Inside Trump’s Don’t-Call-It “Debate Prep”

“He’s waited four years for this. It’s not gonna be a shitshow.”

DONALD TRUMP BELIEVES THAT ONE ERROR cost him bigly during the 2020 campaign: his aggro meltdown during the first debate with Joe Biden.

Trump interrupted Biden and debate moderator Chris Wallace at least 145 times. Trump lost his cool. He failed to condemn the Proud Boys. Top advisers told Trump at the time that he did terribly. Polling averages showed Biden’s advantage grow from almost +7 to more than +10 in the days following the debate.

Despite his public denials at the time, Trump privately accepted the reality and retooled his approach in the next debate. By then it was too late.

“It won’t be like last time,” Trump vowed to a confidant recently. “It’s not 2020.”

He’s right.

Unlike four years ago, Trump won’t be taking the stage while so sick with COVID that he’d land in the hospital three days later. Also, the polls are now essentially tied and President Biden is weighed down by four years in the White House and low approval ratings.

Perhaps most importantly, the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it’s not their turn to talk.

“I would never say this to him [Trump], but this is a good guardrail to stay on track,” said one adviser who has discussed the debate with Trump. “He’s waited four years for this. It’s not gonna be a shitshow.”

---

TRUMP ISN’T COMPLETELY DEPARTING from prior precedent for debate preparation—starting with the fact that the campaign refuses to call it “debate prep,” because that might imply that Trump wasn’t already prepared. And as in 2020, no one is playing the part of Biden. 

“This is a policy refresher. This is about what he did as president and contrasting that with Biden,” said an insider familiar with the “policy refresher.”

So far, Trump has held half a dozen of the sessions, each about an hour long, involving a core group of five top aides: communications adviser Jason Miller, policy adviser Stephen Miller, campaign co-manager Susie Wiles, and policy advisers Vince Haley and Ross Worthington.

Other senior advisers, including communicators director Steven Cheung and campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita, have joined in from time to time as have other insiders with specialties they’ve discussed with Trump. These include Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (national defense and foreign policy); Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance (“America First” policy and Hillbilly Elegy heartland issues); Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt (“lawfare”/Trump’s legal problems); longtime Trump adviser and pollster Kellyanne Conway (abortion); former Acting Director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan; and former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Emmet Lighthizer. 

Conway and both Millers (who are not related) were involved in Trump’s 2020 don’t-call-it-debate-preparation sessions as well. In 2020, Chris Christie played the part of debate-prep antagonist who pressed Trump and tried to get him flustered. Trump hated it.

“No one is doing any yelling this time,” said one person briefed on the meetings. “There’s no point. Not like it worked last time.”

Nor is Rudy Giuliani involved this time. Before the 2020 faceoff with Biden, Giuliani presented Trump with the world’s worst false choice: “We can live with a headline that you were too tough on him. We can’t live with a headline that he dominated the debate.”

---

ONE PERSISTENT CONCERN of top Trump supporters: the incredibly low bar he and Republicans have set for Biden. In 2020, Trump and his team thought Biden was so mentally diminished he would be unable to debate. They even spread the word that Biden might use performance-enhancing drugs to counteract the effects of his age. At his Philadelphia rally this past weekend, Trump was using the same line: “A little before debate time, [Biden] gets a shot in the ass, and that’s—they want to strengthen him up,” Trump said. Trump allies have been spreading the same story, one so far as to demand on congressional letterhead that Biden take a drug test.

At the rally, Trump also took aim at CNN and its debate moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, by mocking their names. The following morning, Eric Trump picked up where Trump left off and told Fox News his father would have to debate both Biden and CNN. On Monday morning, Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt furthered the criticisms in an interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt, who ended the interview when the former president’s spokeswoman continued to attack the debate’s moderators.

CNN stood by Bash and Tapper in a written statement, saying that the two “have covered politics for more than five decades combined. They have extensive experience moderating major political debates, including CNN’s Republican Presidential Primary Debate this cycle. There are no two people better equipped to co-moderate a substantial and fact-based discussion and we look forward to the debate on June 27 in Atlanta.” 

For her part, Leavitt posted on X that the incident “proved our point that President Trump will not be treated fairly on Thursday. Yet he is still willing to go into this 3-1 fight to bring his winning message to the American people, and he will win." 

Leavitt’s “3-1” line has been circulating for a few days in MAGAville as Trump prepares for Thursday night. Though the debate-prep sessions are devoted to policy, using the moderators and CNN as a foil is never far from Trump’s mind.

“It’s half of what he thinks about,” said an insider.

At the same time, Trump backers say they expect—or at least hope—he’ll be more strategic than he was in that first 2020 debate, which Tapper and Bash, along with the rest of the political world, panned at the time on CNN.

“That was a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a trainwreck,” Tapper said after the first Trump-Biden faceoff ended.

Bash chimed in: “That was a shitshow.”