‘She needs to let Trump be Trump’: Inside Kamala Harris’s unconventional debate prep

Less than three months ago, a disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden put Kamala Harris on a collision course with Donald Trump.

Now at the top of the Democratic ticket, Harris’s first public face-off with Trump on the ABC debate stage in Philadelphia is just days away. Right now, she is hunkered down in Pittsburgh for intensive preparations with a close circle of aides and confidantes who are getting her ready for her best — and perhaps only — chance to convince Americans that she, and not the former president, should spend the next four years in the White House.

According to NOTUS, the vice president will be participating in sessions led by Paul, Weiss partner Karen Dunn, the Washington super-lawyer who masterminded then-Senator Harris’s prep for her 2020 debate against her predecessor, Mike Pence. Harris will also reportedly be coached by her veteran policy adviser Rohini Kosoglu, as well as Democratic National Convention mastermind and longtime operative Minyon Moore; domestic policy aide Brian Nelson; campaign chief-of-staff Sheila Nix; veteran adviser Sean Clegg; and Cedric Richmond, the former Louisiana congressman who is a co-chair of her campaign.

She is understood to have spent weeks and months preparing for a debate that was originally supposed to be a vice presidential debate against JD Vance, the Ohio senator who Trump tapped as his running-mate at the GOP convention in Milwaukee this past July. But Biden’s decision to stand down has thrust her into an unprecedented situation. Never before has a major party presidential candidate gone into a general election debate with more rust and without any opportunity to clean up an error.

Because the then-Biden and Trump campaigns agreed to only two debates, this will be Harris’s only chance to confront the former president in a televised setting. It will also be her first time debating Trump and her first appearance on a debate stage in nearly four years.

To that end, the Harris campaign has enlisted the help of a veteran from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run — former deputy assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines.

Reines, a longtime aide to the former top diplomat, famously played the role of Trump as Clinton prepared for three general election debates against the then-political newcomer.

It’s a change from how Biden prepared, using his longtime attorney, Robert Bauer, as a foil. While Bauer once told Politico he refrained from copying Trump’s physical mannerisms when he played the ex-president during the incumbent’s debate prep, Reines is known to go full-on method by donning a wig and an ill-fitting suit to match the ex-president’s physicality.

Just before Biden had his first debate with Trump four years ago, he penned an article in Politico Magazine explaining his process. In it, he detailed how he prepared for the role by watching the 15 Republican primary debates Trump participated in during the 2016 election cycle – three times each. First, he would watch a debate all the way through; then, he’d watch a second time to focus on the exchanges Trump involved himself in. Finally, he’d view the debates a third time without audio to get a better sense of Trump’s mannerisms.

Reines referred to Trump as “a malevolent George Costanza” who gains advantages through his “bluster, vulgarity, innuendo and refusal to admit he’s wrong.” Some Democrats have suggested that Harris, the former courtroom prosecutor, use her time on stage to prosecute a case against Trump and play up his criminal record versus her work as a prosecutor. But political veterans tell The Independent that indulging such resistance-porn fantasies will only lead to a bad end for the vice president.

“She only has one job: win the election. She doesn't have to please the press. She certainly doesn't have to please the opposition,” said University of Virginia professor and longtime election forecaster Larry Sabato.

Reached by phone last week, Sabato said Harris has benefited from the relative anonymity of the vice presidency and the swift process by which Biden stood aside and thrust her to the top of the ticket without a primary process of any sort. He predicted that Harris won’t have to do much in her debate other than give Trump a chance to melt down himself. His appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists last month, during which he questioned the vice president’s heritage, is a prime example of that, Sabato added.

“It’s like if you have a serial murderer [in the courtroom] and you're charged with convincing them not to murder again. Ain't going to do that. I mean, it's in their blood, it's in their mind,” he said. “I don’t want to compare [Trump] to a murderer, but you know what I’m saying? He can’t change. I'm 72 and I can't change my habits. He's 78 and he is not going to change his MO because it did succeed — briefly.”

According to a person familiar with Harris’s preparations, she will be running through multiple 90-minute mock debate sessions per day in an effort to avoid getting bogged down in minute policy discussions that have taken her schedule off-the-rails in the past.

One close friend told NOTUS that Harris “really does deal much more in a fact-based universe than most Democratic candidates” and therefore she does have a tendency to get stuck in the mud when discussing policy matters during debate prep.

“A way that they’re trying to work through those sorts of challenges of the past is to change the process,” the person said. “Not sitting down, talking through every single policy issue, [but] giving her the reading work to do ahead of time, making sure that her books are prepared and organized. And then every session is: Let’s come in … and go through the mock debate.”

Publicly, the Harris campaign is leaning into Trump’s experience as a debater who has been on the big stage far more than Harris.

Factually, that is correct. No one living has done more presidential general election debates than Trump. He has debated general election opponents six times — thrice during the 2016 cycle against Clinton, twice during the 2020 race versus Biden, and a third time against Biden this past June.

By contrast, Harris has only debated one time — against Pence — aside from her short stint as a primary candidate early on in the 2020 cycle.

Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon called Trump a “formidable opponent” in a recent memo, citing his experience. But Susan Estrich, the political operative and lawyer who helmed Michael Dukakis’s 1988 campaign against George HW Bush, said Harris should worry less about Trump and focus mainly on “making the case for herself” when she steps up to the microphone on the 10th.

“The first and most important thing she needs to do is to give voters a sense of what she stands for,” said Estrich, who praised the Harris-Walz campaign operation for moving her poll numbers into favorable territory with a campaign “of optimism and hope and joy” since she replaced Biden atop the ticket.

“She's still, in the minds of most voters, an unknown quantity, and I think she needs to get granular and set forth enough policy positions so that people come away — undecided voters come away — feeling like they know what she stands for,” she said. “It can't be just Biden 2.0 — it's got to be Harris 1.0. She's got to lay down her economic proposals, lay out what she wants to do about the border, talk about foreign policy, the way she did in her convention speech.”

Estrich said Harris’s second task will be to not let Trump get under her skin while still getting under his skin enough to make him go off-script.

“Trump is easy to bait. She needs to laugh at him. She needs to dismiss him. She needs to remind people that they don't want to go back to his shtick and to his divisive politics for the next four years,” Estrich said. She added the caveat that the rules set by the Biden-era campaign team that will have candidates’ microphones muted when the other is speaking will make that task more difficult: “Doing that with two-minute responses and muted mics is a little harder than doing it in a free-flowing segment.”

“She needs to use her time to make her case and to show people that she can be commander-in-chief, but she also needs to let Trump be Trump,” Estrich added. “Because Trump being Trump is exactly the wrong thing for him to be doing in this debate, and he can't resist it.”