New York Times senior political correspondent Maggie Haberman said she expects former President Trump to be “very mean” to President Biden during the first presidential debate on Thursday but to interrupt him less than he did four years ago.
In a Monday night interview on CNN’s “AC360,” host Anderson Cooper played a clip from a recent Trump rally, where the former president quizzed the crowd on how they should approach the debate.
“How should I deal with him?” Trump asked the crowd, according to the clip. “Should I be harsh and nasty and just say, ‘You’re the worst president in history’? Or should I be gentle and calm and let him talk?”
Haberman – who wrote a best-selling biography of Trump and has covered him for decades – he responded to Trump’s question after the clip aired, telling Cooper, “I think he’ll be both.”
“I think he’ll probably interrupt less because I think that’s the main lesson he took away…from their first debate in 2020,” she said. “And I think he will be very mean to Biden. I would be very surprised if he was anything other than that.”
Thursday’s forum, hosted by CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, comes early in the election cycle in the history of televised presidential debates. The first debate between Biden and Trump during the 2020 campaign – a notoriously raucous and confusing showdown – was held on September 29.
However, Haberman cautioned against making predictions before the debate, saying Trump “does what he wants to do” and it’s unclear whether the former president will listen to his advisers’ guidance on his message.
“He can sometimes stick to the script and then deviate from it,” she told Cooper, adding, “That’s why predictions of how he’ll actually be in this debate probably aren’t worth much.”
“We know that he has been preparing for this debate the way he has – with political sessions as opposed to the classic games behind the podium – but whether he will absorb what he is learning there and whether he will enter, interrupting President Biden less than in 2020 in its first debate,” Haberman continued. “It’s an open question why he does what he wants.”
The debate, which will mark the first in-person interaction between the incumbent and the former president since 2020, will take place in Atlanta on June 27 at 9 pm (Brasília time).
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
