President Biden and Donald J. Trump have agreed to two debates, one on June 27 on CNN and one on Sept. 10 on ABC News, the first onstage clashes between the former president and his successor in more than three years.
While some of the details were still being hammered out, the agreement to the two debates, reached in a series of social-media posts Wednesday morning, raises the likelihood of the earliest general-election debate in modern history and immediately delivered a jolt of electricity to a campaign that had settled into something of a rut.
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden believe firmly that if the American people get a look at their opponent on a debate stage they will be less likely to vote for them.
Mr. Biden opened the exchange on Wednesday by saying he was willing to debate Mr. Trump twice before the election, and as early as June, but on the condition that the arrangements bypassed the nonpartisan organization that has managed presidential debates since 1988.
Mr. Biden and his top aides want the debates to start much sooner than the dates proposed by the organization, the Commission on Presidential Debates, so voters can see the two candidates side by side well before early voting begins in September. They want the debate to occur inside a TV studio, with microphones that automatically cut off when a speaker’s time limit elapses.
And they want it to be just the two candidates and the moderator — without the raucous in-person audiences that Mr. Trump feeds on and without the participation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or other independent or third-party candidates.
It remains unclear whether the Trump campaign will agree to the Biden campaign’s proposed rules, including the mic cutoff and lack of an audience.
Before the Biden campaign’s debate proposal Wednesday morning, at least one behind-the-scenes conversation between aides to both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump had taken place, according to four people familiar with the discussion. The two campaigns had mutual interest in both circumventing the debates commission and excluding Mr. Kennedy.
That mutual interest between the two camps did not necessarily mean mutual agreement.
Mr. Trump added a new wrinkle when he announced on his social-media site Truth Social that he had agreed to a third debate on Fox News on Oct. 2. But the Biden campaign slammed the door on that.
“President Biden made his terms clear for two one-on-one debates, and Donald Trump accepted those terms,” Mr. Biden’s campaign chair, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, said. “No more games. No more chaos. No more debate about debates.”
Shortly after the Biden campaign had announced that they would consider invitations from news organizations seeking to host the debates, Mr. Biden posted on X that he had accepted an invitation from CNN for a debate with Mr. Trump on June 27 in Atlanta.
“Over to you, Donald. As you said: anywhere, any time, any place,” Mr. Biden wrote.
Mr. Trump quickly responded, telling Fox News Digital that he would “be there” and was “looking forward to being in beautiful Atlanta.”
A short time later, Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social that he had accepted the ABC News debate. The Biden team then said the president will attend that one as well.
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Mr. Biden gave Mr. Trump what he has openly clamored for: a televised confrontation with a successor Mr. Trump has portrayed, and hopes to reveal, as too feeble to hold the job. The move suggests that Mr. Biden is willing to take some calculated risks to reverse his fortunes in a race in which most battleground-state polls show the president trailing Mr. Trump and struggling to persuade voters that he’s an effective leader and steward of the economy.
Mr. Biden recently indicated he would debate Mr. Trump, but had until now declined to give any firm commitment or specific details. Mr. Trump had declared repeatedly that he will debate his successor “anytime and anywhere,” and demanded as many debates as possible.
The public back-and-forth over debates started on Wednesday morning, after Mr. Biden’s campaign chair, Ms. O’Malley Dillon, sent a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates. The letter notified the group that Mr. Biden will not be participating in the three general-election debates sponsored by the commission, which are scheduled for Sept. 16, Oct. 1 and Oct. 9.
It was a striking decision for Mr. Biden, an institutionalist who has tried to preserve the traditions of Washington. Instead, Ms. O’Malley Dillon writes in the letter that Mr. Biden will participate in debates hosted by news organizations.
In a video announcing his offer, Mr. Biden taunted Mr. Trump. “Make my day, pal,” he said, adding a reference to the one weekday Mr. Trump’s Manhattan trial is generally not in session. “Let’s pick the date, Donald. I hear you’re free on Wednesdays.”
Mr. Trump, in his insult-laden response on Truth Social, said he would like to see more than two debates and for “excitement purposes, a very large venue.” Calling Mr. Biden “the WORST” debater and “crooked,” he accused the president of being “afraid of crowds.”
The Biden campaign also proposes that one vice-presidential debate be held in late July after Mr. Trump and his running mate are formally nominated at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
For the president, early debates hold significant advantages. Early votes are crucial, especially for Democrats. And polls show that Mr. Biden currently trails Mr. Trump and that his messages on core issues like the economy are not resonating with enough voters.
The Biden campaign and the president’s White House staff widely feel that the debates were important in 2020, and that they will be important again this year.
The Biden campaign has been trying to remind voters of why a majority removed Mr. Trump from office in 2020. People close to the president have said they’re worried about so-called Trump amnesia — that voters are nostalgic about Mr. Trump and have forgotten how divisive he was — and some of the recent polling underscores that point.
A side-by-side debate, which could have a large viewing audience, is the most dramatic way for the Biden campaign to give Mr. Trump more exposure, in their view.
In the first debate in 2020, Mr. Trump barely allowed Mr. Biden to get a word in. He was aggressive and constantly interrupting, while sweating and appearing unwell. Mr. Biden, exasperated, famously said to Mr. Trump, “Will you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential.” And in the days following that first debate, Mr. Trump’s poll numbers fell.
The Trump campaign’s top officials, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, see the situation differently and share their boss’s eagerness for him to debate Mr. Biden as often as possible. They have indicated that they don’t care who hosts the debate, or where it’s held. The Trump campaign believes, almost to a person, that Mr. Biden has declined significantly since 2020 and would be exposed in a debate against Mr. Trump.
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Mr. LaCivita said in a statement the only reason Mr. Biden agreed to debates was because he had “trapped” himself last month by telling the radio host Howard Stern that he would participate.
The letter from Ms. O’Malley Dillon makes clear that the Biden campaign does not trust the Commission on Presidential Debates to conduct a professional debate, saying it “was unable or unwilling to enforce the rules in the 2020 debates.”
Among other grievances with the commission, Biden aides are still furious that Mr. Trump debated Mr. Biden in 2020 and appeared visibly under the weather, announcing soon after the debate that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. The Biden team was also livid that members of the Trump family took their masks off when they arrived in the audience for the debate.
Still, the decision to sideline the commission offers clear advantages to Mr. Biden.
For starters, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump agreed to two debates, but the commission had already scheduled three debates. Also, Biden campaign officials want the debates to be held in a television studio without an in-person audience that could cheer, boo and derail the conversation, as Trump supporters did during a CNN town hall last year. The commission always invites an audience to watch its presidential debates.
There’s also a chance that Mr. Kennedy reaches the 15 percent national polling threshold to qualify for the commission’s debates. The Biden campaign views Mr. Kennedy as a spoiler candidate and people close to the president worry that with the Kennedy name he could attract support from voters who might otherwise support Mr. Biden.
Ms. O’Malley Dillon writes in her letter that the debate should be one-on-one to allow voters “to compare the only two candidates with any statistical chance of prevailing in the Electoral College — and not squandering debate time on candidates with no prospect of becoming president.”
Mr. Kennedy criticized both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump as the debate plans became public. “They are trying to exclude me from their debate because they are afraid I would win,” he wrote in a statement posted on X. “Keeping viable candidates off the debate stage undermines democracy.”
The Biden campaign has proposed rules — including the automatic cutting-off of microphones — to ensure Mr. Trump does not blow through his time limits and talk over Mr. Biden as he did relentlessly during their first debate in 2020.
“There should be firm time limits for answers, and alternate turns to speak — so that the time is evenly divided and we have an exchange of views, not a spectacle of mutual interruption,” Ms. O’Malley Dillon writes in the letter.
She also proposed criteria to limit which television networks are allowed to host debates. It should only be hosted, Ms. O’Malley Dillon writes, by broadcast organizations that hosted both a Republican primary debate in 2016 in which Mr. Trump participated and a Democratic primary debate in 2020 in which Mr. Biden participated — “so neither campaign can assert that the sponsoring organization is obviously unacceptable.” That criteria excludes Fox News.
The Trump campaign has been complaining about the commission for months.
In a statement on May 1 condemning the organization, Ms. Wiles and Mr. LaCivita blasted the group for not agreeing to earlier debates given the fact that early voting begins well before Election Day.
“We must host debates earlier than ever before,” they said. “Again, we call on every television network in America that wishes to host a debate to extend an invitation to our campaign and we will gladly negotiate with the Biden campaign, with or without the stubborn Presidential Debates Commission.”
Reid J. Epstein and Maggie Astor contributed reporting.
