House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) spoke out hours before Tuesday night’s presidential debate to send a message to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, urging him to “save the planet.”
In an interview with MSNBC, Pelosi offered Biden some advice before he takes on President Donald Trump in a debate for the first time.
“Be yourself,” Pelosi said. “Save the planet.”
This comes after Pelosi spent weeks saying that Biden should refuse to debate Trump, arguing that the president and his “henchmen” have no “fidelity” to facts or the truth, according to Fox News.
“Not that I don’t think he’ll be excellent,” Pelosi said, referring to Biden. “I just think that the president has no fidelity to fact or truth and, actually in his comments the last few days, no fidelity to the Constitution of the United States.”
“He and his henchmen are a danger, with their comments, are a danger to our democracy,” she added. “So I don’t want to give him — I mean, why bother? He doesn’t tell the truth.”
Pelosi first called on Biden to cancel his debates with Trump a month ago, saying at the time that she does not want the debates to become an “exercise in skullduggery.”
“I wouldn’t legitimize a conversation with him, nor a debate in terms of the presidency of the United States,” she said. “Now I know that the Biden campaign thinks in a different way about this.”
Biden, however, refused to take her advice.
“As long as the commission continues down the straight and narrow as they have, I’m going to debate him,” he said. “I’m going to be a fact-check on the floor while I’m debating him.”
Meanwhile, the Biden campaign has been trying to downplay the importance of the debates, with a source saying that “there is no debate performance that can fundamentally shift the race because of what people are living through,” referring to COVID-19.
“Everyone is stuck in a reality on account of Trump’s mismanagement, so there is no outcome during the debate that can really change the trajectory of this race,” the source said. “If Trump has a good debate, which we anticipate, and he has no compunctions about lying through his teeth and making things up on the spot, American life is still defined by his failure to have any plan to beat COVID.”
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