The Dos and Don’ts of Debating Donald Trump
6 min read
Stand your ground, but don’t take the bait. Be prepared, but not scripted. Call him out, but don’t lose your cool. Own your identity, but don’t lead with it.
As Kamala Harris gets ready to face Donald Trump in a debate tonight for the first and possibly only time in her abbreviated presidential campaign, Democrats who have advised past nominees have plenty of advice on how she should handle an opponent whose chief political skill is attacking and degrading. Her task, they acknowledged, is tricky: If President Joe Biden’s goal in debating Trump in June was to demonstrate that he was fit to serve another four years in the White House—a test he rather famously failed—Harris enters this matchup needing to clear a much higher bar. She must lay out her vision and convince voters that she is ready to be the commander in chief, all the while keeping cool as Trump tries to rattle her.
“Her goal is to be presidential and to withstand his attacks and continue to remind people of her frame: Let’s not go back,” Jim Messina, who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, told me. “That is easier said than done.”
Trump, Messina predicted, “is going to get really nasty with her and whale away.” Her main challenge, he said, will be to decide which punches to respond to and which to ignore. “Don’t chase every attack,” Messina said. “Sometimes you just need to brush it off and look at the camera, look at the country, and say, This is where I’m going to take us.”
Bob Shrum, who helped both Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 prepare for their debates against George W. Bush, offered similar advice. “Don’t lose your temper,” he told me he would advise Harris. “Don’t think you have to answer things that aren’t important and seem preposterous to people.” As an example, he said, Harris should ignore Trump if he calls her a Communist, which he characterized as an outdated attack line that voters would find “absurd,” given that Harris’s economic positions are well within the Democratic Party’s mainstream.
Harris has excelled in past debates, during her successful bids for attorney general of California and in the 2020 presidential campaign. Her takedown of Biden’s record on desegregation (“That little girl was me”) marked the high point of her short-lived bid for the Democratic nomination. Harris’s sharp rejoinder to an interrupting Mike Pence—“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking”—provided one of the few memorable exchanges of a running-mate debate otherwise overshadowed by a fly on Pence’s head.
Yet she has never gone up against someone as tenacious or unscrupulous as Trump. The former president “is the best counterpuncher in modern political history,” Messina told me. “This is a better format for him than it is for her.” To other Democrats I spoke with, however, that rosy assessment of Trump’s skills sounded suspiciously like the kind of expectation-setting that campaigns attempt in the lead-up to big debates, to help their candidate perform better than predicted. The Harris campaign, for example, has complained that the vice president will be “fundamentally disadvantaged” because neither ABC News, the network hosting the debate, nor the Trump campaign would agree to its request that the candidates’ microphones stay on throughout the debate; as during the Biden-Trump debate in June, the mics will be muted when the candidates aren’t speaking, which could prevent viewers from hearing Trump if he tries to interrupt Harris. Trump’s frequent interruptions of Biden during their first debate in 2020 played poorly and prompted one of Biden’s snappier retorts when he said to Trump, “Will you shut up, man?” Democrats believe that Trump has even less discipline four years later.
Shrum said he thought Harris would be fine regardless: Trump “behaves badly in ways that send messages about his character, and they’re not good messages.” Shrum added that he knew he was supposed to raise expectations for Trump’s performance, “but I’m not going to.”
With Biden off the stage, many Democrats hope the debate will expose Trump as the diminished candidate, a 78-year-old who rambles even more than he used to and who struggles to complete a coherent thought. “She’s going to have to get out of Trump’s way,” Ashley Etienne, who served as Harris’s communications director during her first year as vice president, told me. “Let Trump be Trump, and [don’t] debate him point for point, back and forth.” That could be difficult for Harris. “To some degree, she’s going to have to deny that prosecutorial instinct,” Etienne said.
Trump will likely try to tie Harris to Biden’s unpopular economic stewardship, blaming them for inflation. Rather than getting bogged down in a defense of the president’s policies, Etienne said, Harris should pivot quickly to her vision for the future and a critique of Trump: “Her most important thing is not to defend her record. It’s going to be to talk about Donald Trump.”
Democrats I spoke with expect Harris to hold back if Trump flings any racist or sexist attacks her way, as she did after he said in July that she only “happened to turn Black” a few years ago, suggesting that she was playing up that part of her identity for political purposes. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked her about the comment in an interview last month, she replied: “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.”
Aimee Allison, an Oakland, California–based founder of a political group devoted to empowering women of color, told me that during the debate, Harris should strike exactly that tone. “Continue to give no air to Trump’s obsession with identity,” Allison said. “He wants to use the age-old white-guy power move, but by not entertaining it, it has very little power amongst the people who will vote for Kamala Harris.” She praised Harris for a campaign that has not centered the history-making nature of her candidacy in the same way that Hillary Clinton’s “I’m with her” slogan did in 2016. “We’ve grown as a country,” she said.
How much the country has grown, however, remains an open question. Candidates in televised debates are scrutinized nearly as much for how they look when they’re not talking as for what they say when they are. Think of George H. W. Bush’s glance at his watch in 1992, Gore’s heavy sighing in 2000, and Biden’s open-mouthed stares in June’s debate with Trump. Black women are subjected to even more scrutiny of their body language, Etienne said. “She knows that. She’s adjusted to it,” she said of Harris. “I would just caution her to be aware of her nonverbals.”
Trump has belittled Harris’s intelligence, and his campaign has needled her for agreeing to few formal interviews and press conferences, implying that she is weak in situations that she cannot script in advance. Harris did stumble during interviews early in her term as vice president, and her public image did not recover until she launched her campaign in July. Those who have worked with Harris, however, say that Trump knows her only as a right-wing caricature. The debate tonight will be the first time they have met in person. “She is good when she gets a little fire under her,” Etienne said. “I don’t think he’s going to be ready for it.”
