Two years ago, Joe Biden issued what his campaign framed as a bold strategic masterstroke. He bypassed the Commission on Presidential Debates, challenged Donald Trump to two debates on his own terms, and released a short video to prove he meant business.
“Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020,” Biden claimed in the video. “Since then, he hadn't shown up for debate. Now he's acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal. I'll even do it twice. So let's pick the dates, Donald. I hear you're free on Wednesdays.”
The left-wing press swooned. Democrats celebrated. And hiding in plain sight, for anyone willing to look, were all the signs of the looming disaster for Ol’ Joe.
The video ran just over 13 seconds, and in those 13 seconds, Biden's team needed five jump cuts to splice together a message he couldn't deliver in one take.
To this day, I don’t know whether his campaign set him up to fail, or if his campaign actually thought he’d pull it off.
Now, exactly two years later, even Alex Thompson of Axios, who co-authored the book Original Sin about the Biden cover-up, acknowledged the video in a post on Friday.
2 years later.
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) May 15, 2026
The jump cuts 😬 https://t.co/QVQ9yu7AsR
It took him two years to notice the jump cuts? Really?
“On average, the 13-second video had a jump cut every two seconds,” I wrote the day Biden posted the video. “The cuts are so frequent it’s jarring for the viewer, and they most certainly aren't in the name of creativity.”
I even noted that the Biden campaign was “no doubt aware of the potential peril a debate could pose to his campaign.”
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It was obvious. But, you know, Alex Thompson only noticed now? Does he want a medal or something? We all knew what the campaign was trying to hide. If Biden couldn't string together a coherent paragraph for a scripted campaign clip, what did his campaign think was going to happen when CNN put him on a live stage with no script, no cuts, and Donald Trump standing 10 feet away?
We all knew what was going to happen.
The media was too busy gushing over Biden’s bravado to realize that they were walking into a dumpster fire that would torpedo Biden’s campaign and send the entire party into a tailspin just weeks later.
Those of us on the night knew the trainwreck was coming. And when the June debate finally took place, the public saw exactly what the jump cuts were hiding.
Biden lost his train of thought. He froze. He stumbled through answers that a former senator and two-term vice president should have been able to deliver in his sleep. The media-crafted image of a mentally sharp incumbent collapsed on live television. Editorial boards that had carried water for Biden for years suddenly realized they had a huge problem. The same Democratic establishment that spent years mocking anyone who questioned Biden's cognitive health as a right-wing conspiracy theorist began quietly, and then not so quietly, pushing him out of the race.
