Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Katie Rogers, and Reid J. Epstein reporting for NYT (“Inside the Trump-Harris Debate Prep: Method Acting, Insults, Tough Questions“):
Vice President Kamala Harris is holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel, doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions ahead of 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 J. 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 Ms. 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. Mr. 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 Ms. Harris’s 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 Ms. Harris for millions of swing voters who know what they think about Mr. Trump but are still curious about her.
Bringing out Mr. Trump’s most self-destructive instincts is a priority for Ms. 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 Mr. Trump, said in an interview on 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 Mr. Trump’s debate prep sessions, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida has embraced the role of posing tough questions to Mr. Trump, including on uncomfortable subjects like his criminal convictions, according to a person with knowledge of the gatherings. Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman who memorably attacked Ms. Harris in a 2019 presidential primary debate, has also been helping Mr. Trump prepare.
Mr. Trump’s advisers are acutely aware of the risk that he could appear overly aggressive, as he did in his first, disastrous debate with Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, when the Covid-infected Mr. 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 Ms. Harris or from seeming to lecture a female opponent.
While he respected Ms. Clinton as “smart” and a hard worker, Mr. Trump plainly believes that Ms. 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 Ms. Harris. There are risks to that approach as well: One ally warned that if Mr. Trump tried to stay on his best behavior, he could overcorrect and come across as “low energy.”
The degree to which campaign staffers are willing to spill this information to reporters never ceases to amaze me, despite having read these sort of reports for over four decades now. Why you’d want to tip your hand in this way, I’ll never understand.
But what most stands out to me here is how much the nature of the prep reflects the candidates and the campaigns.
While my impression of Harris remains very much tied to her failed 2019 campaign, her overall CV indicates a woman who prepares for every contingency and surrounds herself with competent staffers who help her to that end. One simply can’t be a successful prosecutor—or get anything done in the Senate—otherwise. So, she and her team have mapped out the various ways Trump might come across in the debate and has contingencies for each—as well as strategies for getting him to drop any charade of self-discipline.
Trump, on the other hand, likes to wing it. So, the debate prep is mostly focused on cramming for the exam. Almost all of this is stuff that someone who has been either running for President or serving as President for the past nine years should already know inside and out. And the staff is desperately trying to get Trump to pretend, for at least one evening, to be the sort of person people could trust with the nuclear codes.
This is also interesting and comports with my longstanding view of the race:
Ms. Harris has also telegraphed how she plans to go after Mr. Trump.
Unlike Mr. 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.
Ms. Harris has also ditched Mrs. Clinton’s unsuccessful strategy of denouncing Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Ms. 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.
Granting that this is a far easier task for Harris than Biden—himself a stale old act even among a lot of Democratic partisans—it’s obviously the right approach. Trump’s racism and misogyny are simply not news to anyone who will cast a vote in November. They’ve either 1) decided he’s an awful human being and decided to therefore vote for the Democrat; 2) decided he’s an awful human being but it’s still better than voting for Democratic policies; 3) decided he’s just like them and therefore would Make America Great Again; or 4) decided he’s an awful human being but so are all politicians and are therefore undecided.
