Don’t be surprised if a juiced-up Joe Biden pulls out a set of handcuffs tonight and says, “These are for you, Donald.”

It won’t happen, of course.

It is against the CNN “no props allowed” presidential debate rules which CNN, the Democrat-friendly debate sponsors, have designed to handcuff Trump anyway.

In lieu of restraints Biden could repeatedly call Trump “a convicted felon” hoping to bait Trump and set him off.

Normally, one could expect Trump to respond with something like, “Yeah, Crooked Joe, just like your convicted felon son Hunter, the guy who made you rich with Chinese money.”

But Trump would be wise not to take the bait, but rather to concentrate on Biden’s dismal record as president, and what he will do to Make America Great Again.

It won’t matter much what Trump says or does during the 90-minute debate. The corrupt Democratic establishment media, along with the two Democratic debate operatives Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, will declare Biden the winner anyway.

All Joe Biden has to do to “win” is show up, not fall down, stumble, mumble, wander off, doze, freeze or give one of his thousand-yard stares into space.

Ordinarily an incumbent president would run for re-election on his record of accomplishments. But Biden does not have many to run on.

Practically everything he has done — from opening the southern border to the illegal immigrant invasion of the country to conducting a war on fossil fuel — has made things worse for the average American.

This is not to mention his often confused, contradictory and contrarian foreign policy which has people wondering whose side he is on, especially in Israel’s war against the Hamas terrorists.

So, with nothing to run on — and with no promising agenda — Biden will go on the attack, acting as though Trump were the incumbent and Biden the challenger.

And his attacks on Trump will not be on policy as much as they will be   on personality.

It is all Biden has left.

Biden will attempt to tie Trump to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots and claim that Trump is a threat to democracy, whatever that means.

Some might say that if there is any threat to democracy, it is Biden’s use of the U.S. Justice Department and Democratic district attorneys to persecute and gag Trump on the flimsiest of charges to keep him off the ballot.

Normally that would be called election interference.

But these are not normal times.

This is the first time in history that a president is running against a challenger whose home he invaded — and who he later indicted —looking for illegally held classified documents like the illegally held classified documents he himself had stored in his own garage.

One man’s “crime” is another man’s credit.

Hopefully Joe Biden listens to the advice given by John Sasso, a Massachusetts Democratic operative. Sasso managed Mike Dukakis’ 1988 campaign for president. He has also prepared several candidates for presidential debates. Sasso knows how to savage a political opponent.

Sasso, in a Boston Globe article Sunday, advised Biden to take the gloves off, go after Trump as unhinged and unfit to run compared to Biden’s “strength and fitness.”

This is the same John Sasso, now a Biden supporter, who wrecked Joe Biden’s 1988 Democrat primary presidential campaign when he leaked to the press a video of Biden plagiarizing a working-class speech by British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock.

The embarrassing revelation knocked Biden out of the race and Dukakis went on to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

Dukakis, who denied knowledge of the video, fired Sasso when word leaked that Sasso was the mastermind behind the dirty trick. Dukakis lost the election to George H.W. Bush.

Sasso would now advise a man he once wrecked on how to wreck his opponent.

Politics does indeed make for strange bedfellows.

Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter who covered the 1988 presidential campaign. Email him at: peter.lucas@boston herald.com

President Donald Trump listens to Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden during the first presidential debate Sept. 29, 2020 in Cleveland, Ohio. (AP Photo/Morry Gash, Pool)