Long-time pollster John McLaughlin said President Joe Biden failed to change the narrative surrounding his presidency during Thursday night’s CNN debate against former President Donald Trump.
McLaughlin (pictured above) said he has never seen a worse debate performance by a presidential candidate than Biden’s performance on Thursday.
“When you think about it and you look at the whole circumstances of it, Biden is desperate. He’s corrupt, and he, as President Trump says he’s the worst president in the history of the United States…People are tired of Joe Biden. We’re tired of the wars. We’re tired of the open borders. We’re tired of immigration problems. We’re tired of our girls and our wives getting murdered by illegal immigrants across America and our communities…The world’s on fire with the war in Ukraine. Biden can’t stop it. He couldn’t protect Israel from Iran and Hamas terrorists. We’ve got so many things that Donald Trump can fix and he addressed those issues last night in the debate factually really well, and Joe Biden was saying things that people know are not true,” McLaughlin said on Friday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
McLaughlin added that Biden’s performance on Thursday was especially “shocking” because his own campaign orchestrated and requested the debate.
“At one point, Donald Trump just said to [Biden], ‘I don’t know what he said and he doesn’t know what he’s saying.’ That was shocking. It was shocking because the debate was set because Biden knew he was behind in our polls. He’s been behind in the polls since he surrendered to Afghanistan and inflation took off. So Biden set the parameters for the debate. He said it was CNN, he let them pick the moderators, he banned RFK Jr., no studio audience to react, and they could shut the mic off on Donald Trump whenever they wanted…What killed [Biden] was that split screen,” McLaughlin explained.
“[Biden’s campaign] decided they had to debate to try to change the narrative and change the view of Biden and it didn’t work,” McLaughlin added.
Moving forward from Thursday’s debate, McLaughlin pointed out that Trump’s superior performance over Biden may just land him in Rikers Island stemming from his felony conviction last month as a way to throttle his campaign’s momentum leading up to the November 5 election.
“On the other hand, the bad part for us in the Trump campaign is that Joe Biden may actually send Donald Trump to Rikers Island, the jail in New York. Last year, I was telling President Trump, ‘The only crime you committed is you’re ahead of Joe Biden in the polls.’ Biden and his supporters have orchestrated since then four indictments of Donald Trump, and this year they rigged a trial in New York so that they could get a conviction,” McLaughlin said.
In light of this, McLaughlin said the Trump campaign needs to “run every day like we’re an underdog” during the next 130 days leading up to the election to return the former president back to the Oval Office.
“If Donald Trump doesn’t win this election, the consequences to the country are so severe that we could never recover…We have 130 days to go and we’ve got to run every day like we’re an underdog…We have to make sure people get out and vote, not just on election day, but when early voting starts or absentee voting starts in September, October in a lot of these states. The Trump voters have to be online. We have to make sure that we go out as soon as we can to cast our votes and make sure it’s an honest and fair election, that we can win this election. So we’ve got a lot of work to do,” McLaughlin said.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “John McLaughlin” by Leading Authorities, Inc.
