After years portraying Joe Biden as a doddering fool, Donald Trump is already trying to save face in the event he loses Thursday's debate to the president.

Trump has insisted that Biden will be using some performance enhancing drug, including cocaine, during the debate, and has called for a pre-debate drug test (which Trump, too, would also be expected to undergo in such an event. Jimmy Kimmel has suggested that the former president be tested for Adderall).

At a rally in Philadelphia Saturday night Trump said that Biden will inject drugs "in his ass" to get "jacked up" before the debate. 

At a rally last Wednesday in Wisconsin, Trump said of Biden at the upcoming debate: "He's gonna be so pumped up, he's gonna be so pumped up," and indicated that president would be using cocaine before the event.

Trump referred in the speech to a small plastic bag of cocaine discovered last year (he erroneously said last month) in the White House complex near an entrance to the West Wing commonly used to give tours, and indicated it belong to Joe Biden.

"Somebody didn't pick up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cocaine. I wonder who that could've been. I don't know. Actually, I think it was Joe," Trump said after his "pumped up" comment about the president.

Trump is pre-spinning a bad debate performance by preemptively accusing Biden of being on drugs pic.twitter.com/5MbFmsO4Pv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2024

Trump pal and Fox News host Sean Hannity has also suggested Biden's performance would be aided by caffeinated Red Bull, caffeine pills or ... something else, just as he falsely claimed Biden was on something for his popular, powerful State of the Union address.

Hannity even suggested that Trump skip the debate.

In another strategy, Trump is suddenly reshaping Biden into a formidable opponent whom he does not want to "underestimate."

"I watched him with Paul Ryan and he destroyed Paul Ryan," Trump said of Biden's performance in the 2012 vice presidential debate.

"He beat Paul Ryan. So, I'm not underestimating him ... I assume he's gonna be somebody that will be a worthy debater," Trump said in an interview on the "All-In" podcast released Thursday. Trump didn't specify whether that's with or without cocaine.

The whiplash contradictions between the crafty and incompent versions presented of Biden is one Trump critics have long pointed out about attacks by the former president and his MAGA backers. Is Biden a conniving, sinister mastermind out to rule the earth, or a man who can barely put on his pants in the morning?

As the debate nears, Republicans are fearful they have set expectations for Biden's performance way too low, so that even a mildly competent performance could be seen as a stellar showing, New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman CNN's Kaitlan Collins on Thursday.

"They're trying to move from 'Biden can't tie his shoelaces' ... to trying to suggest that they expect that he will be good in the same way he was in the State of the Union," she added.