Maggie Haberman, a senior political reporter at The New York Times, predicts that former President Trump will be “very mean” to President Biden in Thursday’s first presidential debate, but that he will likely interrupt him less than he did four years ago.
During an interview on CNN’s “AC360” on Monday night, host Anderson Cooper played footage from a recent Trump rally, in which the former president asked the audience how they thought the debate should go.
“How should we deal with him?” Trump asked the crowd, according to the video. “Should we be harsh and mean and say, ‘You’re the worst president we’ve ever had,’ or should we be nice and gentle and let him talk?”
Haberman, who wrote a bestselling biography of Trump and has covered him for decades, Responded “I think he’ll be both,” Trump told Cooper in response to a question after the clip was played.
“He’s probably not going to interrupt very much because I think that’s the main lesson he took away from the first debate of 2020,” she said. “And I think he’s going to be very mean to Biden. I’d be very surprised if he did anything other than that.”
Thursday’s forum, moderated by CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, will be the earliest televised presidential debate in history. The first debate between Biden and Trump in the 2020 campaign, a notoriously loud and chaotic showdown, took place on Sept. 29.
But Haberman warned against making predictions ahead of the debate, saying Trump will “do what he wants” and it’s unclear whether the former president will heed his advisers’ guidance on his message.
“He stays on script at times and then he goes off script,” she told Cooper, adding, “That’s why it’s probably not very meaningful to try to predict how he’s actually going to perform in this debate.”
“We know he’s prepared for this debate as he normally does, which includes a policy session rather than the typical behind-the-podium showdown, but whether he’s able to absorb what he learns and go into the debate without interrupting President Biden, as he did in the first debate in 2020? That’s an open question, because he’s doing what he wants to do,” Haberman continued.
The debate, which will be the first face-to-face meeting between a sitting president and a former president since 2020, will take place in Atlanta on June 27 at 9 p.m. EDT.
