Hillary Clinton offered Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris straightforward advice for taking on Republican rival Donald Trump at the upcoming presidential debate: Bait him.
Clinton, who lost the 2016 White House race to Trump, said in a New York Times interview published on Saturday that the Republican “is going with a scorched-earth approach and will just try to tear her [Harris] down, which is his usual go-to strategy.”
To combat Trump, Clinton suggested that Harris go on the offensive, arguing that this would hit directly at Trump’s weaknesses.
“She just should not be baited. She should bait him. He can be rattled,” Clinton told the Times. “He doesn’t know how to respond to substantive, direct attacks.”
Earlier this week, Harris reluctantly agreed to ABC News’ debate rules, which state that candidates’ microphones will only be turned on when it is their turn to speak. That rule had also been implemented in Trump’s June debate against President Joe Biden, who was the presumptive Democratic nominee before his disastrous debate performance led him to drop his reelection bid.
In a letter to ABC News, Harris’ campaign said that the vice president would be “fundamentally disadvantaged” by the format of the debate, “which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with [Harris].”
Her camp further said that it agreed to the format because Trump “is a risk to skip the debate altogether,” adding, “We do not want to jeopardise the debate.”
The Trump campaign, for its part, said in a statement that “We are thrilled that Kamala Harris and her team of Biden campaign leftovers ... have finally accepted the already agreed upon rules of the debate,” nodding to Biden’s earlier preference for muted microphones.
During the 2016 and 2020 presidential debates, Trump was known to frequently interrupt Clinton, Biden and moderators, who struggled to tame Trump’s aggression. An analysis by The Washington Post’s The Fix estimated that Trump was responsible for more than three-fourths of the interruptions that took place during one 2020 debate, with Biden accounting for the rest.
In a September 2016 debate against Clinton, Vox found that Trump interrupted her 51 times, with 25 of those disruptions happening in the first 26 minutes of the event. Clinton, on the other hand, was recorded interrupting Trump 17 times.
In the Times interview, Clinton pointed to a moment in an October 2016 debate when she called Trump a “puppet” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing this as an example of how to expose Trump’s weaknesses.
“I mean, when I said he was a Russian puppet and he just sputtered onstage,” Clinton told the paper, “I think that’s an example of how you get out a fact about him that really unnerves him.”
During that infamous debate, Trump claimed that Putin had “no respect” for the former secretary of state, to which Clinton replied, “That’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”
As Clinton continued to speak, Trump talked over her, saying: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.”
Harris and Trump are scheduled to meet at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for Tuesday’s debate, hosted by ABC News.
Read more at The New York Times.