There will be no opening statements. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will each have two minutes to answer questions — followed by one-minute rebuttals and responses to the rebuttals. The red lights visible to candidates will flash when five seconds remain and turn red when the time expires. And each man’s microphone will be muted when it is not his turn to speak.
The candidates will be paused during two commercial breaks, in accordance with debate rules provided by CNN to campaigns and reviewed by The New York Times, but will be barred from meeting with aides while they are off the air.
The first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle is less than two weeks away, and both campaigns are racing to prepare for the first showdown sponsored directly by a television network in more than a generation. The 90-minute contest in Atlanta on June 27 is considered one of the most important moments on this year’s campaign calendar, as Biden and Trump will outline their sharply contrasting visions for the nation, appearing together for the first time since their last debate. . in October 2020.
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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 a fundraiser in California for structured preparations. Trump has long preferred looser conversations, debating topics, ideas and short phrases more informally among advisors. He held a session at the Republican National Committee headquarters last week.
Trump and 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 an aspiring dictator who threatens democracy itself. Four years ago, in their first meeting, Trump overrode his rival’s conversation time – the former president has since admitted privately that he was too aggressive – with Biden scolding him: “Will you shut up, man?”
The rules released by CNN warn that, this time, “moderators will use all the tools at their disposal to impose timing and ensure a civilized discussion.”
And then there’s this: “Microphones will be muted throughout the debate, except for the candidate designated to speak.” It’s unclear how muted microphones will work in practice — whether the kinds of memorable moments (Al Gore’s sighs or Barack Obama’s “you’re quite nice” except for Hillary Clinton) that defined past debates will be lost entirely. .
Candidates will appear without a live audience and in lecterns determined by lot.
The unusually deep personal animosity between the two men is both an X-factor for the debate and a fundamental consideration for their strategies. The Trump campaign thinks a winning approach is to expose Biden as Biden; the Biden campaign sees it as a winning debate to let Trump be Trump.
Both men will be rusty. Neither has debated since their last confrontation in 2020, the longest drought since general election debates became a regular part of American campaigns in 1976.
For Biden, the preparation process will be overseen by Ron Klain, his first White House chief of staff, who served in the same role in the 2020 debates and the 2012 vice presidential debate. Klain compiles which topics are likely to come up and which could be possible answers, according to people who have been involved in previous planning sessions.
Bruce Reed, White House deputy chief of staff, has been collecting materials on the two candidates’ political contrasts for Biden to study in recent weeks. If past is prologue, Biden will use the first meetings to define how he wants to answer various questions. In subsequent sessions, he will have to rehearse with a substitute opponent.
In 2020, Bob Bauer, a Democratic lawyer who served as Biden’s personal lawyer and is married to Anita Dunn, a top White House adviser, played Trump’s role; it is unclear whether he will do so again in 2024.
“The goal is to have no surprises,” said Kate Bedingfield, a former White House communications director who was involved in Biden’s 2020 debate preparations. “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 can come out of Donald Trump’s mouth.”
A key question is whether Trump mentions Hunter Biden, the president’s son, whom Trump targeted in 2020 and who was just convicted of gun possession. Another is the way Biden addresses the fact that Trump himself is now a criminal, convicted in New York of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened his 2016 campaign.
Klain has long worked to prepare Biden for attacks on his family. In 2012, when Klain was directing Biden’s vice presidential debate preparations, 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 is going to hit below the belt,” said Van Hollen, now a U.S. senator. “In that previous debate with Paul Ryan, the probability was low. In this case, it is 100% that Donald Trump will hit below the belt.”
For his part, Trump has never consented to anything resembling traditional, rigorous debate preparation, and this election appears to be no exception. He always said he does his best when he improvises.
“He sees his rallies as debate preparation,” said Marc Lotter, who was an adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign and now works for a conservative nonprofit group. The challenge for Trump, Lotter said, will be to constrain responses to a time limit. “If they are going to literally cut off your microphone, you need to achieve your goals,” he said.
Often, campaigns spend the run-up to debates hyping up their opponents and their debating skills. But Trump’s relentless accusations that Biden is mentally diminished have only lowered expectations for the president.
Trump’s inner circle has so far engaged in very limited debate preparation, including the recent meeting at the Republican National Committee headquarters that included Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Eric Schmitt of Missouri.
Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser who took a leading role in organizing the discussions, said Trump’s speeches demonstrated “elite resilience” and that the former president “does not need to be programmed by officials.”
Trump aides are not expected to hold formal role-play sessions that replicate the debate and include someone acting like Biden.
“We have conversations,” Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s campaign managers, explained to reporters this month in Las Vegas. Asked who could replace the president, he replied: “Joe Biden will play Joe Biden.”
Trump argued that he is facing not only Biden but also a CNN television network that he says is hostile to him. “CNN is the enemy,” he said on a podcast last week, mocking one of the two moderators, Jake Tapper, as “Fake Tapper.” (Tapper will be joined by Dana Bash.) Still, he predicted the network would be “as fair as possible.”
Biden’s team made it clear what topics they wanted moderators to focus on. In a “Road to Atlanta” memo last month, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, chairman of the presidential campaign, wrote that she wanted to talk about abortion, democracy and some of the specifics of Trump’s economic plans, including tax cuts for older Americans. rich.
Trump’s team believes he will have a key advantage he didn’t have four years ago: an unpopular Biden record to attack. Trump wants to focus on inflation, the fact that major conflicts in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip began during Biden’s term and the record border crossings that the former president blames on domestic crime.
The 90-minute debate will begin, according to rules released by CNN, as soon as the first question is answered. Up to five minutes are allotted per question: two minutes for the initial response, one minute for the rebuttal, one minute for the response to the rebuttal, and an extra minute to be used at the discretion of the moderators. Each candidate will also be entitled to a two-minute closing statement.
Biden’s team believes it has already scored a major victory by persuading the Trump campaign to agree to move the first debate to late June from September. The Biden campaign believes that once voters fully come to terms with the prospect of a Trump return to power, Biden’s lagging poll numbers will improve.
Presidential debates continue to be unique moments in American campaigns. In 2020, more than 73 million viewers watched the first debate. But increasingly, the debates are not just about the live audience, but about the clips packaged afterwards, as well as the pundits and expectations of the days before. Biden’s campaign asked Gov. Gavin Newsom of California to serve as one of his surrogates in the so-called rotation room after the debate in Atlanta.
Many Democrats are nervous about Biden’s performance. But the president is not said to be one of them.
“I can guarantee you that Joe Biden is not afraid of Donald Trump,” Klain said in an appearance on MSNBC this year.
One fear among Biden’s staff and supporters is that he will spend too much time talking about his record and not enough attacking Trump.
“The challenge for all the incumbents in the debates is not to spend the entire time talking about their record,” said Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager.
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