he did not predict that Trump would employ the purported strategy of constantly interrupting his opponent.
The event was also notable for Trump’s response when the moderator pressed him to disavow white supremacists, which Pelosi touched on both during the Bloomberg TV interview and during her weekly press conference in the Capitol.
“The night of the debate you saw what keeps me up at night,” she said during the conference.
Pelosi accused Trump of refusing to condemn white supremacists and also noted his previous refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses in November.
As reported by CNN , Wallace placed the majority of the blame for the messy debate on Trump. During a conversation with colleague Bill Hemmer, Wallace claimed that the president “bears the primary responsibility for what happened.”
Nevertheless, if Biden continues with the planned two debates, they will be carried out in a different format. Not long after the debacle, the Commission on Presidential Debates released a statement outlining its plans to integrate more structure into the forthcoming events and ensure that the issues are discussed in a more orderly manner.
The next face-off between Trump and Biden takes place on October 15 in Miami, Florida, and will be moderated by Steve Scully of C-SPAN. The final debate is set to be moderated by Kristen Welker of NBC News on October 22 in Nashville, Tennessee.
