This week’s debate between President Biden and Donald Trump won’t produce much in the way of civil dialogue over the nation’s future. It’s more likely to resemble a demolition derby, with each contestant trying to knock the other off course.

And, let’s face it, many viewers will tune in mainly for the crashes.

The question isn’t who will win that series of collisions — it’s who will lose.

Presidential debates rarely transform an election. But Thursday’s showdown could change the momentum in this year’s contest — mostly because the stakes for Biden are so high.

The president is running about even with Trump in national polls, but he’s behind in the battleground states that will determine the outcome. He’s also battling the view among many voters in both parties that he’s too old to serve effectively for another four years.

Republicans have waged a relentless campaign to stoke those doubts. Biden “can’t put two sentences together,” the former president told supporters last month. “He can’t find the stairs off the stage.”

That’s a pretty low bar for Biden to clear. Last week, Trump belatedly realized his mistake and tried to reverse course, calling the president “a worthy debater.”

“I don’t want to underestimate him,” he explained.

Either way, the 90-minute debate will give the 81-year-old president an opportunity to show that he can not only find the stairs but think on his feet as well. If Biden doesn’t visibly pass that test, his campaign will have a hard time recovering.

Trump, who is 78, faces challenges too.

In his first debate against Biden in 2020, the then-president behaved like a disruptive bully and promptly dropped four points in the polls.

A similarly chaotic performance this week in Atlanta would help revive the anti-Trump coalition of voters that fired him last time.

If Trump blunders badly — he has been known to lapse into incoherence and confuse Biden with former President Obama — he too would face renewed questions about his mental fitness.

Again, the question isn’t so much who will win but who will lose. Candidates fail in debates by stumbling more often than they triumph through brilliant wordplay.

So the stakes are high for both candidates. The incentive will be to go on the attack, to try to push the other guy toward disaster.

The debate, hosted by CNN with correspondents Jake Tapper and Dana Bash as moderators, will spare viewers the tedium of opening statements. There will be no live audience, a demand Biden’s side made after witnessing the noisy enthusiasm of Trump supporters at earlier events. Each candidate’s microphone will be silenced while the other is speaking, in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the 2020 debate, when Trump constantly interrupted Biden and the moderators.

I asked strategists from both parties what advice they would give each candidate.

Biden’s first task is to “demonstrate that he’s not too old to serve another term,” said Doug Sosnik, who advised President Clinton during his 1996 reelection campaign.

After that, Sosnik said, Biden “needs to have a clear narrative about his presidency, what his goals would be for a second term. And then he can go after Trump.”

Republican strategist Alex Conant agreed that Biden should try to steer the debate toward the future and away from a referendum on his stewardship of the economy, which has left most voters dissatisfied.

“He needs to make the debate about abortion and everything else Trump doesn’t want to talk about,” Conant said. “He should try to provoke Trump into overreacting … then get out of the way and let Trump destroy himself.”

One pitfall Biden needs to avoid: boasting about legislation he has passed or trying to convince voters that the economy is better than they think.

“He has to prosecute his political case against Donald Trump and not get bogged down, as incumbents often do … in defending his record,” said David Axelrod, who advised Obama during his 2012 reelection campaign.

Trump’s goals, no surprise, are pretty much the reverse of Biden’s. He wants to make the election a referendum on Biden’s first three years.

“My advice to Trump would be: ‘You are going to win this race on two issues: inflation and immigration. Those are the only two things you should be talking about,’” Conant said.

If the moderators or Biden ask Trump about his conviction on 34 felony charges in New York state, “he doesn’t need to engage in it,” Conant said.

Sosnik agreed. “Stick to a referendum,” he said. “Were you better off during [Trump’s] presidency or Biden’s?”

The hazard Trump needs to avoid: lapsing into complaints about the 2020 election, his conviction or his three pending criminal cases. That would reinforce the appearance “that he is only out for himself and settling old personal scores … [and] reminding people how chaotic and exhausting his presidency was,” Sosnik said.

So will Thursday’s debate change the direction of the race? Conant, the Republican, thinks it could.

“This is the most consequential debate we’ve had in recent memory,” he said. “Voters have major questions about each candidate. There’s an unusual number of undecided or third-party voters who might still be movable. If one of the candidates has a really bad night, that could be decisive.”

But Sosnik is skeptical that many undecided voters will bother watching “a debate between two candidates they dislike.”

“It will take a big moment where one of the candidates falls on his face to make it a game changer,” he said.

With four months remaining before election day, one evening in June won’t determine the winner. But Thursday could provide a pivotal moment — depending not on which candidate performs better but which performs worse.

Read more from columnist Doyle McManus on Trump and California:

An antisemitism watchdog group is calling for the Biden administration to fire a recently promoted White House official whose anti-Israel social media posts resurfaced this week.

StopAntisemitism said Tyler Cherry, who was promoted earlier this month as an associate communications director at the White House, called for the elimination of Israel and promoted anti-Israel viewpoints on social media going back years, as well as anti-police commentary.

“We’re hoping this is the quickest hire and fire scenario in President Biden’s administration to date,” Stop Antisemitism founder Liora Rez told Fox News Digital. “For the Biden administration to either A, not vet properly, or B, to vet and then approve an inner circle appointee like this… is just horrifying.”

BIDEN OFFICIAL SAYS PAST SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS DON’T REFLECT ‘CURRENT VIEWS,’ VOWS TO SUPPORT ADMIN ‘AGENDA’

Cherry, who spent three years at the Department of Interior working for Secretary Deb Haaland, deleted almost 2,500 posts on X between Sunday night and Monday morning, according to the Social Blade analytics website.

White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital on Thursday that the White House was “very proud to have Tyler on the team.” Fox News Digital reached out to the White House again on Monday. 

On Sunday, Cherry responded to the backlash following his promotion and his past tweets. 

“Past social media posts from when I was younger do not reflect my current views,” Cherry, who was in his 20s when he made the posts, wrote on X. “Period. I support this Administration’s agenda – and will continue my communications work focused on our climate and environmental policies.”

Some of his social media posts include a 2014 anti-Israel post that went viral and echoes a lot of the rhetoric currently heard on college campuses.

US, ISRAELI OFFICIALS CALL OUT BOSTON GROUP OVER ‘MAPPING PROJECT’ LINKING JEWISH GROUPS TO MEDIA, GOVERNMENT

Interior Department spokesperson Tyler Cherry was appointed to the role in 2021. (Getty Images)

“Cheersing in bars to ending the occupation of Palestine – no shame and f— your glares #ISupportGaza #FreePalestine,” Cherry wrote on July 25, 2014.

“Praying for #Baltimore, but praying even harder for an end to a capitalistic police state motivated by explicit and implicit racial biases,” Cherry posted in 2015 amid riots that were sparked following the death of Freddie Gray, a Black man, in police custody in Baltimore.

In 2018, Cherry called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to be abolished. 

Anti-Israel rhetoric has increased following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists on Israeli communities. The Biden administration has supplied Israel with military aid but has also been criticized for trying to dictate its military response in Gaza. 

“The Biden administration is forgetting that it took 10 years for us to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden, so it is highly, highly unappealing and misfortunate that President Biden is pressuring Israel after just nine months to get out of Gaza and stop Israel’s attempt to remove Hamas terrorists from power,” Rez said. “Talk about not being proportional. Ten years, we took our sweet time versus nine months. It doesn’t make sense to us.”

An Israeli soldier attaches an Israeli flag on top of an armoured personnel carriers (APC) near Israel’s border with Gaza, in southern Israel, Monday, April 15, 2024. 

UN BODY ISSUES ‘ANTISEMITIC REPORT’ AGAINST ISRAEL, CRITICS CHARGE

Rez noted that the Biden administration has appointed people with anti-Israel views to prominent positions. She cited Maher Bitar, who serves as the special assistant to the senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council (NSC). 

Bitar has been accused of spreading hatred of Israel in the past and promoting the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestments, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

“We’re kind of moving from the point of scratching our heads and asking ‘What’s going on?’ to asking if this is a deliberate attempt to give antisemites a seat at the White House table,” she said. 

Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report. 

As U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon entertains another far-fetched argument from Trump’s defense team in the classified documents prosecution, a recent report sheds considerable light on her vexing oversight of the case.

When Cannon was assigned to the case by lottery, the New York Times reported last week, two of her fellow judges urged the Trump appointee to transfer the case.

Those calls were extraordinary. New judges like Cannon might seek out the advice of colleagues on various questions, potentially including whether to take on such a difficult case early in their tenure. But for not one but two other sitting judges to urge a colleague to give up an assignment demonstrates severe concern within the Southern District of Florida.

It’s not hard to understand why. Cannon’s assignment came six months after she spectacularly bungled a Trump lawsuit protesting the search for and seizure of the documents that would form the basis of the federal charges.

Cannon’s mischief-making in the civil case included her appointment of a special master to sift through the seized documents based on Trump’s claim of executive privilege. That shackled the Justice Department in an unprecedented fashion and drew criticism from legal experts of all ideological stripes.

It took two decisions excoriating Cannon by the conservative 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to shut down her misadventure. Those two strikes against the judge arguably put her oversight of the case at real risk if she draws another rebuke from the appellate court.

The first call to Cannon from an unidentified colleague reportedly offered face-saving reasons for her to give up the case. The judge pointed to logistical concerns such as the lack of a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, in Cannon’s Fort Pierce, Fla., courthouse. (In fact, Cannon’s retention of the case required a SCIF to be built there at considerable cost to taxpayers.)

But Cannon refused to take the hint. That was when the chief judge of the district, Cecilia M. Altonaga, reportedly stepped in to make a “more pointed” argument.

Altonaga gave Cannon the unvarnished facts, according to the report. She told the new judge that the prior debacle in the search warrant litigation made it “bad optics” for her to preside over the case. And since she was speaking as the district’s chief judge, the implication was that keeping the case would hurt not only Cannon but the entire district.

The report suggests a forceful appeal, close to a demand, from a chief judge to a novice with very little trial experience. The chief judge is the closest a federal judge gets to a boss. Moreover, Altonaga is an appointee of another Republican, George W. Bush, so Cannon had no reason to see her as a member of the enemy camp.

New federal judges to some extent have to leave society and old friendships behind, assuming a necessary distance from former colleagues that can be difficult. Their colleagues in the district typically become their closest confidants as well as a primary source of professional esteem. For those reasons, rebuffing one’s fellow jurists is the last thing most judges want to do.

And it hasn’t gone unnoticed. On the contrary, the New York Times reported that Cannon’s refusal of her colleagues’ entreaties “has spread among other federal judges and the people who know them.”

Cannon’s obduracy was a forewarning of her bizarre and almost ludicrously pro-Trump handling of the case. She has generally shown hostility to prosecutors, given extensive consideration to patently meritless defense motions, and studiously avoided issuing any rulings that could be appealed to the 11th Circuit and lead to her recusal. A case in point is Monday’s hearing of the defense’s dubious argument that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.

The upshot is that what should have been the most cut and dried of the four criminal cases against Trump — a case in which his lawlessness is patent and uncomplicated — is highly unlikely to proceed to trial before the election.

The latest reporting on Cannon confirms that she is willing to invite the deep disrespect of the community that normally determines a judge’s professional standing. If Trump wins in November, she has every reason to expect the gamble to pay large rewards. If he loses, she has every reason to expect to go down with the ship. It’s a risk she appears determined to run.

Harry Litman is the host of the “Talking Feds” podcast and the Talking San Diego speaker series. @harrylitman