Chris Van Hollen tried to make Joe Biden mad. Didn’t work. Van Hollen tried to confuse Biden. No luck. Then again, this was 2012, when Biden was the incumbent vice president, and Van Hollen was playing the part of Republican veep nominee Paul Ryan in mock debates. Whatever you may think of Ryan’s politics, the congressman was at least a coherent thinker and speaker. “What I was trying to do was to throw a lot of stuff at Biden that might come his way,” Van Hollen, who is now a U.S. senator from Maryland, tells me. “So you come up with the most outrageous things that Paul Ryan might say, and then go beyond that a bit. But you’re in a different universe here with Donald Trump.”
Philippe Reines knows that very well. In 2016, Reines, a longtime top adviser to Hillary Clinton, played the part of Trump in mock debates opposite the Democratic nominee. There does not appear to have been any lasting psychological damage from the experience, but at the time impersonating Trump left Reines somewhat shaken. “Trump is a very simple character. There’s not a whole lot going on up there,” Reines says. “But it is actually very hard to act like him. Because your entire life you’ve been socialized to conform to norms that exist for good reason. It is very hard to reprogram yourself to be so balls to the wall, disregarding any semblance of reality. It is simultaneously freeing and disturbing to emulate. It’s just not how we’re wired. During breaks I would watch videos of my cats on my iPad. That seemed to be the most human-reminding thing I could do.”
Perhaps that’s why the Biden campaign apparently has more than one person standing in for Trump to tune up its candidate for the first debate on September 29. (The Biden campaign declined to confirm whether it is splitting the Trump load, or the identities of any of its debate impersonators.) Reines did his job well four years ago—Clinton was the consensus “winner” of the debates, though we all know how much good that did her in the electoral college—and he has some very specific advice for Biden. “He has to, at the beginning, say, ‘Look, everybody, I don’t mean to spoil the debate, but I’ll tell you what’s going to happen: Donald, you’re going to stand here and you’re going to lie. Everyone watching knows it. And we all see right through it.’ He can’t rely on the moderator. He can’t rely on the postdebate analysis. He can’t rely on anyone but himself to be the player and the play-by-play announcer. And it sounds so obvious, but it’s such a hard thing to do in the moment, to pronounce yourself the winner or to repeatedly call someone a liar. Hillary spent too much time defending herself. I don’t mean that she made a mistake, but that was the last debate between one person who was playing traditional ball and someone who is just a bulldozer to norms.”
Besides calling out Trump’s failures on everything from the coronavirus pandemic to the economy to his denigration of the military—while maintaining a happy warrior demeanor—Biden should be direct and aggressive on one key, immediate issue: Will Trump accept the results of November’s vote and leave office quietly if he loses? There is little chance Trump will concede, no matter the margin, but in the debate he will no doubt do his usual verbal dance about waiting and seeing and the “hoax” of mail-in ballots. Yet Biden will at least have gotten Trump to repeat, in front of a massive TV audience, his outrageous refusal to commit to a core principle of democracy. Trump will lob personal insults; Biden, instead of lowering himself to respond in kind, can goad Trump by both pointing out that his convention speech drew higher ratings than the president’s, since Trump cares more about television than anything else, and praising the pandemic response of German chancellor Angela Merkel, whom Trump hates.