I played Donald Trump to prepare Joe Biden for the debate

A close ally of Joe Biden has revealed the secrets of acting like a “deranged” Donald Trump while preparing for the presidential debates.

In a new book, Bob Bauer, a former White House lawyer who played Trump to help Biden prepare for 2020, says he was “as personally insulting and unhinged as Trump can be.”

But while trying to relax by playing fetch with one of Biden’s dogs, Bauer slipped and fell into a swimming pool, soaking himself up to his waist.

“My ‘Trump’ faced brutal justice,” Bauer writes.

Four years later, Biden and Trump are preparing to debate again, next week in Atlanta, on CNN. Whether either candidate will face brutal justice remains to be seen, but Bauer’s book, Untangling: reflections on politics without ethics and democracy in crisis, will be released Tuesday in the United States. The Daily Beast obtained a copy.

Now 72, Bauer served as Barack Obama’s White House counsel between 2010 and 2011. In 2020, he helped the Biden campaign select vice presidential nominees.

Bauer is also no stranger to debate, having helped groom Al Gore in 2000 and serving on a 2015 University of Pennsylvania task force on debate reform. In 2020, he also gave his best to Bernie Sanders when Biden was preparing for the primary debates.

To help Biden prepare for the first debate against Trump, in Cleveland on September 29, Bauer said he “watched hours of video recordings of the 45th president, as a businessman, a candidate in 2016, then in office, and read the transcripts of his extemporaneous statements. remarks on every subject imaginable.

“I accepted this role,” he wrote.

Noting Biden’s sister Valerie Biden Owens’ judgment that he has figured out “how to put himself in his brother’s shoes,” Bauer said special sessions were planned in which he would be “at my worst Trump – as personally insulting and unhinged as Trump. can be,” although he concedes that “it may well be that no one can truly be Trump in the way that only Trump can be.”

Bauer says he didn’t attempt a “life-size impression,” with costumes and makeup, working only to imitate hand gestures, move in Trump’s manner and do “a slight imitation of his voice.”

This contrasts with the approach taken by Philippe Reines, a Hillary Clinton aide who dressed up as Trump when he took on the role of debate preparer in 2016 – even going so far as to chase the candidate on their mock stage , seeking to give him an advantage. cuddly.

Bauer also notes a key part of becoming Trump, writing: “I needed to get comfortable with insults directed at Joe Biden. »

Bauer did not knowingly throw anything else at Biden — COVID-19, for which, as Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows would later reveal, the then-president tested positive before the Cleveland debate .

Nonetheless, Bauer takes credit for playing a “trustworthy Trump, the same one who later showed up at the debates (two of them, while he dodged one).”

At the Cleveland debate, Trump insulted and harassed Biden until he drew one of the most memorable lines of the Democratic campaign: “Will you shut up, man?

Bauer admits, however, that once during his prep sessions with Biden, he “severely missed (his) goal,” when he moved beyond Trump’s stance on abortion to call for an end to abortion. Roe v. Wade.

At the time, Trump did not openly call for it – although he would later take credit for his downfall.

“In answering a question about Roe v. Wade” — the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that established the federal right to abortion — Bauer “led Trump to go far beyond his right-to-life rhetoric and call to the annulment of the decision”.

“I knew that wasn’t the case,” Bauer writes, “and I still got my Trump to say that he supported the end of the European Union. Roe deer.”

According to Bauer, Biden senior adviser Ron Klain, who would later become Biden’s White House chief of staff, joined senior adviser Anita Dunn, Bauer’s wife, to tell her that he was gone too far.

“I immediately recognized that I had botched the answer,” Bauer writes.

The real debate took place in the shadow of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a hero of liberals everywhere, who died on September 18, 2020. To replace her and tilt the court 6-3 to the right, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett.

Coney Barret was introduced to the White House on September 26, three days before the first debate, and confirmed a month later. Suggesting she was expected to spill Roe deer could have upset the strength of his nomination, so the real Trump would not have betrayed this view in public.

Bauer adds a postscript, however, noting that Trump now takes credit for building the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court that effectively overturned the case. Roe deer in June 2022, thereby removing the federal right to abortion.

Bauer also includes a lighter moment from 2020, when his attempt to play with Biden’s dog, Major, went awry.

Unlike headline-grabbing incidents involving Biden’s other German shepherd, Commander, Bauer’s interaction with Major did not result in a bite. (Major now lives with friends of the Biden family.) Instead, Bauer became a sensation.

Major – “a regular presence at these preparations and always looking for a playmate” – returned a tennis ball that Bauer had thrown. As Bauer threw the ball again, he slipped and “fell into the pool, into waist-deep water.”

Bauer “returned to the staging area, a chastised Trump: all wet. I hope to hide my soaked lower half behind the desk. As I hurriedly left after the session ended, (Biden) bade me farewell and told me to “dry off.”

“How did you know?”

“The major told me.”