What to Expect Tonight: President Trump's Woman Problem

Trump and Harris Face Off: My Predictions

I have a bit of a reputation as a Cassandra for forecasting horrible things that come true, sadly enough. I have at times also correctly forecast historical events (see my post-July 13 essay predicting an anti-Biden family coup) that have also subsequently come true. So I’ll take that reputation for having a bit of witchy foresight, to tell you here, some of what I predict will happen at the Trump/Harris debate tonight in Philadelphia.

Don’t be mad at me if I am right and don’t be mad at me if I turn out to be wrong.

1/ VP Harris will stick rigidly to her soundbites. In this regard, she will show herself to be more “Presidential” in terms of self-discipline than will President Trump, who will give in, I fear, to his usual temptation at times to riff and meander.

A Presidential debate is a highly prepared-for event, if the campaign is doing things right. I was present at one of the pre-debate drills for Gore 2000, at which Vice President Gore was being trained by his team to face off against Gov George W Bush Jr.

While I can’t say what happened there, due to my having signed an NDA, I can tell you what happens in such contexts in general.

These trainings typically take place in a hotel room near the debate site. The entire floor (at times, the entire hotel) is closed off for the sake of security, so that a “maid” or a “janitor” can’t spy on debate prep on behalf of the other team.

In a large conference room or in an auditorium-style space, the campaign advisors watch the candidate perform. They drill him or her, over and over. It is a grueling marathon. The candidate has 3x5 cards or cue cards, on which the important soundbites and data points are printed.

Personalities sympathetic to the candidate, but that “resemble” the candidate’s opponent, whether in temperament, style or appearance, are brought in to the room to “play” the role of the opposition. These people imitate the persona of the opponent, while using soundbites prepared by the campaign’s advisors based on past debates or on the advisors’ best guesses of what is happening in the other camp. The “actors” thus try to trip up, befuddle or outfox the candidate.

In this session or sessions — debate prep can take several days — every possible question gets asked by an actor playing the opponent or by an advisor or actor playing the moderator.

Is there a question on the economy? Here is the answer. Will there be a question about abortion? Answer. A question about immigration? Answer. A question from “opposition research”, which is the dossier that is compiled on every candidate’s past missteps, flaws or errors in judgement? Here are the answers. And so on.

The goal is to so over-train the candidate, that these responses will come out no matter what — in spite of the intense pressure of the hot camera lights, the live audience, the TV audience, and rapid-fire activity from the moderators and from the opponent. This over-drilling is meant to ensure that the candidate can respond in the right format, with proper backup data and examples, no matter what is coming at him or her.

This training, with a personality “playing” the opposition in advance, is supposed to ensure that no weird trick or out-of-the-blue tactic from the opponent, takes the candidate by surprise.

It is all an absolute pressure cooker, generated with great intention in advance, to harden the candidate for the absolute pressure cooker of the debate stage.

Well, that kind of training is what Democrats do, in any event. I have no idea if that is what the Trump team is doing — I kind of doubt it.

As a result of this prep, we can be sure that Vice President Harris tonight will say rote, focus-group-tested, practiced soundbites, if in a robotic or uneven manner.

She will “look” Presidential. She will wear a well-tailored navy pantsuit, black heels and a discreet white silk blouse. Her hair will be sprayed rigid so as not to get into her face, but it will be well-styled in stateswoman-like waves.

(Why is her tailoring usually so terrible? Why do they put her in awful olive greens and tans, that dull her complexion? That won’t happen tonight. Tonight she will come out looking like a star.)

She will wear subtle gold earrings, shell-shaped, and perhaps a subtle gold chain. Neutral nails.

President Trump will wear his signature boxy navy suit, white shirt and scarlet tie. His hair will be less rectangular than usual, and more gray will show at the temples, in order to present him as looking Presidential.

2/ The campaigns have both released to legacy media what they intend to showcase on the debate stage. Legacy media is preparing audiences for what to expect. VP Harris, says The New York Times, will make the case that President Trump wants to cosset billionaires and to squeeze the middle classes. VP Harris will repeatedly use the soundbite that she is “fighting for working families”; this is a soundbite that was expensively derived from focus-group testing by Democrats when Mrs Clinton was preparing for her own run, and it polls well. VP Harris will also accuse President Trump of planning to destroy democracy. That is a message unit for which the population has been prepped since January 6 2020. President Trump will highlight immigration and crime and seek to connect the two and assign the mess to Mrs Harris. He’ll talk about the economy and about VP Harris being “dangerously liberal.” (This paragraph is a summary of what the two campaigns have informed legacy media, with my commentary.)

3/ These two individuals have never met, so I predict that there will be some awkward physical and body language adjustment, in which Mrs Harris will have an initial advantage. What I mean by that is that — I am sorry — President Trump still has a hard time relating to a mature, professional woman as a mature, professional woman. I can think of very few or honestly of no times during which he has publicly succeeded. His default for professional women tends to be courtship or flirtation (if they are young and attractive) or else a dismissiveness that can verge on or transgress into the insulting and the contemptuous (if they are not, or if they are Democrats). This is ironic since he works closely with a number of highly skilled professional women and they speak well of him (whereas VP Harris has trouble retaining staff, male and female), but there it is. This problem could simply be generational, but it is a problem that has dogged him throughout his tenure in public life. I would say that this reflex on his part - that is so deeply ingrained that it may stem from an early wound — is a bigger problem for him in attracting female swing voters in battleground states than is any policy prescription of his, including those related to reproductive rights.

His big challenge tonight will be to show that he can demonstrate a minimum of respect to a mature professional woman even as he fights her hard and effectively on policy grounds. I have literally never seen him accomplish this. I hope he manages it.

The initial meeting of these two will be off-putting to President Trump. I predict that Mrs Harris will come onstage walking tall, with excellent posture and squared shoulders; and that she will shake his hand firmly and look him in the eye. She will have been drilled and drilled to do this.

President Trump won’t handle this moment of her physical confidence well — he is used to being the physically dominant presence, especially with women — and he will make some effort to gain the upper hand physically. He may grasp her right hand during the handshake with his left hand, in a gesture of dominance, or pat her shoulder; any such gesture would be a major mis-step.

I predict that President Trump will go on later in the evening to try to fluster Vice President Harris in some way, as he tried to fluster Mrs Clinton in 2016 by stalking after her alarmingly around the stage.

I predict that VP Harris won’t be flustered, and that as a result this effort will be awkwardly visible and will backfire against President Trump.

As a result of this flaw in, or this internal struggle on the part of, President Trump — I expect a moment (at least one, maybe more if it is a really good night for the Democrats) in which President Trump says something off-the-cuff to VP Harris that is personal, insulting, gendered or condescending — and gender is going to be a bigger minefield I predict even than race in this regard.

If that happens, and if I could bet on this I would bet that it will, VP Harris will receive the gift of showcasing her special trick. She will draw herself up to her full height, and say something in a stertorous voice such as, “President Trump, I am speaking now” or: “And that is why I am leading you among woman by double digits.”

Every woman in the political center or on the left, watching, will be inwardly applauding for this rejection of all the insults heaped upon her gender over the course of her lifetime, of which most of us who are female are, regardless of party, painfully aware. This hypothetical swing voter will be inwardly cheering in spite of herself, even if she hates VP Harris’ party and policies.

I expect that VP Harris will have been trained to needle President Trump, as he cannot seem to resist reacting to certain kinds of bait from Democrats. As Mrs Clinton points to The New York Times, our “He Can Be Rattled.”

Mrs Harris might call him “weird” or she might call his cronies “lunatics.” She might call him an accused rapist. She might even glancingly refer, without using vulgar language, some of the more boorish things he has said in the past about women. If she does this, I would bet that President Trump won’t be able to maintain “message discipline” and pivot to a better area for him; that he won’t be able to respond with something like: “It’s really sad that you are resorting to personal attack when after 3 1/2 years of your leadership, groceries are a third more expensive than they were when I left the Oval Office. I think you should focus here on addressing the harm you have caused to the American people.”

Rather, I predict with great sorrow and trepidation that if VP Harris needles him in this way (which the Democrats consistently do on purpose, even as Republicans seem unable to comprehend what is happening to them) President Trump will not be able to resist getting down in the gutter in reply, or counter-insulting her with a radioactive slur such as “lazy,” or, God forbid, with a reference to Willie Brown, which is a coded reference to Mrs Harris sexual past.

4/ I predict that Mrs Harris will be so on message that her part of the evening will be boring. I don’t expect that she will make a major mistake. She may sound not very bright or able to extemporize, but I predict that the moderators will give her a pass and ask few tough followup questions.

Sadly, that will allow the legacy media tomorrow to declare a muted victory for VP Harris.

I hope I am wrong on all counts. We shall see.

There are a lot of great ideas for drinking games circulating in advances of tonight’s spectacle. I propose a drink every time Mrs Harris says “Look” - inheriting the mantle of her sadly demented boss — and that you take a drink (or have a mocktail) every time President Trump makes a claim that something is the most, biggest, best or largest in the world or in history.

Emerald Robinson, the distinguished political reporter, and the No 1 political commentator on Substack, and I have just launched our exciting new show, “Emerald & Naomi.” We’ll be coming at the debate from the conservative and from the liberal sides of the issues. Join Emerald Robinson and me tonight at 8:45 EST on @Naomirwolf X and @EmeraldRobinson on X, and on all DailyClout social channels, for our watch party. We can only hope that what survives the evening, at last, at least, is our Republic.