Page 38 of 107 Days
It was time to hunker down for debate camp. We left for Pittsburgh in the early afternoon. I would be mostly off the campaign trail for five days—no small thing. Trump mocked me for it. But I knew how vital it was.
I suspected that Trump was still riding the ego boost of trampling Joe and would have high confidence.
Indeed, J. D. Vance bragged to CNN: “We’re not going to have some sort of formal debate prep session, because Donald Trump doesn’t need it.
” I knew this was false and typical bluster.
I was sure they would try to prepare him, and I was determined to put in the necessary work.
The team had tricked out the ballroom of the historic Omni William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh.
It was done up to exactly reproduce the actual debate set, including the same lighting.
It was freezing in there, as studio sets often are.
The value of duplicating the exact set proved itself right away.
We’d had made-to-measure podiums built, and when I placed my notebook on it, it slid right off.
There would be no way to take notes on a podium with that steep of a slope.
Brian Fallon called ABC and told them they needed to fix their design.
Philippe Reines was my sparring partner.
He was a longtime political operative who had served Hillary in her Senate and presidential campaigns and worked for her in the State Department.
He’d had various roles but was perhaps most well-known as her take-no-prisoners, highly combative press spokesman.
He’d called a reporter’s question “asinine” and told another to “fuck off.” He was able to harness this natural aggression when channeling Donald Trump.
Reines had played Trump during Hillary’s debate prep in 2016, and he approached the role with the dedication of a method actor.
He had studied Trump’s debates frame by frame, learning his every gesture.
He’d memorized everything he’d said and exactly how he said it.
Every night, he watched the video of Trump’s latest rant to see if he’d updated any lines of attack.
He wore makeup to give his skin an orange tinge, tortured his elegantly graying hair into a facsimile of Trump’s cotton candy comb-over, and sported a long red tie dangling over his belt.
He was also a total jerk—but solely in pursuit of honing my performance. He lied, was confrontational, tried to rattle me one moment, distract me the next. It was a high-level hazing. Not even during our breaks did he step out of character.
The first day of debate camp, our method was to run through three or four questions, then stop to review how I’d done, refining my answers.
I had most of my team in Pittsburgh—Karen Dunn, Rohini Kosoglu, Minyon Moore, Cedric Richmond, David Plouffe, Sean Clegg (my longtime California political adviser and strategist), Ike Irby, Tony West, Brian Fallon, Lorraine Voles, and Sheila Nix, and later Jen O’Malley Dillon and Tony West—all there to tweak and tune my every phrase.
Kirsten Allen and Colin Diersing role-played as ABC News moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir.
James Singer was there as fact-checker, to go over every answer to make sure that on the night I had the facts straight.
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and my own national security adviser, Phil Gordon, also flew in to help shape my answers on foreign policy.
Of all the president’s responsibilities, foreign policy is among the weightiest, and yet it is outside the experience of most Americans.
The key is having advisers who understand the intersection of foreign and domestic policy and politics.
Jake and Phil are gifted and helped me find words that would be immediately accessible to everyone, including those whose busy lives have little time to learn acronyms like AUKUS or JCPOA, but who want to know how these key agreements work to make our country more secure.
What had kept me up, long before I was the top of the ticket, was the sadness of realizing that many Americans don’t fully understand how important they are to the rest of the world.
Not the American government; the American people.
We the people have for so long embodied ideals of equality, generosity, enterprise.
In the eyes of many, we have been the reliable allies, the trusted friends, a source of aspiration and inspiration.
I knew Trump couldn’t care less about the moral leadership of America in the rest of the world.
His perverse notion of what strength looks like is, I believe, out of step with most Americans.
I think the true strength of a leader is based not on who you beat down but who you lift up.
His is a stunted, narrow definition of strength: the strength of the bully.
I hoped the debate would offer a moment to starkly reveal our difference. I wanted to show that he was very weak and entirely vulnerable, more interested in favor, grift, and flattery, and would yield to that, manipulated by leaders like Putin.