Before any of them takes the debate stage on Tuesday and Wednesday, the 2020 Democratic candidates will already have put in dozens of hours each preparing. But here’s what they need to understand: Nothing they do to prepare for the primary debates will feel remotely similar to when the nominee faces Donald Trump in a debate.
My perspective on this is unique: I was assigned the role of playing Trump during Hillary Clinton’s general election debate prep in 2016. His stand-in. Her sparring partner. The ball machine. Over 17 years of working for her, I’ve argued with and annoyed Hillary plenty. But this time, I was supposed to. And without question, she did the debates right. They were her most successful three days between the high of accepting the nomination and the low of Election Day.
To prepare myself for her grueling debate prep, I watched the 15 Republican primary debates and forums in which Trump participated three times each: once the whole way through; a second time focusing entirely on the exchanges he was part of; a third time with the sound off to watch his mannerisms and body language. I might know his debating style—if you want to call it that—better than anyone on the planet (aside from Hillary Clinton, of course).
These are the qualities that make Trump such a tough opponent in a debate, despite the fact that he is possibly the worst debater in presidential history. If Democrats are serious about nominating a candidate who can beat Trump, these are also the qualities that their nominee should be able to respond to—and how.
What better time to start figuring that out than now?The bluster, vulgarity, innuendo and refusal to admit he’s wrong. We all speak differently during a job interview or on a date than we do at home to our loved ones or pets. The difference is a healthy mindfulness of being evaluated, with success yielding something beneficial, failure being costly. All parties involved know it’s a social convention: Profanity might be fine with your friends, but nobody is hiring someone who curses like a sailor during the interview.
But imagine if you didn’t care whether you got the job. Or worse, imagine if you’ve gotten every other job simply by being your obnoxious self, with no filter. A malevolent George Costanza. That guy is Donald Trump. This dynamic was on full display throughout the 2016 Republican primary debates. Remember his exchange about his hand size with Sen. Marco Rubio? He wasn’t talking about his hands.
Here’s the problem with most of the 2020 Democrats: They are all politicians or former politicians, and most of them sound like it. The fact that you sponsored bipartisan legislation in the last Congress might be accurate, but phrasing it that way in a debate against Trump is just going to look weak.
Democrats need to be able to communicate and attack in the same kind of blunt language that has until now been inappropriate in national politics—or at least not get caught flat-footed when Trump makes a typically rude or crass comment. Blunt and direct does not, however, mean juvenile or immature. In the first primary debate of this cycle, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s willingness to interrupt former Congressman Beto O’Rourke to make his own point about health care illustrated the kind of scrappiness that might be necessary in a debate against Trump.
Another debate tip: Never admit you’re wrong. It is safe to say in a debate against Trump that he or the moderator will press a weakness in your past you’ve likely addressed countless times before. You could spend your allotted time repeating yourself, or you can say, “Are you kidding? You’re asking about some lobbyist I met with a decade ago while this guy has installed a revolving door in the White House? No. Let’s talk about how people are paying him $200,000 to get into his club and then getting their money’s worth out of him. If there’s still time, you can come back to me.” As an example, former Vice President Joe Biden was criticized after the first debate for not taking full responsibility for past positions and statements. Not only did he not apologize, he went further and also emphasized that he had been a public defender, not a prosecutor—a not-so-subtle dig at Sen. Kamala Harris.
So forget the “glass houses” rule and get out your slingshot. Setting aside what’s right or wrong, Biden’s reluctance to admit mistakes might be the exact right approach to Trump’s rampant hypocrisy.
The lying. This one’s a problem on so many levels, but specifically to debating him there are at least two dynamics to contend with:
1. Volume: As we see every day, the sheer number of Trump’s lies overwhelms even the most diligent media outlets trying to fact check him. Doing so in real-time is all the tougher. So our nominee should know that Trump will lie throughout their debate, but can’t count on the moderator to call them all out and can’t expect the audience to know on their own. So our nominee needs to be able to say, “You’re lying.” Easier said than done. Especially if Trump lies every time he opens his mouth.
One possible tactic is to simply, and calmly, count out loud. First time he lies, the nominee should say, “That was the first of many lies to come because that’s what he does best.” After that, when Trump lies again, the nominee should interject with a simple “Lie number two,” or, “That was a few, so we’re up to six.” The moderator might scold the candidate for interrupting, but he or she should respond, “If you were calling out his lies, I wouldn’t have to. But someone has to. He gets away with it all day every day. But not here, not now.”
2. Target: A good chunk of Trump’s lies will be about the nominee prior to the debates, and to their face during the debates. Even a grizzled and jaded politico like me would never suggest the answer to this problem is to lie about him. Just stick with the truth—it provides more than enough fodder.
So who is best able to call out his lies in real time, while standing a mere 10 feet away from him?
Looking at the field, 11 of the 20 candidates debating this week in Detroit are sitting or recently serving members of Congress. Why is that relevant? Because they question witnesses for a living. The two obvious standouts in this respect are the two senators who previously served as their states’ attorneys general and currently sit on the Judiciary Committee: Harris and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. We saw their ability to drill for the truth during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Klobuchar had an exchange for the books—or at least “Saturday Night Live”—when she hammered Kavanaugh about whether he had a drinking problem, which clearly irritated him. He ended up turning the question around on her and asking Klobuchar if she had a drinking problem. “And she asked me a question at the end that I responded by asking her a question and I didn’t—sorry, I did that,” Kavanaugh eventually apologized, essentially admitting that he had cracked under the pressure. Klobuchar did not. Harris also had a direct exchange with Kavanaugh about contacts he had regarding the Mueller investigation, and her background as a prosecutor was on full display.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, also a trained lawyer, sits on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. Her ability to go right at a witness was clear earlier this month during her questioning of then-nominee for Defense Secretary Mike Esper. After a back-and-forth about whether he would ever seek a waiver from his blanket recusal of any matters involving a top defense contractor, for which he ha been a top lobbyist, Esper seemed to give her a compliment: “I think this is a good debate.” “I’m not trying to have a debate,” Warren shot back.
The macho routine. Like it or not, many people associate Trump with strength—and they find it appealing. He knows that, too, which is partly why he loomed over Hillary during the October 2016 town hall-style debate. For at least some people, that menacing show of physical size made him appear the dominant candidate.
To be sure, this particular dynamic is part of larger and more complicated age and gender disparities. Even so, several candidates seem to know that it is a strength of Trump’s to contend with—which they choose to do by impersonating him. Recently, Sen. Cory Booker said his testosterone, “sometimes makes me want to feel like punching Trump.” Biden has said that he “would take Trump behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” Both men—probably to the eye rolls of many across the country—might try to out-muscle Trump on a debate stage. It’s also worth noting—no matter how unlikely a matchup—that at 6 foot 5, de Blasio would tower above Trump. (Watching the Republican debates, it seemed to me Jeb Bush’s height advantage unnerved Trump.)
The bottom line is that watching a candidate share a debate stage with nine others might be one of the most important ways of deciding whom you like the most, but less useful in determining who is best to debate Trump.
If that were our sole criteria, we should skip the thoughtful policy discussions and instead require each candidate to debate a 10-year-old boy who responds to everything with, “I know you are, but what am I?”
We’ve all had to. That kid is obnoxious. Juvenile. Insufferable. Detestable. Smackworthy. Most of all, the very definition of predictable.
But that kid is hard to beat.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine