Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump were going through final preparations Monday for the first — and maybe only — debate of their neck-and-neck race for the White House.
With just hours to go before they meet in person for the first time in the high-stakes clash, neither Harris nor Trump had any public appearances planned.
Harris started the day holed up in a Pittsburgh hotel where she spent the weekend doing intensive debate prep and planned to fly Monday afternoon to Philadelphia where the debate will be held at 9 pm Tuesday.
Trump was relaxing at his New Jersey golf resort, supposedly undergoing policy briefings.
In a radio interview that aired Monday, Harris said she was ready to deal with a barrage of lies and insults from Trump because the former president “plays from this really old and tired playbook.”
“There’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go,” Harris said in the interview with Rickey Smiley. “And we should be prepared for that. We should be prepared for the fact that he is not burdened by telling the truth. And we should be prepared for the fact that he is probably going to speak a lot of untruths.”
Harris suggested she would seek to steer the debate away from personal insults and to issues.
“(Trump) tends to fight for himself, not for the American people, and I think that’s going to come out during the course of the debate,” she said.
The 90-minute debate will air on ABC and will be moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis.
The candidates’ microphones will be muted when they are not speaking, similar to Trump’s debate against President Biden in June.
It’s Harris’ first presidential general election debate and the seventh for Trump, who is mounting his third straight Republican campaign. The clash is expected to draw the single largest audience of any single event before the November election.
No other debate has been agreed to by the two campaigns. Trump previously proposed three debates. Harris’ campaign has said it will negotiate terms of a second clash in October if the Tuesday debate goes off as planned.
Some pundits believe that if either Trump or Harris opens up a lead in polls, that candidate would have little incentive to agree to a second debate.
Harris is generally regarded to be a solid but not spectacular debater, and often uses her skill as a prosecutor to drive an effective narrative.
Pundits are divided over what she needs to achieve in the debate, with some suggesting she should focus on staying above the fray and introducing herself to American voters. Others say she faces a high bar to convince the nation she is ready to become the first Black woman president.
“For her, the best strategy is to stand back and let people see who Trump is,” said Errin Haines, an editor with the 19th, which covers gender issues. “It’s hard to imagine there will not be a moment in which he doesn’t interact with her in a way that has racial or gendered overtones.”
Trump can throw debate opponents off their game with aggressive and unpredictable attacks, although he was noticeably more restrained in his debate with Biden, whose poor performance eventually forced him to drop out of the race.
“The difficulty debating Trump is that he doesn’t really debate in any conventional sense,” said David Niven, a University of Cincinnati political science and former speechwriter. “He doesn’t lay out facts. He doesn’t engage in the ideas of his opponent. He just barrels through.”
