Even late in the primary season Trump never shared the stage with fewer than three other rivals, and mostly he was on stage with many more. And during all that time he wasn’t really trying to debate those rivals; as James Fallows writes, he would go “into a kind of hibernation” whenever the conversation turned remotely substantive, and emerge to hurl insults and declaim his promises of greatness restored.
2016 Inside Hillary Clinton’s debate prep
The Democrat holds more moot court than mock debate as she prepares to show her opponent as unbalanced and ill prepared.
Clinton, for all her knowledge, polling and top-tier coaching, has always been defined not by what she’s said on the debate stage but by how she’s dealt with what her opponents have said about her.
.. Another added that her preparation this year “is more style than substance. They’re trying to prepare her for the different Trumps that might show up.”
.. when you count her own three dozen on-stage debates there is arguably no one in American politics with more prime-time experience
.. When D.C. attorney Bob Barnett, who was playing Sanders, began peppering her with attacks in a drab hotel conference room, a clearly agitated Clinton shut the session down and declared, “How about I play Bernie?”
Over the next hour or so, Clinton – to the surprise of her staff – staged a credible and unvarnished version of Sanders’ attacks on her economic plans and close ties to Wall Street, according to two people with knowledge of the exchange.
.. “If Trump can be positioned to bully her, that will probably be his biggest failing,” said another longtime Clinton insider. “And her pushing him back politely, so there’s a difference between his level and her level, that will be her biggest strength.”
Donald Trump wanted to ‘see who the moderators are.’ Now that he has, will he debate?
he pressed for evidence to support Trump’s claim that Clinton was asleep at critical times during the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and got the casino magnate to admit that his assertion might not be true.
“She was asleep at the wheel, whether she was sleeping or not,” Trump conceded. “Who knows if she was sleeping?”
.. Holt flummoxed Trump by asking how he could say for certain that Clinton’s private email server was hacked.
HOLT: But is there any evidence it was hacked other than routine phishing?
TRUMP: I think I read that, and I heard it, and somebody also gave me that information.
HOLT: Where?
TRUMP: I will report back to you. I will give it to you.
HOLT: You said it with such certainty yesterday.
TRUMP: I don’t know if certainty. Probably she was hacked.
Trump may not be willing to sign on to a debate moderated by a journalist with a record of throwing him off balance.
.. “There seems to be a pattern, Mr. Trump,” Raddatz said. “When you’re criticized or attacked, you often respond with name-calling, using terms like ‘dummy,’ ‘loser,’ ‘total losers’ on Twitter and elsewhere. You even demean some people’s physical appearance. Is that something you would continue doing if you were president? Isn’t that language beneath the office of the president?”
Hillary Clinton Piles Up Research in Bid to Needle Donald Trump at First Debate
Hillary Clinton’s advisers are talking to Donald J. Trump’s ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal,” seeking insights about Mr. Trump’s deepest insecurities as they devise strategies to needle and undermine him in four weeks at the first presidential debate, the most anticipated in a generation.
Her team is also getting advice from psychology experts to help create a personality profile of Mr. Trump to gauge how he may respond to attacks and deal with a woman as his sole adversary on the debate stage.
.. Mr. Trump is taking the opposite tack. Though he spent hours with his debate team the last two Sundays, the sessions were more freewheeling than focused, and he can barely conceal his disdain for laborious and theatrical practice sessions.
.. she is searching for ways to bait him into making blunders.
.. Mr. Trump, a supremely confident communicator, wants viewers to see him as a truth-telling political outsider and trusts that he can box in Mrs. Clinton on her ethics and honesty.
.. He has been especially resistant to his advisers’ suggestions that he take part in mock debates with a Clinton stand-in.
.. his belief that the debates will be won or lost not on policy points and mastery of details, which are Mrs. Clinton’s strengths, but on the authenticity, boldness and leadership that the nominees demonstrate onstage.
.. her campaign is preparing ways for her to unnerve Mr. Trump and provoke him to rant and rave.
.. The Clinton camp believes that Mr. Trump is most insecure about his intelligence, his net worth and his image as a successful businessman, and those are the areas they are working with Mrs. Clinton to target.
.. Mr. Trump would be vulnerable if Mrs. Clinton proved to be calm, deliberate and relentless in attacking Mr. Trump’s character, volatility and readiness to be commander in chief.
.. “Trump has severe attention problems and simply cannot take in complex information — he will be unable to practice for these debates,”
.. “Trump will bring nothing but his bluster to the debates. He’ll use sixth-grade language, he will repeat himself many times, he won’t complete sentences, and he won’t say anything of substance.”
.. “She is more wonk than pol, so she might be especially frustrated by a steady stream of invective, conspiracy theories and lies.”
.. He said his daughter Ivanka could end up playing Mrs. Clinton.