Morning Report — The motivations behind the Biden-Trump debates

President Biden and former President Trump agreed Wednesday to give voters at least two live televised chances, June 27 and Sept. 10, to size up their visions for the future during a presidential race that could turn on a few hundred thousand ballots in key states.

The first prime-time debate, to be hosted by CNN in Atlanta without an audience, will take place before the Republican nominating convention in mid-July and well ahead of the Democratic nominating event beginning Aug. 19. The second Biden-Trump debate, to be broadcast by ABC News from its studios and available for simulcast on other networks, will lean into the fall ahead of when early voting begins in four states by late September.

The event details will get ironed out. But for now, the question is: Why did Biden and Trump agree to debate? What’s their motivation?

Biden defeated Trump in part because of the 2020 debates. And Team Biden thinks history will repeat. Another big factor: Trump is ahead in the polls. 

Trump and his team believe Biden can’t keep up with the fast-talking former president and will be embarrassed on stage. 

The Hill’s Niall Stanage in his latest Memo unpacks why Biden and Trump agreed to debate.

The Biden campaign made a strategic determination Wednesday to challenge Trump to face off in June, envisioning a high-stakes opportunity to frame differences well before voters’ decisions gel, The Hill’s Amie Parnes reports. Biden is taking a combative approach at a time when his allies think his campaign needs a jolt.

The Hill: Senate Democrats say they’re hungry for the Biden-Trump debate. 

“Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020. Since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate,” the president said in a video message his campaign posted to social media Wednesday. “Now he’s acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal.”

Trump, pinned down in a Manhattan courtroom this month while trying to raise more campaign cash, has held few rallies and instead leaned on GOP surrogates, conservative media interviews, courthouse commentaries and social media to mobilize his base. The former president did not participate in any GOP primary debates this year, despite aggressive goading from an array of Republican contenders.

Instead of lowering expectations for his performance against the incumbent, Trump raised them Wednesday, despite his September 2020 experience when viewers by a margin of 6 to 1 thought Biden bested the then-president in a back-and-forth that drew the third-largest audience of all presidential debates. It’s a good bet that Trump, as in the past, will work to stoke public interest by scuffling with the Biden campaign over rules, formats — and moderators — with arguments for additional debates.

Trump on Wednesday described Biden on social media as the “WORST” debater he’s ever faced and no match for the former president’s skills. “He can’t put two sentences together,” Trump wrote. That assessment was not the reality four years ago, according to viewer surveys at the time. Trump is known to prefer improvisation to debate preparation. As Biden has demonstrated during his State of the Union addresses, he is capable of blending set-ups with ad libs to his benefit.

The Hill: The nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates is left out of arrangements Biden and Trump reached but says it will continue with its plans.     

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who could have qualified for the commission-sponsored debates, isn’t happy. 

The Hill has all the debate details here. 

Tech Watch: Will billionaire tech critic Frank McCourt buy TikTok? … Will Google’s latest play with AI drive U.S. news organizations (and their thinning ad revenues) deeper into a financial ditch? … Language-based AI software benefits less-skilled workers more than highly skilled ones, which could make lower-skilled work more valuable and shift more higher-paid jobs overseas, studies show (The Hill).

LEADING THE DAY

© The Associated Press / Alex Brandon | Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), a Trump critic, is retiring at the end of the term.

MORE IN POLITICS

SIX MONTHS OUT FROM ELECTION DAY, a small handful of prominent Republicans have crossed party lines to support Biden in his 2024 rematch against Trump, with the endorsements coming in as most Republicans have started to coalesce around Trump. The Hill’s Julia Mueller has rounded up the party line-defying Republicans, from former Reps. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) and Liz Cheney (Wyo.) to those opposed to Trump’s bid to return to the White House but not supporting Biden, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Among the Trump-critical: retiring Utah Sen. Mitt Romney (R), who ran for president in 2012. He made history during Trump’s first impeachment when he became the first senator to vote to convict a president from his own party. But Romney told MSNBC that he would have pardoned Trump if he had been in Biden’s position when federal indictments were brought against him.

Romney said Wednesday he thinks the American people “have recognized” some fundamental facts in Trump’s multiple indictments, including that the former president allegedly took classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and didn’t handle them properly.

“I think they realize he’s been lying about the election in 2020,” Romney added. “They know those things. So, these things are not changing the public attitude. And, frankly, we ought to get beyond these and focus on the big issues that really matter to the American people, our inflation, our border, what’s happening around the world, America’s involvement in the world.”

ZOOM IN

© The Associated Press / Kevin Wolf | Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Capitol in April.

CONGRESS

THE HOUSE is expected to vote, perhaps today, on a GOP bill to reverse Biden’s recent pause on the delivery of certain weapons to Israel. House Democrats, backed by the White House, have lined up to oppose the proposal, arguing the bill would undermine Israel’s standing in the U.S. by turning the traditionally bipartisan issue of Israeli defense into a partisan affair, The Hill’s Mike Lillis reports. Opponents include some of Congress’s most prominent Jewish lawmakers and Israel allies, who are framing the GOP proposal as a cynical effort to appear to support Israel without actually doing so.

“It’s just another political stunt to try to go after Joe Biden,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks (N.Y.), the senior Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Wednesday morning as he emerged from a closed-door meeting in the Capitol basement. “That’s all it really is.”

Notably, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said he does not plan to provide floor time for a vote on the measure if it reaches the Senate (The Times of Israel).

FAA REAUTHORIZATION: The House on Wednesday passed a bill to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration for five years, sending the legislation to Biden’s desk ahead of Friday’s deadline. The Hill’s Mychael Schnell reports that passage of the legislation marks the end of Congress’s long road to reauthorizing the FAA, which required four short-term extensions and featured a bitter battle over adding round-trip flights at Washington’s Reagan National Airport — slots that were ultimately included in the final version.

THE GOP’S PLAN to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress seeks to string together two seemingly unrelated probes — special counsel Robert Hur’s review of Biden’s handling of classified records and House Republicans’ own impeachment investigation. But Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, called the contempt resolution a “half-hearted coda” that tries to “blame Attorney General Merrick Garland for their own protracted comedy of errors.”

ELSEWHERE

COURTS & INVESTIGATIONS

Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen is expected to take the stand again today in the former president’s hush money trial in New York City, wrapping up a feisty cross-examination by Trump’s attorneys and potentially closing out the state’s case-in-chief. 

Ahead of his testimony as the prosecution’s final witness, The Hill’s Ella Lee and Zach Schonfeld have rounded up five key revelations from his testimony so far.  

GOP VS. COMMERCE: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is facing an investigation — from a Republican committee chair. Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) has demanded the Chamber answer questions about the more than $12 million its foundation received from a left-leaning nonprofit, the Tides Foundation, between 2018 and 2022. Smith, who chairs the powerful tax-writing committee, said the grants from the Tides Foundation, which “partners with and sponsors several anti-business organizations,” appear to conflict with the Chamber’s mission and raises questions about its tax status. The Hill’s Taylor Giorno writes that even if the inquiry goes nowhere, it represents a new phase in well-reported tensions that erupted after the 2020 election between the Chamber and an increasingly populist Republican party.

The Hill: During opening remarks of his corruption trial in Manhattan, prosecutors made no qualms painting Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) as a politically powerful but corrupt lawmaker who accepted gold bars, envelopes of cash and a luxury car in exchange for his influence.

© The Associated Press / Geert Vanden Wijngaert | Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, pictured in Brussels in February, was shot multiple times on Wednesday in what authorities are calling an assassination attempt.

INTERNATIONAL

AID IN GAZA: Recent gains in getting humanitarian aid to people in Gaza risk being undone by the fighting in the southern part of the enclave, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Wednesday. Since Israel began strikes against Hamas in Rafah, one border crossing vital to the transit of the aid has been closed, and another severely restricted (The New York Times).

“At the very time when Israel was taking important and much needed steps to improve the provision of humanitarian assistance,” Blinken said, “we’ve seen a negative impact on the fact that we have this active, very active conflict in the… Rafah area.”

The U.S. military’s floating pier that will allow for humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza from the sea has been anchored to a beach in Gaza, and aid will be dispatched within the coming days, officials announced Thursday (CNN).

The Wall Street Journal: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the U.S.’s plans for a postwar Gaza.

UKRAINIAN FORCES WITHDREW from some parts of the country’s northeast and faced Russian troops in other areas Wednesday, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced he would postpone his upcoming foreign trips — underscoring the seriousness of the threat his soldiers face. Against that grim backdrop, Blinken sought to reassure Ukraine of continuing American support, announcing a $2 billion arms deal, of which most of the money comes from last month’s congressional aid package (The Hill).

SLOVAKIA’S PRIME MINISTER, Robert Fico, is in serious but stable condition after being shot multiple times Wednesday in an “attempted assassination.” Slovakian Interior Minister Matúš Šutaj Eštok told reporters that a suspect was arrested following the shooting, and that the act was politically motivated. Biden on Wednesday said in a statement that the U.S. Embassy in Slovakia was in communications with the government (The Washington Post and Politico).

“I can confirm that there has been an assassination attempt,” Eštok said. “The gunman shot five times … the first information we have is that this was a politically motivated act.”

The Hill: Who is Fico, the Slovakian prime minister allied with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán?

THE CLOSER

© The Associated Press / Julia Nikhinson | A Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show agility competitor soared in New York on Tuesday.