This guy is what Nathan Thurm would sound like after a case of Mountain Dew.

Is he just bad at this, or so accustomed to a soft touch from the rest of the media that the prospect of facing off with Bret Baier turned him into a jabbering spokes-chimp?

I don’t know what Team Joe is doing on Fox in the first place. They’ll get a fair shake from Baier, but there are no persuadables in that audience.

Watch Joe Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo absolutely melt down when @BretBaier asks him if Biden has ever used a teleprompter for news interviews from his house. Ducklo explodes and, like he did throughout the interview, accuses him of being a Trump campaign shill pic.twitter.com/oIfCID9qAb

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 10, 2020

Video: Here's just a sample of the back-and-forth between Fox News Channel's @BretBaier and TJ Ducklo from the Biden campaign. Baier repeatedly asked the simple question of what Biden would have done differently on COVID, and Ducklo accuses him of being a Trump campaign stooge pic.twitter.com/kQw9PZJAUk

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 10, 2020

I think maybe he psyched himself out given the expectations on the left for how one should comport oneself when entering The Bad Place. Under normal circumstances, maybe Ducklo could have chilled out a bit and been more conversational. In the home stretch of the presidential campaign, with the left expecting him to slay the Fox dragon, he may have felt he had to be excessively combative.

Which is dumb, because one of his boss’s strengths is that he’s not that way himself. He’s more soft-spoken, which is a better fit for many swing voters than Trump’s “this one goes to 11” nonstop rhetorical shtick.

That’s not to say today was a good day for Sleepy Joe either, though. He sat for an interview with CNN this afternoon and somehow maneuvered himself into saying that (a) he was against NAFTA after he was for it, which isn’t the first time he’s been in that position with respect to major public policy, and (b) that Trump’s USMCA deal is actually an improvement on NAFTA. It’s hard not to notice that on issues ranging from trade to China to the “forever wars” he voted for, Biden sounds a lot Trumpier than he did five years ago. All part of his campaign strategy, I assume: “I’ll give you all the things you like about Trump too! Just with much less Trumpiness.”