There isn’t much of a debate over who won the first presidential debate, though the significance of ‘winning’ is a more complicated question. Trump has devoted most of his Twitter feed since Monday night to finding online polls of his supporters that ‘prove’ he won. The more interesting news is about what prep Trump had and what prep he can actually accomplish. There are numerous reports that Trump’s team tried to get him to prepare for the debate but that he couldn’t focus or couldn’t muster the patience to do so.
These claims are ubiquitous enough and consistent enough with what we’ve seen of Trump over the last year to be troubling in themselves. Presidents do need to be able to focus, to give some amount of sustained attention to serious questions, preparation for consequential events. They shouldn’t micromanage and they need competent staff to do most of the grunt work of governing. But many key decisions and tasks fall inevitably to the president. Focus and preparation are critical parts of the job which seem entirely beyond Trump’s abilities.
What’s less clear to me is whether this is an attention deficit in some clinical sense or simply a manifestation of arrogance and a life time lived surrounded by yes men. None of us really wants to do things that are unappealing or tedious. But life – in the sense of immovable reality that we cannot change just by wishing it so – teaches us that we must, at least enough to get through life’s basics. With Trump it may be both. Who knows?
In any case, Trump didn’t think he needed to prepare. He didn’t prepare. And it showed. His staff tried. They failed.
This indelible image from the Times stands out …
There were early efforts to run a more standard form of general election debate-prep camp, led by Roger Ailes, the ousted Fox News chief, at Mr. Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, N.J. But Mr. Trump found it hard to focus during those meetings, according to multiple people briefed on the process who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. That left Mr. Ailes, who at the time was deeply distracted by his removal from Fox and the news media reports surrounding it, discussing his own problems as well as recounting political war stories, according to two people present for the sessions.
Let’s step back and decode this tableau in ways the Times may not feel totally comfortable doing.
A lot of Trump’s ‘prep’ for facing Clinton was sitting down for bull sessions with sexual predator Roger Ailes where the dethroned Fox chieftain ranted about the bi$%^es who betrayed him and robbed him of his kingdom at Fox News. Given each man’s deep respect for women and allegiance to political correctness, I’m sure those conversations were beautiful and not at all tinged with anger and grievance. What preparation could be better? (This is going to be part of the dictionary entry for Trump’s Razor.) In other overlapping accounts, Giuliani and Christie are also in the mix, another thrice married serial adulterer with anger management issues and some degree of geriatric disinhibition and Christie who is younger but angry enough to be an honorary old guy.
So prep is now the order of the day. But how much prep is possible? Prep can’t make you what you’re not. It can prepare you with practice and details at the ready to make you the best version of who you are. You want a half a dozen key points you want to hit. You don’t want to be caught fielding a question you didn’t expect. You want to be prep on ways your particular opponent might try to throw you off stride. But you’re not going to be someone you’re simply not. You can take the rough edges off the product. But generally pretending you’re someone you’re totally not is not effective. What’s more, you can’t become conversant in the almost limitless variety of public policy questions in a week’s work. It may not take a lifetime but it takes months just to come off as passable. Trump’s not going to manage that in the next couple weeks. More than anything, if you’re arrogant and impulsive that’s going to be hard to hide in a high stress, inherently unpredictable situation when you have an opponent prepped and focused on setting you off.
On that stage, Hillary Clinton was her best self. But she was herself. Anybody who knows her, either personally or as a public figure, would recognize her. Trump is inevitably going to be Trump on that stage no matter what. And if I had to guess, I doubt he’ll prep for the next debates either.
