President Trump faces off with Democratic nominee Joe Biden in Cleveland on Tuesday night in the first of three presidential debates.
The showdown promises to be filled with personal grievances as much as stark policy differences, with each candidate trying to gain the upper hand.
The revelation that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 injects a fresh attack line for Biden, who is also certain to go after the president’s record in handling COVID-19 and America’s place as the country with the highest death toll in the world.
Trump and his campaign have spent months portraying Biden as frail and prone to verbal stumbles. But the Democratic nominee held his own in the primary race, and Trump must land some serious blows if he is to start overhauling the challenger’s lead in national polls.
This is how Trump might do it:
1. Avoid the incumbent slump
The first debate almost always goes the way of the challenger. Remember Ronald Reagan’s “there you go again” to Jimmy Carter in 1980 (although that was technically the second debate — Carter opted out of the first one, which included an independent candidate)?
Like previous presidents in his position, Trump has not had to hold his own in a debate for four years. He spends all day surrounded by people who work for him and who know they would be challenging their commander in chief were they to disagree with him. Biden, in contrast, has spent much of the past 12 months clashing with rivals for the Democratic nomination. He has had more than three years to consider Trump’s record in office and may well be the hungrier of the two.
Nevertheless, Trump battles almost daily with the press, while Biden in recent months has avoided verbal clashes. Trump’s combat acumen may be well honed.
2. Throw Biden off balance
Trump’s best chance of avoiding the incumbent slump is to throw Biden a curveball that he is not expecting. Trump is nothing if not unpredictable, and his relatively short political career means he is not constrained by a sense of what is and what is not acceptable in a debate. Remember how he stalked around Hillary Clinton in 2016?
The Democratic nominee has shown himself vulnerable to attacks on his family. Although questions about his son Hunter may turn off large sections of the audience, that topic may help Trump get under Biden’s skin. A flustered Biden is a weak debater.
And there are policy areas where he is vulnerable. He’ll be ready for China, fracking, and blue-collar jobs with canned responses. But will he be so ready to defend his record in setting up the Bowles-Simpson commission and its plan to cut Social Security and Medicare when he was vice president?
3. Speak in the presidential voice
Trump is at his best in front of a raucous audience, playing for laughs and acting out his string of crowd-pleasing anecdotes. The debates this year will be held in front of an audience numbering in the dozens rather than hundreds.
Biden has been here before, debating Bernie Sanders in an empty studio as the coronavirus made its impact felt in March.
But a candidate like Trump, who draws and feeds off the energy of a crowd, may have a tougher time adapting, particularly if he cannot feel what is working and what is not working on the night.
The secret may lie in how he handles Biden. A quiet hall means more time to speak without interruptions. Trump may be well advised to leave Biden dangling with as much time to talk as possible, mindful of how the challenger repeatedly cut himself off during the Democratic debates, giving himself the air of someone struggling to follow his own train of thought.
That means Trump must adopt his more measured, stately delivery (the one he deploys for the State of the Union or announcing the death of terror leaders) rather than the carnival barker persona on display at rallies.
4. Define Biden
The big project of the Trump campaign has been to define Biden as a radical revolutionary or a Trojan horse that would smuggle leftist zealots to power. However, a string of polls suggests the idea is failing to gain traction with voters.
A recent Morning Consult poll found voters gave Biden roughly the same rating on a scale from conservative to liberal as they had a month ago — before the campaign used his selection of Kamala Harris to try again to paint him as a dangerous leftist.
The campaign seems intent on continuing the project. That means the most-watched of the three debates offers Trump his last, best opportunity to paint Biden as an extremist by offering voters Trump’s vision of the choices before them: pro-China, anti-China; high tax, low tax; pro-worker, anti-worker; law and order, chaos.
