Trump on Debate: Drug Test Me and Biden

Former President Donald Trump on Monday called for President Joe Biden to take a drug test and pledged to do the same for Thursday's debate.

"DRUG TEST FOR CROOKED JOE BIDEN??? I WOULD, ALSO, IMMEDIATELY AGREE TO ONE!!!" Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Among the interests going into Thursday night's debate is how the two presidents will perform. Biden, throughout his presidency, has displayed a wide gamut of behaviors in public. Former White House physician Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, has speculated that the president would have a different disposition going into the debate and be given drugs for a performance edge.

"I'm going to be demanding," Jackson told Newsmax on Sunday, "on behalf of many millions of concerned Americans right now that he submit to a drug test before and after this debate, specifically looking for performance-enhancing drugs; because we see, we've seen recently in his State of the Union address that there was a Joe Biden that came out that was not similar at all to what we see on a day-to-day basis for the last three and a half years."

Last week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reintroduced a novel term, "cheap fakes," which was first used by The Washington Post to describe "selectively edited clips" of Biden's "senior moments and missteps" during his visit to Normandy for the D-Day anniversary. As Jean-Pierre implied, the term mischaracterizes Biden's cognitive ability. "They are cheap fakes video," she said. "They are done in bad faith."

But the term ostensibly seems to be a carefully constructed portmanteau rather than a novel off-the-cuff comment used during a White House press conference that could confuse an audience considering that it borrows from both the term "deep fakes," which describes fake artificial intelligence-generated videos, and cheap or selectively edited videos. However, for the sake of brevity, all videos in the news have some aspect of editing, and there are many videos of Biden having public gaffes or not showing signs of alertness.

CNN will host the debate on Thursday at 9 pm EST. CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate.

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