Democratic Rep. Troy Carter of Louisiana claimed Tuesday that President Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance was due to former President Donald Trump “distracting” the president.
Biden froze at least twice, lost his train of thought and made multiple verbal gaffes during the June 27 CNN debate with Trump. Carter told “CNN Newsroom” host Jim Acosta that Biden’s poor debate performance was due to Trump “heckling and making noises” during the face-off, being “overprepared” and not being “100% healthy.”
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“The circumstances that led to that, a combination of not being 100% healthy, having the former president heckling and making noises on the side of him, distracting him and even being perhaps overprepared. These are all things that we will better prepare for, and I suspect that you will not see a performance of what you did Thursday or so ago,” Carter told Acosta about Biden’s debate performance, who did not challenge the claim.
Carter and CNN did not immediately respond to inquiries about Trump’s alleged conduct during the debate from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“You will see the Joe Biden that you saw the next day and that you’ve seen every single day since that debate — an energized, coherent, well-planned and understanding the policies that he has worked so hard to make reality, to be able to articulate them off the top,” Carter said. “I think that’s what you’ll continue to see. If you’ll recall, the very next day he had color back in his skin, he was energetic, he was able to speak and he admitted that he had a bad day and a bad performance. No one’s running from that.”
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Biden currently trails Trump by 3.3% in a national head-to-head matchup in the upcoming presidential election, according to RealClearPolitics’ average of polls conducted from June 28 to July 8. Trump’s lead grew to 4.8% when independent candidates Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green Party candidate Jill Stein were included in the surveys.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF about Carter’s claim.
First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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