There will be no opening statement. President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump will each have two minutes to answer questions – followed by one-minute rebuttals and responses to the rebuttals. Red lights visible to candidates flash when they have five seconds left and turn solid red when time is up. And each man’s microphone is muted when it’s not his turn to speak.
According to debate rules provided by CNN to the campaigns and reviewed by The New York Times, candidates will take a breather during two commercial breaks but are prohibited from meeting with advisers outside of the broadcast.
The first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle is less than two weeks away, and both campaigns are preparing for the first showdown directly sponsored by a television network in more than a generation. The 90-minute contest on June 27 in Atlanta is considered one of the most consequential moments in this year’s campaign calendar, as Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump will lay out their starkly contrasting visions for the nation and appear together for the first time since their last debate in October 2020.
The two men are preparing for the debate in ways that are almost as different as their approaches to the presidency itself. The Biden operation is blocking much of the final week before the debate after he returns from Europe and in California has raised funds for structured preparations. Mr. Trump has long favored looser conversations in which topics, ideas and one-liners are discussed more informally among advisers. Last week he held a meeting at the Republican National Committee headquarters.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden clearly don’t like each other. The former president calls the current president the worst in American history. The current president calls his predecessor a would-be dictator who threatens democracy itself. Four years ago, in their first meeting, Mr. Trump trampled on his rival’s speaking time – the former president has since admitted privately that he was too aggressive – and Mr. Biden scolded him: “Are you going to shut up, man?”
The rules circulated by CNN warn that “this time, moderators will use all means at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion.”
And then there’s this: “The microphones will be muted throughout the debate, except for the candidate scheduled to speak.” It’s not clear how muted microphones will work in practice – whether the kind of memorable moments (Al Gore sighs or Barack Obama’s “You’re likable enough” apart from Hillary Clinton) that have characterized past debates will be completely lost.
The candidates appear without a live audience and at lecterns, which are determined by a coin toss.
The unusually deep personal animosity between the two men is both an X-factor for the debate and a central consideration for their strategies. The Trump campaign believes a successful approach is to expose Biden as Biden; The Biden campaign sees a successful debate as letting Trump be Trump.
Both men will be rusty. Neither has debated since their last clash in 2020, the longest drought since general election debates became a staple of American campaigns in 1976.
For Mr. Biden, the preparation process will be overseen by Ron Klain, his first White House chief of staff who served the same role in his 2020 debates and his 2012 vice presidential debate. Mr. Klain is putting together what topics are likely to arise and what possible answers they might contain, according to people involved in previous planning sessions.
Bruce Reed, the White House deputy chief of staff, has been collecting materials on the two candidates’ policy differences in recent weeks for Mr. Biden to study. If past is prologue, Mr. Biden will use the early meetings to figure out how he wants to answer various questions. He is expected to rehearse with a replacement opponent in later sessions.
In 2020, Bob Bauer, a Democratic lawyer who served as Mr. Biden’s personal lawyer and is married to Anita Dunn, a top White House adviser, played the role of Mr. Trump; It is unclear whether he will do so again in 2024.
“The goal is no surprises,” said Kate Bedingfield, a former White House communications director who was involved in Mr. Biden’s preparations for the 2020 debate. “In some ways you have to be prepared for the unimaginable. “So the goal of the process is to get President Biden used to the idea that some really terrible things could come out of Donald Trump’s mouth.”
A key question is whether Mr. Trump will bring up Hunter Biden, the president’s son, whom Mr. Trump prosecuted in 2020 and who was just convicted of gun crimes. Another is how Mr. Biden addresses the fact that Mr. Trump is now a felon himself, having been convicted in New York of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened his 2016 campaign.
Mr. Klain has long worked to prepare Mr. Biden for attacks on his family. In 2012, as Mr. Klain led preparations for Mr. Biden’s vice presidential debate, Chris Van Hollen, then a Maryland congressman playing the role of Paul Ryan, was asked to do a series of personal digs.
“You have to prepare for someone who hits below the belt,” said Mr. Van Hollen, now a U.S. senator. “In that earlier debate with Paul Ryan the probability was slim. In this case, it is 100 percent certain that Donald Trump is going below the belt.”
For his part, Mr. Trump has never agreed to traditional, rigorous debate preparation, and this election appears to be no exception. He has often said that he does his best when improvising.
“He sees his rallies as preparation for the debate,” said Marc Lotter, who helped Trump’s 2020 campaign and now works for a conservative nonprofit group. The challenge for Mr. Trump, Mr. Lotter said, will be to speed up the response time. “When they literally cut off your microphone, you have to hit the mark,” he said.
Campaigns often spend the lead-up to a debate touting their opponents and their debating skills. But Mr. Trump’s relentless accusations that Mr. Biden is mentally weakened have only dampened expectations for the president.
Mr. Trump’s inner circle has so far engaged in relatively limited engagement with debate preparation, including the recent meeting at the Republican National Committee headquarters that included Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri.
Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser who took a leading role in organizing the discussions, said Mr. Trump’s speeches demonstrated “elite stamina” and that the former president “doesn’t need to be programmed by staff.”
Mr. Trump’s advisers are not expected to hold formal role-playing games recreating the debate and in which anyone appears as Mr. Biden.
“We are having conversations,” Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s campaign managers, told reporters in Las Vegas this month. When asked who could step in for the role of president, he replied: “Joe Biden will play Joe Biden.”
Mr. Trump has argued that he is taking on not only Mr. Biden but also a television network in CNN that he says is hostile to him. “CNN is the enemy,” he said on a podcast last week, deriding one of the two hosts, Jake Tapper, as a “fake tapper.” (Mr. Tapper is joined by Dana Bash.) Still, he predicted the network would be “as fair as possible.”
The Biden team has made it clear which topics they want the moderators to focus on. In a “Road to Atlanta” memo last month, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the president’s campaign manager, wrote that he wanted to talk about abortion, democracy and some features of Mr. Trump’s economic plans, including tax cuts for wealthier Americans.
Mr. Trump’s team believes he will have a key advantage he didn’t have four years ago: an unpopular Biden record to attack. Mr. Trump wants to focus on inflation, the fact that major conflicts began in Ukraine and Gaza during Mr. Biden’s term, and border crossings that the former president blames for domestic crime.
The 90-minute debate will begin as soon as the first question is answered, according to rules distributed by CNN. Up to five minutes are allowed per question: two minutes for the opening answer, one minute for the rebuttal, one minute for the response to the rebuttal, and an additional minute to be used at the discretion of the moderators. Each candidate will also be allowed a two-minute closing speech.
Mr Biden’s team believes it has already won a major victory by convincing the Trump campaign to agree to postpone the first debate from September to the end of June. The Biden campaign expects Mr Biden’s declining poll numbers to improve once voters fully come to grips with the prospect of Mr Trump returning to power.
Presidential debates remain unique moments in American election campaigns. In 2020, more than 73 million viewers tuned in to the first debate. But increasingly the debates are not just about the number of live viewers, but also about the clips packaged afterwards as well as the expert opinion and expectations in the days before. The Biden campaign asked California Gov. Gavin Newsom to serve as one of its surrogates in the so-called spin room after the debate in Atlanta.
Many Democrats are concerned about Mr. Biden’s performance. But the president should not be one of them.
“I can assure you, Joe Biden is not afraid of Donald Trump,” Mr. Klain said during an appearance on MSNBC this year.
One fear among Mr. Biden’s team and supporters is that he spends too much time talking about his record and not enough time attacking Mr. Trump.
“The challenge for all incumbents in the debates is not to talk about their record all the time,” said Jim Messina, the campaign manager for Obama’s 2012 campaign.
Michael Gold, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
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2024-06-15 09:03:36
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