Former President Trump is staring down a night-and-day difference as he prepares to step onto the debate stage Tuesday with Vice President Harris.
When Trump debated President Biden less than three months ago, he was facing a candidate who was trailing in the polls, in search of a moment to energize his campaign and beating back questions about age and competency. The situation has changed drastically heading into Tuesday’s meeting in Philadelphia.
Now, Trump will square off with Harris, who has made the race a jump ball and presents a new challenge for the former president: a younger, more energetic candidate who is less likely to struggle and could goad the former president into moments of peril.
“Oh, it’s hugely different,” said Matt Gorman, a former senior adviser to Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) presidential campaign and a GOP strategist.
“[The Harris campaign] has already kind of made their game plan clear. They want to have some sort of moment akin to what happened in the first Democratic debate with Biden or Vice President [Mike] Pence in 2020 where they can have some sort of rallying cry,” Gorman continued. “Biden was just trying to metaphorically survive it.”
Harris has been the Democratic nominee for a little more than a month but has transformed the race in that time with shock-and-awe fundraising numbers and a surge of enthusiasm that has narrowed the race to neck and neck in numerous swing states. The change has been a sore spot for Trump and Republicans as they have struggled to react accordingly.
It has also prompted a number of moments that have made Republicans cringe, including Trump questioning the vice president’s ethnicity and implying that her rise in Democratic politics was due to sexual favors.
“She’s formidable. She has a record. Stay away from race. Stay away from the idea that she is a promiscuous woman that’s slept her way to the top. That does you no good,” one GOP operative with Trump ties told The Hill. “That’s a losing message. Policy is a winning message. If he has that discipline, he’ll win.”
Harris represents a marked change for Trump in a number of other ways, Republicans say. She is not as seasoned of a debater as Biden, and when running for president four years ago she did not separate herself from the rest of the field as a top-tier debater, despite her past as a prosecutor.
GOP operatives also argue that she struggles when discussing policy details and when she has to think more on her feet, headlined by her 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt.
Still, while Biden’s disastrous performance in June stole headlines, Democrats are quick to note that Trump was by no means a world-beater that night. Immediately after the debate, Biden surrogates highlighted a number of remarks by the former president — including on “Black jobs” and abortion being conducted “even after birth” — but they were quickly forgotten because of Biden’s self-inflicted wounds.
“It’s probably not going to be a situation where the presidential candidate he’s facing has a stroke on stage,” a second Republican strategist quipped, “but that’s a pretty high bar to clear.”
With these changes surrounding the debate, Trump has decided to make alterations of his own, including bringing in former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) for debate prep.
Gabbard landed a notable blow against Harris’s prosecutorial record on the debate stage in 2020 and Republicans believe her inclusion in preparation should not be overlooked.
“People laugh at the Tulsi involvement, but what that tells me is [the Trump team is] taking this seriously,” Gorman said.
One thing that will not change from the last debate to the fast-approaching one is that the candidates’ microphones will be muted when they are not speaking. Harris’s team had pushed for the mics to be live at all times in an apparent effort to give Trump more opportunities to harm his own campaign, but the campaign eventually acceded.
The muted mics did Trump a world of good during the first debate and seemed to curtail his ability to badger and cut off Biden, unlike in the first debate four years ago that ended up being a turning point and helped lead to the sitting president’s victory. Even Trump’s closest supporters acknowledged as much.
“I actually like this format for my father. Keeping him disciplined and focused,” Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, wrote on social platform X midway through the June debate.
The mic situation could harm the ability of Harris — a former prosecutor known for tough questioning during Senate hearings — to cross examine Trump on stage, something her team has made clear they are eager for her to do. Brian Fallon, a Harris spokesperson, said the muted microphones “will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President. We suspect this is the primary reason for his campaign’s insistence on muted microphones.”
But what it won’t stop is Harris attempting to rattle Trump, with Republicans anticipating that she will readily bring up that he was found guilty on 34 counts of financial fraud and liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.
“I hope [his advisers] are prepping him for that. … No matter how personal she gets, he always has to shift back to the policy,” one Senate Republican said.
“If he doesn’t just deflect versus defend that, he’s going to fight for the battle and lose the war,’” they added.