With just days to go before a debate that could upset the course of a very close election campaign, Donald Trump finally seems to be realizing the dangers of constantly portraying his opponent as a frail, shambling old man.
Trump now calls President Biden a “great debater” – and a formidable one, to be sure. “I watched him and Paul Ryan debate, and he blew Paul Ryan away,” Trump said in an interview last week, referring to Biden's 2012 vice presidential debate against Mitt Romney's running mate. “I don't underestimate him.”
The comments conveyed a key piece of information to the Biden campaign: Trump is actually putting all his effort into preparation this time around, a stark difference from how he behaved in the first 2020 debate, when the roles of incumbent president and challenger were reversed.
At what was meant to be his first warm-up session, held at Trump's golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, the then-president began with the words, “What the hell am I doing here?”
Follow this authorKaren Tumulty's opinion
“I know how to do it,” Trump said. “I'm already the president.” Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was leading the exercise, gave Trump a list of predecessors who had relied on similar confidence to run for a second term, only to lose miserably in the first debate. Mr. Christie recounted the episode in his 2021 book, “Saving the Republican Party.”
Trump reluctantly accepted the reading material and said he might give it a read. Judging by his frantic performance in the first debate, Trump did not read it, nor did he follow much of the advice he received, including Christie's parting admonition to “Let Biden talk. … Biden will hang himself.” Trump interrupted Biden more than 70 times, according to a Post tally.
Trump, aware of how badly he lost his first debate with Biden, appeared more subdued in the second debate, with each candidate's microphone muted for parts of the evening.
Trump has assembled a more strategic, disciplined campaign team than he did in the past two presidential elections, and Biden advisers expect him to lay out his strategy Thursday night. Whether Biden can stick to it for an hour and a half is another matter.
As his comments last week show, Mr. Trump has belatedly come to understand the importance of the time-honored practice of building anticipation for an opponent's speech. In 2004, Matthew Dowd, chief strategist to President George W. Bush, called Democratic candidate John F. Kerry “the best debater who ever ran for president” and even “better than Cicero.”
Both campaigns have cleared their public schedules between now and Thursday to allow candidates to practice and prepare.
Don't expect any groundbreaking policy announcements on Thursday night — the nature of this year's debate puts a sitting president and a former president side-by-side on the podium, so the candidates' positions are pretty well known at this point — but CNN's accomplished hosts Dana Bash and Jake Tapper will surely try to confront both candidates about their plans for the next four years and where those plans conflict with their track records so far.
What viewers will no doubt be most interested in is how they perform: Can Biden, 81, hang on to four more years in office? And is Trump, 78, too unstable to hold onto office again?
That the debate in Atlanta will take place without a crowd, which could be disruptive due to crowds, is a welcome development, something I've argued for years, and is reminiscent of the famous 1960 TV studio debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.
But there's another twist: there will be strict limits on the amount of time each candidate can speak, and microphones will be muted until it's their turn to speak.
According to a CNN memo distributed to both sides, each candidate will have two minutes to answer a question, their opponent will have one minute to refute it, and the first candidate will have another minute to respond to the refute. The moderator will have discretion to decide whether an additional minute is needed for a rebuttal or explanation.
I'm skeptical about how this would actually work — the Biden campaign argued the rule was designed to prevent a repeat of Trump's 2020 disruptive behavior — but if it did work, would the networks really choose to sabotage candidates' ability to engage with one another in more productive ways?
CNN has been cautious about how strictly it will enforce its rules, but there are signs that someone in the control room will have the power to unmute microphones.
Will all this really turn the tide in a contest between two unpopular candidates? Most voters are stuck to one side or the other. But in a race this close, it won't take that many votes to make much of a difference. The real question is whether significant uninterested voters are actually willing to watch the race.
