CNN commentator Van Jones predicted that President Joe Biden would lose the election if he failed to perform well in the debate against former President Donald Trump next week.
The debate will be the first of the 2024 cycle will be the “entire election.”
The “entire world will be watching,” Jones told CNN host Jim Acosta, warning that “if Biden goes out there and messes up, it’s game over.”
Jones continued:
“If he walks out there and a week later he’s lower in the polls, it’s panic in the party.”
Polls show a competitive race between Biden and Trump as the debate looms.
Jones, who served as former President Barack Obama‘s environmental adviser, also predicted what would happen if Biden performed well in the debate.
“If he goes in there and can handle himself against Donald Trump, a runaway train, a locomotive, a raging bull, then this guy deserves another shot to be president, because that is tough,” he said.
“You couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it,” he added.
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“If you can stand toe-to-toe with a runaway train like Donald Trump for an hour-and-a-half, you are fit to be president, period, point blank.”
Jones concluded:
“This is the whole presidency in a bottle in a week.”
CNN commentator and former Trump White House lawyer Jim Schultz also weighed in on what it could mean for Biden if Trump dosesn’t perform well during the debate.
Trump “needs to have a good night. He has to have a good night on the policy issues,” Schultz said.
“He needs, to the extent he can stay out of the gutter as much as he can because, look, the issues are on his side,” Schultz went on.
“He has the momentum now.”
The race is Trump’s “to lose at this point in many ways,” Schultz said
He added that Jones “just about admitted that here, that the momentum is in his favor.”
“President Biden is going to have to do something dramatic to convince people that he has the mental acuity to last four more years in that office and lead this country,” he concluded.
