A few minutes into his speech at a campaign rally on Tuesday, Donald J. Trump asked a question of the few thousand who’d turned up to hear him speak. “Is anybody going to watch the debate?”
Mr. Trump was in Racine, Wis., but it was clear his mind was in Atlanta, the site of his matchup against President Biden next week. He repeatedly mused about the potential scenarios, lowering expectations that he would dominate Mr. Biden and then, as if he couldn’t help himself, raising them again.
The expectations game is a particular challenge for the Trump campaign. Mr. Trump, 78, has spent months casting the 81-year-old Mr. Biden as a husk of a man who can barely walk or formulate complete sentences. Republicans have pumped out a stream of videos of Mr. Biden walking stiffly — some deceptively edited — that are meant to be proof of Mr. Biden’s decline.
