But they did say on Friday that they are anxious about the journalist not fact-checking Trump during the debate. “The contrast between them is what you want to hone”, she said.
Advertisement
Quickly put on the defensive, Bush blinked rapidly and slouched behind the lectern.
Donald Trump needs to prove to voters that he has the policy depth and gravitas to serve as commander in chief. Bush got more serious about the debates after that, O’Donnell said.
“Presentation is very important, and Hillary has to work on that. She came off as sour and defensive”, O’Donnell said. He’s appeared at a campaign rally for Clinton. Much of her prep is focused on the unpredictable nature of Trump’s personality, her campaign says. “Any candidate who tells this many lies clearly can’t win the debate on the merit”, Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, said on a call with reporters. “He may be aggressive or he may lay back”. I’ve made this decision for two reasons. Americans know what they don’t want to see in the first debate.
“Hillary Clinton apparently thinks this is an episode of ‘Shark Tank, ‘ but this is America”, Mr. Pence said on “Fox News Sunday”, referring to the TV show on which Mr.
Rick Lazio, a Republican former congressman from NY, found Clinton a tough opponent when he faced her in a U.S. Senate debate in NY in 2000.
“I cannot believe how easily the Clinton campaign was”, Conway said, mentioning a statement from Clinton’s communications director that suggested that the former secretary of state would be using the debate to talk issues while Trump clearly had chosen “a different path”.
“What he has to avoid is a sense that he is name-calling, highly disrespectful, badgering, anything like that”, he said.
Six weeks from Election Day, and with early voting already underway, the opening debate is one of the few opportunities left for the candidates to motivate supporters and sway a narrow band of undecided voters.
Trump’s advisers have coached the celebrity businessman to resist attempts by Clinton to provoke him with questions about his business record, wealth or contentious comments about minorities, including his fabricated theories about where Obama was born.
Some 42 percent of voters said Trump was honest and trustworthy, while 53 percent said he was not.
Among aide’s top concerns for Monday night are that Trump will be graded differently than Clinton, given his relative inexperience compared to the former secretary of state, who has debated upwards of 40 times, including debates in 2008 and during her Senate run in 2000.
Advertisement
Trump’s approach couldn’t be more different than the one pursued in 2012 by Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who started holding practice debates in late August – more than a month before the first general election debate.
