Trump’s Debate Plan: Pop The Harris ‘Bubblewrap’
Trump’s Debate Plan: Pop The Harris ‘Bubblewrap’
The ex-president’s team sees this as the best, maybe last, shot to knock her off her game.
DONALD TRUMP’S TEAM ISN’T SPINNING the stakes around Tuesday night’s debate.
They see the matchup as critical, perhaps Trump’s best—and only—chance to knock Vice President Kamala Harris off message and define her on his terms.
“This is an absolutely seminal moment. And the [former] president is working on it as if that’s the case,” said a Trump adviser who wasn’t authorized to publicly discuss the candidate’s preparations.
Trump world’s view about the significance of Tuesday night’s showdown is born from their belief that Harris has run a professionalized (though not error free) operation. The vice president has had almost no solo, unscripted moments on the trail. And the expectation is that she will continue to run a cautious, methodical race till the end.
They also recognize that the compressed campaign season—and Harris’s mammoth fundraising hauls—have limited their opportunities to target and define her, giving the debate even greater significance than normal.
In the immediate aftermath of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Harris’s ascension as the Democratic nominee, confidants described Trump as distracted and angry. He resented the switcheroo, and he was ticked off at the favorable media coverage Harris was receiving—noting that it came even as she essentially stiff-armed the press.
But there was a subtler ingredient affecting his mood, too. Trump hated the fact that his June 27 debate with Biden led to the president stepping aside, believing that had that evening never happened, he would be coasting to victory against a feeble opponent.
“Why did I have to debate him so early?” Trump has half-laughed and half-lamented to others.
BUT IN RECENT DAYS, INSIDERS SAY, Trump and his team have increasingly sounded upbeat about the Tuesday debate, which will be the first time he’ll meet Harris in person. Internal campaign surveys and public polls, like Monday’s national survey from Pew Research, show a deadlocked race. This weekend’s New York Times/Siena poll also shows that voters favor Trump on the top issue, the economy, and that Harris isn’t as well-known as the ex-president. Those results reinforce the Trump campaign’s belief that the debate will afford him more of an opportunity to present himself to voters as the change candidate and to saddle her with Biden’s record.
“The stakes are far higher for the vice president in this debate because she doesn’t do interviews with all of you,” Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who has prepared Trump for the past two debates, told reporters on a conference call Monday.
“Trump has been doing interviews. He’s been taking tough questions consistently for years. And she’s been wrapped in bubblewrap since securing the nomination,” Gaetz said. “And so I think she’s got a far higher bar that she has to clear because a lot of people haven’t really seen her pressed with straightforward questions about her record and about her radically liberal policy choices.”
For a campaign that views the debate as deeply consequential, Trump has been setting expectations low for Harris’s performance, portraying her as both intellectually incapable and unseasoned. The VP had a few well-regarded debate performances during the 2020 Democratic primary—even though her candidacy faltered early—and received favorable poll results the last time she debated, on Oct. 7, 2020, against then Vice President Mike Pence.
The confidence that Gaetz and others in the Trump campaign betray about Tuesday isn’t universally shared among everyone in that orbit. Trump supporters, including those who have advised him in prior campaigns, worry that the former president is underestimating Harris. While they believe Harris has major vulnerabilities for high-profile policy reversals on issues like fracking, there’s an undercurrent of concern that the 78-year-old Trump isn’t as sharp and coherent as he used to be and runs the risk of looking too old in a splitscreen with the 59-year-old Harris.
“This could take some policy chops, and our guy is not always up for that,” said one former Trump campaign adviser who still supports Trump.
Tuesday’s debate also marks the first time Trump will go head-to-head with a black woman, and his incendiary remarks about Harris’s race in July are still fresh on the minds of nervous supporters. Trump has also made it clear he may get personal and insult Harris’s intelligence.
“I hate my opponent,” Trump has explained.
WHILE NO ONE IS QUITE SURE what the ex-president will say when he takes the stage, campaign insiders insist he is ready for whatever Harris or the debate moderators throw at him.
A Harris spokesperson declined comment, but her campaign has made sure to lower expectations around her appearance. Last week, it complained that the microphones on stage would be muted when it’s not the candidate’s turn to speak, arguing it deprived viewers of a chance to witness Trump unvarnished.
“Vice President Harris, a former prosecutor, will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President,” her campaign said in a letter accepting the debate format. “We suspect this is the primary reason for his campaign’s insistence on muted microphones.”
The Trump campaign argued publicly that its insistence on having muted microphones was about adhering to the debate rules they’d agreed to when Biden was the nominee. But according to one insider, there was another reason: “She wanted it, so we didn’t want it. If she didn’t want it, we would’ve wanted it.”
As in the past, Trump’s campaign is shying away from saying he’s engaging in “debate prep” at all. Trump has questioned the value of traditional preparation and he’s not having timed mock debates with a stand-in playing his opponent, which senior adviser Jason Miller suggested was tantamount to “putting some clown in a clown suit.”
Still, Trump practices set pieces in which he and advisers discuss issues and give-and-take moments. Miller has led debate prep with Gaetz and former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who put Harris on defense in 2019 during a Democratic presidential primary debate.
“He sits around with smart people, listens, talks, adds, raises points,” according to the Trump campaign adviser familiar with the debate discussions. “So he’ll be asked something like, ‘she might say she’s a prosecutor and you’re a criminal. How do you react to that?’”
What’s Trump’s answer? The insider wouldn’t say.
As for how Trump is preparing for Harris: For starters, his team is trolling her. The conference call ID for reporters on Monday was “unburdened,” a reference to Harris’s frequent musing of how she seeks to become “unburdened by what has been.” Secondarily, it’s putting the onus on her.
“I don’t know how Kamala Harris could prepare for President Trump,” Miller said.