Vice President Kamala Harris is holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel, doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions before Tuesday night’s clash. There’s a stage and replica TV lighting and an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie.
The former president’s preparations are more improv. They are pointedly called not “debate prep” but “policy time,” meant to refresh him on his record. Nobody is playing Harris; sometimes his aides sit at a long table opposite him and bat questions back and forth, or other times he pulls up a chair closer to them. Trump has held just a handful of sessions so far, interrupting one at his Las Vegas hotel so he and his advisers could go up to his suite to watch Harris’ convention speech.
While the two camps’ preparations for the big night in Philadelphia could not be more different, both sides view the debate the same way, according to interviews with nearly two dozen people close to the candidates, many of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss the private preparations. The Harris and Trump teams see it as a crucial moment to define Harris for millions of swing voters who know what they think about Trump but are still curious about her.
Bringing out Trump’s most self-destructive instincts is a priority for Harris, as is coming across as coolheaded and presidential.
“She should not be baited, she should bait him,” Hillary Clinton, the last woman to debate Trump, said in an interview Thursday. “When I said he was a Russian puppet, he just sputtered onstage. I think that’s an example of how you get out a fact about him that really unnerves him.”
In Trump’s debate prep sessions, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida has embraced the role of posing tough questions to Trump, including on uncomfortable subjects like his criminal convictions, according to a person with knowledge of the gatherings. Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic member of Congress who memorably attacked Harris in a 2019 presidential primary debate, has also been helping Trump prepare.
Trump’s advisers are acutely aware of the risk that he could appear overly aggressive, as he did in his first, disastrous debate with Joe Biden in 2020, when the COVID-infected Trump sweated profusely and incessantly interrupted his rival.
Trump advisers worry that he will not be able to stop himself from showing his deep contempt for Harris or from seeming to lecture a female opponent.
While he respected Clinton as “smart” and a hard worker, Trump plainly believes that Harris is unintelligent, advisers and allies say. In private, he uses misogynistic language to describe her and gossips about her past romantic relationships, including with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco.
The former president’s allies and advisers have urged him to be “happy Trump” in the debate rather than “mean, bully Trump,” as one close ally put it, while pressing a policy-based case against Harris. There are risks to that approach as well: One ally warned that if Trump tried to stay on his best behavior, he could overcorrect and come across as “low energy.”
The Trump team also expects him to face tough questions about abortion, a topic on which he has been all over the map in recent weeks, appearing uncertain about how to position himself.
The Trump camp has a straightforward goal for the debate: to force Harris both to own her partnership with the unpopular Biden and to take responsibility for the parts of his presidency that voters are unhappiest about. Trump has focused in particular on the high cost of living; chaos around the world, especially in Ukraine and the Middle East; public safety; and immigration.
“You can’t ‘turn the page’ when you’re singularly responsible for the current economic and border nightmare our country is living through,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, said when asked about the campaign’s debate strategy.
Trump’s aides hope he can create his own version of Ronald Reagan’s famous moment in his 1980 debate against President Jimmy Carter, when Reagan asked television viewers whether they felt better off now than before Carter took office.
Harris has also telegraphed how she plans to go after Trump.
Unlike Biden, she has not focused squarely on portraying the former president as a fundamental threat to American democracy. She has tried to minimize him as a stale old act who is repeating his same tired playbook. And she has painted him as a rich guy who cares only about helping other rich guys — a populist line of attack that resonates with voters in focus groups.
Harris has also ditched Clinton’s unsuccessful strategy of denouncing Trump as a racist and a misogynist. The vice president’s aides believe it’s a waste of time to tell voters what a terrible person Trump is, given how hard it is to find a voter who does not already have a fixed view of his character — good or bad. Instead, Harris is trying to connect with the thin slice of undecided voters who feel sour about the economy and worried about the future, and who want to hear what each candidate will do to improve their lives.
Harris and those advising her understand that the debate will be a race to define herself and her political brand before Trump can. And despite all the noise in liberal circles that Trump is torpedoing his campaign with his undisciplined behavior, Harris and the people ensconced in the hotel with her are not underestimating him.
One challenge for Harris is that Trump, who clashed onstage with Biden in June, has more recent debate experience than the vice president has. She must try to shake off the rust while anticipating what it will be like to stand feet away from someone she has never met but who has attacked her policies, her political past and even her racial identity.
Harris is preparing for attacks on her race and her political and personal relationships.
Harris’ sessions, at the Omni William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, have been led by Karen Dunn, a Democratic lawyer who also helped Clinton prepare for debates. Dunn’s co-pilot is Rohini Kosoglu, Harris’ former domestic policy adviser and Senate chief of staff.
A few others with whom Harris feels comfortable, and who can be trusted to deliver tough feedback, have joined the sessions, people briefed on the process said.
They include Sean Clegg, a political consultant who was a lead strategist on Harris’ 2020 campaign. Clegg’s talent, people who work with him say, is that he knows Harris well enough that he can encourage her to speak in a way that is accessible; if he hears something that sounds too dense, he will flag it for her. Philippe Reines, a former aide to Clinton, is reprising his 2016 role as Trump.
The Trump team held a three-hour debate prep session Tuesday at his private club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Additional sessions are planned for Sunday and Monday.
When Gaetz was asked about the preparations, he stayed on message.
“President Trump doesn’t do debate prep,” he texted on Friday. “He regularly assembles advisors to talk about how he will secure the border, lower prices and stop the global chaos caused by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. Just another day at Mar-a-Lago!”
In fact, Trump has done more work preparing for the 2024 debates than he ever did in 2016 and 2020.
He has been briefed on Harris’ past debate performances and her verbal tics. He remembers well her viral moment in 2020 when she debated Vice President Mike Pence and cut off his attempted interruption by saying, “I’m speaking.”
Referring to that exchange, Trump has privately told associates, “I’m not going to let her do to me what she did to Mike.” He was happy to let his advisers negotiate the muting of microphones when the candidates are not talking. (Harris’ team had been pushing for microphones to be unmuted, hoping that Trump would talk obnoxiously over her and give her an opening for a snappy riposte.) The two candidates will debate without a live audience, from behind lecterns.
In private, Trump has toyed repeatedly with dropping out of the debate, which is being hosted by ABC News, one of his least favorite networks. (No other debates are scheduled yet.) He has ranted about what he claims is its unfairness toward him and has proposed debates on other networks. He has particular hatred for ABC’s star anchor George Stephanopoulos, whom he nicknamed “Slopadopoulos.”
Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against Stephanopoulos this year over an interview related to one of the former president’s court cases, and in discussions about the debate, Trump’s advisers told ABC he would not consent to one moderated by Stephanopoulos. Trump has also complained about another ABC News reporter, Rachel Scott, who asked him pointed questions at a recent conference of Black journalists, during which he questioned Harris’ racial identity. (The debate hosts ended up being ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis.)
Ultimately, Trump concluded that the downsides of skipping the debate — especially the appearance of weakness — outweighed his concerns about attending. He has told associates that he has a good relationship with Muir and is comfortable with his selection as one of the debate hosts.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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