Biden and Trump try to elbow Kennedy out of debates — and the 2024 race

Pres­i­dent Joe Biden and for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump are attempt­ing to side­line inde­pen­dent can­di­date Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with their one-on-one debates.
On Wednes­day, the two men agreed to appear onstage twice before the Novem­ber elec­tion, once in June and again in Sep­tem­ber. But the terms to qual­i­fy, set by the two host net­works, CNN and ABC News, could deny Kennedy a podi­um. The Biden and Trump cam­paigns report­ed­ly back-chan­neled to cut out the com­mis­sion that tra­di­tion­al­ly sets the terms of pres­i­den­tial debates.
Despite polling con­sis­tent­ly in the dou­ble dig­its, Kennedy is not thought to have a real chance of win­ning the pres­i­den­cy in Novem­ber, in part because he faces an uphill bat­tle to appear on the bal­lot in all 50 states.

But Kennedy, the for­mer envi­ron­men­tal lawyer and son of one-time Attor­ney Gen­er­al Robert F. Kennedy Sr., is the most pop­u­lar inde­pen­dent pres­i­den­tial can­di­date since busi­ness­man Ross Per­ot ran in 1992, and both Trump and Biden fear he could play spoil­er in unpre­dictable ways. He is expect­ed to siphon sup­port from both par­ties, lead­ing each cam­paign to treat him as a threat.
“RFK is inter­est­ing in that he …