WASHINGTON – At Camp David, a movie theater and an airplane hangar have been outfitted with lighting and production equipment to create a mock debate stage. At least 16 current and former aides, summoned from Washington and Wilmington, Delaware, zip back and forth on golf carts to join the president Joe Biden during strategy sessions.
Biden enters his fifth day of preparations at the presidential retreat in the woods of northern Maryland for Thursday’s debate against Donald Trump. Camp David has become the epicenter of administration and campaign efforts to help Biden shake off the rust that often comes with his position on the defensive, and to combat widespread concerns among voters that he is too old to to be an effective president.
Both candidates are practicing debaters. And Biden’s top advisers, including Ron Klain, who is leading the preparations for the debate, are aware of the missteps made by incumbents in the past. In 2012, President Barack Obama faltered in his first reelection debate and had to quickly refocus for the second.
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So they will work to position Biden not only as president in the midst of a re-election campaign, but also as a fighter who can deliver a counterpunch on the ground. Trump, an opponent adept at obvious insults, skipped primary debates that could have honed his skills.
“The rust factor is real,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s former top strategist. “None of these guys are used to having someone a few feet away and interrogating them without any respect.”
According to people familiar with the planning at Camp David who were not authorized to speak publicly about it, the workdays vary in length and are not tightly structured. Biden and his most trusted advisers are working on what they think can best be refined or put into practice at this time.
They’re all trying to figure out exactly what attacks Trump might launch against Biden, what Biden policies might try to undermine Trump, and how best to keep the president focused on building an argument and establishing character and policy contrast with Trump.
Biden campaign officials believe the debate will provide an opportunity to go on the offensive on issues like immigration and abortion access. In recent days, Biden has unveiled a program that would create new paths to citizenship for people married to U.S. citizens, while Trump has suggested migrants form an alliance to fight each other. And this week marks two years since Roe v. Wade, which would have guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion, was overturned by the Supreme Court.
Biden’s advisers say the setting itself will help highlight Trump’s weaknesses, and allow the president to combat the idea — presented in a slew of misleading videos — that he is bumbling in public. Biden and Trump will meet in a closed studio in Atlanta, without a live audience. Each candidate’s microphone is muted when it is not their turn to speak.
But it will still be live television, broadcast on CNN, with moderators who will be under pressure to fact-check both men in real time but who have downplayed any expectations that they will venture into rebuttal territory. David Chalian, CNN’s political director, told The New York Times over the weekend that the moderators would focus on “facilitating the debate between these candidates, and not on being a participant in that debate.”
The Biden team will do everything it can to ensure there are no surprises.
Bob Bauer, Biden’s personal lawyer, has played Trump’s role in mock debates at Camp David, as he did in 2020.
In his book “The Unraveling,” Bauer said he studied hours of recordings of Trump as a businessman, candidate and president before the 2020 debates. He wrote that he wasn’t trying to portray a “Saturday Night Live” version of Trump, with makeup and costumes. Instead, he wrote: “I used as much of the language he used about the topics that would be raised in a debate.”
The actual Trump has engaged in what appears to be a more streamlined debate preparation process than in recent years. He has participated in policy discussions with allies. But this weekend he said he was relying on his experiences as a campaigner to guide him when he takes the stage opposite Biden.
“Well, this is really the best strategy here,” Trump told Fox News last weekend ahead of a rally in Philadelphia. “We have all these people here and they are shouting questions. I look forward to the debate.”
During the meeting, he attacked Biden for “going to a cabin to ‘study,'” suggested Biden take supplements to “get pumped up” before the debate, and said the president spent most of his time in Camp David would be spent sleeping. .
But Axelrod said Biden’s length of preparation was consistent with previous presidents. He said Klain plans sparring and mock debates, culminating in a two- or three-day debate camp.
“Trump has a different process, in that he doesn’t believe in processes,” Axelrod said. “What Biden is doing is more common.”
Biden’s preparation team at Camp David includes Klain and Mike Donilon, the architect of the campaign theme that democracy is at stake if Trump wins. Steve Ricchetti, an adviser to the president who manages relations on Capitol Hill, will also attend, as will Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser.
Jeffrey Zients, Biden’s chief of staff, is expected to attend, as well as aides focused on communications strategy, including Anita Dunn and Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director.
Several Biden campaign staffers, including Jen O’Malley Dillon, Cedric Richmond, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Quentin Fulks, Michael Tyler and Rob Flaherty, are also on the attendee list.
Some are returning to the fold just long enough to help Biden prepare: Brian Deese, who left the government in 2023 as director of the National Economic Council, is expected to visit Camp David to help Biden refine his argument that the American economy is recovering.
Several people said there will be a clear separation between Biden’s inner circle and the diverse group of policy experts summoned to Camp David, some of whom are not expected to remain on site all week once the mock debates begin in earnest.
Annie Tomasini, Biden’s deputy chief of staff, is never far from his side. And Bruce Reed, a top policy aide to Biden, will make many calls on which arguments need to be refined, according to people familiar with the planning.
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