WASHINGTON — Four years ago, Joe Biden rehearsed debates from a podium in the basement of his Delaware home. Now that he's president, he can choose a room in the White House, his vacation home at Camp David in Maryland or just about anywhere in the country.
But no matter how much the atmosphere around Biden changes — the room he's in, the ups and downs of the economy, the outbreak of war in Eastern Europe and the Middle East — his preparations for a second debate with former President Donald Trump are expected to be remarkably consistent from the 2020 debate.
Three people close to Trump said he has been reluctant to practice for a debate, much less take part in the full-scale mock rehearsals familiar to most presidential candidates.
“What is that?” a Trump aide responded with dry humor when asked about Trump's preparedness plans.
Yet on June 27, when the two men meet for the first time in the Oval Office in a televised presidential debate, they will be battling over four years' worth of fresh material. Trump's main message will be that he is strong and Biden is weak. Biden says he cares about the American people, while Trump only cares about himself.
Trump's advisers say no formal rehearsal is necessary because he spends so much time interacting with voters and the media, including at a rally in the Bronx last week, stopovers at local restaurants, one-on-one interviews and near-daily news conferences at the Manhattan courthouse where his trial is taking place.
Biden's “puppet masters are panicking about how to shore up their weak candidate,” Trump spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt said in a statement. “In contrast, President Trump has delivered a 90-minute speech to tens of thousands of supporters, facing tough interview after tough interview, talking about how he will build back the great Trump economy and make the border secure again.”
Both candidates risk biasing the debates toward themselves, or their track records, when persuadable voters will be tuning in to hear about their plans for the future. This is a particularly serious danger for Trump, who rarely misses a chance to falsely claim that he won the last election.
“One of the issues for him here is how much he talks about his own record from 2017 to 2020 and how much he talks about Joe Biden. [and] “How positive is he talking about a second term,” said a person familiar with his past debate prep sessions. “Time will tell if he's very positive. I would certainly encourage him to do so.”
Biden campaign advisers said the team plans to lay the groundwork for the first debate through paid advertising, media coverage and grassroots communications, highlighting Trump's appointments to the Supreme Court who voted to overturn abortion protections, his embrace of election conspiracy theories, his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat and economic policies that “make our rich friends richer and raise the burden on the middle class.”
“In the month leading up to the first debate, the Biden-Harris campaign will focus on Trump's dangerous campaign promises and outrageous rhetoric,” Biden campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon wrote in a memo last week. “We intend to remind voters weighing in this election of the chaos and damage Trump caused as president and why they ousted him four years ago.”
Comparing the two presidents' careers offers one lens through which to sift through fights over the economy, abortion rights, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the future of American governance.
The White House and Biden campaign have yet to finalize the roster of debate prep participants, but former Biden White House chief of staff Ron Klain, who keeps a file of every question from past presidential debates, will resume his role as prep guru for several Democratic presidential candidates.
A source close to Biden said the list of attendees would likely include White House aides Anita Dunn, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed and O'Malley Dillon, as well as campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond. The source also named author Jon Meacham and Michael Sheehan, who coaches Democratic candidates on speaking styles, as helping with preparations.
It's not yet clear whether Biden's lawyer, Bob Bauer, who played Trump in a 2020 practice session, will do so again.
Crain and Dunn declined to comment for this article, saying they wanted to keep the entire effort private.
“I'm not going to argue,” Dunn said in a text message.
To the extent that Trump can be confined to a modified preparation session, it is likely to be a very informal discussion of issues and tactics.
“He doesn't believe traditional preparation is necessary,” said a person familiar with past debates, “partly because he wants to save his best performance for the real thing, but also because he thinks, 'I can do it.'”
Trump also drew criticism from some Republicans for repeatedly interrupting Biden and Fox News moderator Chris Wallace during the first debate of 2020. By interrupting in the opening minutes of the debate, Biden appeared to set a trap to irritate Trump and provoke him into becoming overly aggressive.
After Biden urged him to cut ties with the white supremacist group Proud Boys, Trump told them to “stand back and stand by” in the final stretch before the election. Bizarrely, Trump accused Biden of wanting to kill cows.
In the second and final debate, held in Nashville, Tennessee, in October, Trump was more traditional, and the two men battled over substance rather than style.
Trump still has some of the people in his inner circle who kept him focused on the 2020 debates. Communications strategist Jason Miller, for example, is a senior adviser to his campaign, and he is also close to Stephen Miller, a top policy adviser to the Trump administration. But two of Trump's three senior advisers, Suzi Wiles and Chris LaCivita, did not hold the highest-ranking positions at the last debate.
Missing from the debate preparation team are then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Trump's 2020 campaign chairman Bill Stepien and longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks, who is not involved in the campaign.
It's unclear how much the debates will affect the outcome of a presidential election in which campaigns and their allies spend billions of dollars on advertising, but they offer voters a rare opportunity to watch the candidates stand side-by-side and counter each other's arguments on issues and character.
Trump and Biden have agreed to face off for a second time on Sept. 10, with Biden proposing a date that would leave two and a half months between the meetings.
