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 answers to the rebuttals. Red lights visible to the candidates will flash when they have five seconds left, and turn solid red when time has expired. And each man’s microphone will be muted when it’s not his turn to speak.
The candidates will get a breather during two commercial breaks, according to debate rules provided to the campaigns by CNN and reviewed by The New York Times, but they are prohibited from working with advisers while off the air.
The first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle is less than two weeks away, and both campaigns are rushing to prepare for the first showdown sponsored directly by a television network in more than a generation. The 90-minute match in Atlanta on June 27 is being circled as 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 and appear 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 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, where themes, ideas and one-liners are discussed more informally between advisers. He held one session at 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 a wannabe dictator who threatens democracy itself. Four years ago, during their first meeting, Trump trampled on his rival’s speaking time — the former president has since privately admitted he was too aggressive — with Biden scolding him: “Will you shut up, man?”
The rules distributed by CNN warn that “this time, moderators will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure civil discussion.”
And then there’s this: “Microphones will be muted throughout the debate, except for the candidate designated to speak.” It’s not clear how muted microphones will work in practice — or the kinds of memorable moments (Al Gore’s sighs or Barack Obama’s “you’re nice enough” ones, apart from Hillary Clinton) that have defined debates of the past, will be completely lost.
The candidates appear without a live audience and on lecterns determined by a coin toss.
The unusually deep personal animosity between the two men is both an X-factor for the debate and an important consideration for their strategies. The Trump campaign thinks a winning approach will expose Biden as Biden; the Biden campaign views a winning 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 fixture of US 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 during his 2020 debates and his 2012 vice presidential debate. Klain compiles what topics are likely to be covered and what possible answers might be, according to people involved in previous planning sessions.
Bruce Reed, the White House deputy chief of staff, has been collecting material on the two candidates’ policy contrasts in recent weeks for Biden to study. If the past is prologue, Biden will use the first meetings to figure out how he wants to answer different questions. In later sessions he is expected to rehearse with a replacement opponent.
In 2020, Bob Bauer, a Democratic attorney who has served as Biden’s personal attorney and is married to Anita Dunn, a top White House adviser, played Trump; it is unclear whether he will do so again in 2024.
“The goal is not a surprise,” 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 purpose of the trial is to get President Biden used to the idea that really terrible things can come out of Donald Trump’s mouth.”
An important question is whether Trump will bring this up Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who Trump went after in 2020 and who was just convicted on gun charges. Another is Biden’s handling of the fact that Trump is now a felon himself, convicted in New York of falsifying corporate 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, as Klain led preparations for Biden’s vice presidential debate, Chris Van Hollen, then a Maryland congressman playing the role of Paul Ryan, was asked to make 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 earlier debate with Paul Ryan, the chances were slim. In this case it is 100% that Donald Trump will hit below the belt.”
For his part, Trump has never agreed to anything resembling traditional, rigorous debate preparation, and this election appears to be no exception. He has often said that he is at his best when he improvises.
“He views his rallies as preparation for the debate,” said Marc Lotter, who was an aide on Trump’s 2020 campaign and now works for a conservative nonprofit. The challenge for Trump, according to Lotter, will be to put a time limit on the answers. “If they’re literally going to cut off your microphone, you have to achieve your goal,” he said.
Campaigns often spend the lead-up to debates blasting their opponents and their debating skills. But Trump’s relentless accusations that Biden is mentally debilitated have only dampened expectations for the president.
Trump’s inner circle has thus far engaged in fairly limited debate preparation, including the recent meeting at Republican National Committee headquarters that also included Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Eric Schmitt of Missouri.
Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser who played a leading role in organizing the discussions, said Trump’s speeches showed “elite staying power” and that the former president “doesn’t need to be staff programmed.” .
Trump’s aides are not expected to hold formal role-playing sessions that replicate the debate and involve someone acting as Biden.
“We are having conversations,” Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s campaign managers, explained to reporters in Las Vegas this month. When asked who could take over the role of president, he replied: “Joe Biden is going to play Joe Biden.”
Trump has argued that he is not only taking on 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 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 the moderators would like to focus on. In a memo on the road to Atlanta last month, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the president’s campaign chairman, wrote that he wanted to talk about abortion, democracy and some specifics of Trump’s economic plans, including tax cuts for wealthier Americans.
Trump’s team believes he will have one 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 number of border crossings that the former president blames on domestic crime.
The 90-minute debate period will begin, according to the rules distributed by CNN, once the first question has been answered. A maximum of five minutes will be allowed per question: two minutes for the opening answer, a one-minute rebuttal, a one-minute response to the rebuttal, and an additional minute to be used at the moderators’ discretion. Each candidate will also receive a two-minute closing statement.
Biden’s team believes it has already scored a major victory by convincing the Trump campaign to agree to move the first debate from September to the end of June. The Biden campaign believes that once voters fully grapple with the prospect of Trump’s return to power, Biden’s lagging poll numbers will improve.
Presidential debates remain special moments in American campaigns. In 2020, more than 73 million viewers watched the first debate. But increasingly, debates are not just about the live viewership, but also about the fragments that are packaged afterwards, and about the experts and expectations in the days before. The Biden campaign asked Governor Gavin Newsom of California to serve as one of its surrogates in the so-called spin room after the debate in Atlanta.
Many Democrats are nervous about how Biden will perform. But the president wouldn’t be one of them.
“I can assure you: Joe Biden is not afraid of Donald Trump,” Klain said in an appearance on MSNBC this year.
One fear among Biden’s team and supporters is that he spends too much time talking about his record and not enough time attacking Trump.
“The challenge for all incumbents in the debates is to not talk about their performance all the time,” said Jim Messina, campaign manager for Obama’s 2012 campaign.
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