Chuck Todd believes Biden’s team intentionally set him up to fail in debate

Chuck Todd says he’ll never be able to shake the belief that former President Joe Biden’s team purposefully set him up to fail against Donald Trump during last summer’s campaign-altering presidential debate.

During the latest episode of “The Chuck Toddcast,” the ex-NBC anchor told The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich that he’s sure that Biden’s inner circle scheduled the first presidential debate last year in June so that the former president would look bad and the party would ditch him in time to run his replacement.

“Look, I will go to my grave believing that the debate was intentional for that,” the host said.

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Biden’s disastrous performance in last summer’s presidential debate is widely seen as the death knell for the former president’s re-election campaign. Less than a month after the spectacle, where Biden looked weak and cognitively challenged, he announced his withdrawal from the campaign and endorsed then-Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the nominee.

Biden’s cognitive decline has been under more scrutiny in recent months as CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson’s newly published book, “Original Sin“, alleged that members of Biden’s White House engaged in a cover-up of the president’s condition. 

In the clip flagged by The Daily Caller, Leibovich prompted Todd’s declaration by bringing up a previous conversation they had about some members of Biden’s inner circle using the debate as an opportunity to punch through the cover-up and show the world that Biden was unfit for office.

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Former President Biden’s debate against Donald Trump in 2024 opened the floodgates to criticisms over his mental acuity.  ((Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) | (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images) | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images))

The journalist mentioned “the idea that there were actually people within the White House, within the Biden campaign who thought it would be a good thing to create some kind of daylight for the world to see what they were dealing with on a day-to-day basis.”

Todd followed up by saying that no matter what Biden’s former senior adviser Anita Dunn and campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon say, he thinks they were trying to expose his frailties.

“Anita Dunn and Jen O’Malley Dillon will deny it till they’re blue in the face, and if I were in their shoes and I did it, I’d deny it until I was blue in my face, OK?” Todd said.

“Of course, you’d deny that,” Leibovich agreed. 

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Todd added, “It’s like whoever the hell helped Reagan delay the hostage release, OK? It’s never going to be admitted. It’s too convenient,” referring to the January 1981 release of American hostages held by Iran, after Jimmy Carter had already lost his re-election effort to Reagan.

Going back to the alleged plot to expose Biden, Todd continued, “There was no other reason. This idea, ‘Well, we needed to shake up the race.’ In late June? Who shakes up a race in late June?”

“They knew when the nomination was going to be and they knew they needed to deal with this with an opportunity to make a change if it was necessary,” Todd added. “I will always believe this.” 

Reps for the former president did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. 

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