Immigration record and the administration's botched withdrawal from afghanistan. Now, the trump campaign previewed as much this week, essentially indicating that the former president would pursue those lines of attack against harris on the debate stage and presented with that. Harris aides and allies expected the vice president is going to paint trump as unserious and essentially describe his policies as unpopular. All of this to essentially avoid taking the bait. That includes one of those labels that the former president often uses. For harris calling her the border czar. Of course, the vice president was not tasked with border security, instead tapped to address root causes of migration. But she will be presenting that case on the debate stage today. All of this, anderson, really boils down to harris flipping the script here and using trump's own words and actions against him. All right. Thanks very much. We'll check in a little bit later. David axelrod, you have been with the president backstage waiting to go out on a debate. I've moderated one of these debates. It is stressful for the moderators. Yes. What is it like being with the principal? being with a candidate in these moments? i'll tell you. You can tell a lot from how the candidate behaves before the debate, before our first debate in denver in 2012. You could see that the president was not. He was sort of like, let's get this over with and get out of here. And we left the locker room and david plouffe, who's helping on this prep, and i looked at each other and said, we're going to have a bad night. The next you could tell we could tell the next time. We had had some very good prep. He really clearly knew what he wanted to do on that stage. We knew what he was going to do on that stage. And he, as we were leaving, he pulled us back and he said i just want you to know we're going to have a good night. And we did. So there is a feeling, i mean, there's tension, but you can tell from the principal this is a little weird, though. The whole cat deal. Maybe he's that's how he gets into game shape, i don't know. You know i saw some golf balls. I saw jason miller this morning on tv saying, you know, she doesn't know what she's in for. This is the muhammad ali this is the floyd meriwether. If i were them, i'd worry about him knocking himself out trump doesn't really prepare in a traditional way in any sense. I've been with him ahead of town halls and interviews, and oftentimes he becomes a victim, you could say, of the last person who was in his ear. So when you read the roll call of who got off of the plane with him tonight, i think that would be concerning in that he's trying to win a general election and communicate to a mass audience, and you have people the likes of laura loomer who may be saying, hey, here's what you need to talk about. He if he can stick to the kitchen table, issues, the border, the economy, he's going to be fine. But we have seen him many times. If one person gets an idea in his head, if he thinks cat memes is the direction to go, this could go quickly off the rails for him tonight. Audie, to your point, we'll know tonight whether he is actually trying to appeal to a mass amount of people or if he's trying to appeal to a very specific subset of people in certain counties i won't get into the cat meme thing but it actually follows in with, you know, racial hierarchy of immigrants in this country. It's actually quite an ugly set of commentary that will harken back to past things that were rumored that the trump administration was talking about these are the kinds of things that are going to jog the memory of certain sliver of the voting population that already feels dissatisfaction with behavior and conduct so will you see that tonight? that's sort of what i'm looking for. And i think this cat thing is really disgusting. I just want to just i just want to be very clear about it there. If you've missed this, if you have a real life, they're saying that haitians, haitian immigrants are stealing people's cats and eating them. And it's a complete lie. And i hope that the haitians in florida, where trump is only up by two, pay attention. This is what he thinks about you. I mean, he called the country, you know, a and so, so, so, so haitians in florida take note but but this is who he is, right this is who he is. And you have to take j. D. Vance you have that. J. D. Vance started this one. J. D. Vance started this one from right wing message boards to gab to x. The pipeline from that to to talking point is pretty disturbing. And fascinating to see. Absolutely. So you're in this critical phase of the election. It is as close as it can be. And this is what they are doing. This is crazy conspiracy stuff, right? this is why trump lost willie horton. This is like willie horton stuff. It just, you know in a different but this is why he lost the last election because a sliver of people who who many of whom right now think they might vote for him because they're worried about inflation. They are republicans. They don't like the biden record. They don't know enough about kamala harris. But this is ingesting bleach all over again. This is and again, in recent days, what did j. D. Vance said he would not do what mike pence did. He would invite the states to send in. He calls them alternative electors that's fake. They don't exist. There's no legal grounds for it. It's a lie. It's cheating okay. And then donald trump goes before the largest police organization in the country and says, get your badges out, keep your eyes open because we will win big. Unless there's cheating. So why is he going back to this at this key point in the election because that's what lost him the last election. I know i know, go ahead. Well, i know that you all won't agree when i say this, but. Oh, sure, we will. How do you know? but you never know. Alyssa's point about sticking to the issues of immigration and economy. Well, there is a way that that actually could play to kamala harris's favor. If you are able to invoke him saying very derogatory things like he is known to say, and when you have someone like a laura loomer and you're posting eye images of what he was posting earlier, that could actually backfire on him and expose the type of person that john is talking about that doesn't want to bring our country together, that just wants to be divisive. I also think on the economy people do want to hear, we heard one of the undecided voters in our focus group. They do want to hear. And so if he's talking about black jobs because he said that in the last debate, and kamala harris is talking about how all americans deserve jobs, it could backfire. Remember the format here to this format is very tight. It's like a minute. It doesn't allow it's very short. We're not going to get long diatribes here. And and one of the things that they were talking about is afghanistan. Let's just remember afghanistan is going to play a large part today we had the gold gold medal ceremony in the capital, where those, you know, the servicemen and women's families are given the gold medal. Um kamala harris is going to be a big feature here that's not met with those families in 3. 5 years, despite them asking, i suspect they'll get a question or trump will that will be raised here tonight. Scott look, no matter what happens, there's really only one thing he has to do tonight. Keep it simple. If you're unhappy, you need to assess what your level of unhappiness is and whether she's responsible for it, and whether you want to leave the same people in charge. Whether you go down the economy immigration or crime or anything else if he gets lost, come right back to the promised land of change. I want to check in with jeff zeleny who's at the debate spin room. We'll soon find out how the debate rules both candidates have agreed to actually play out on stage, but to the point we were just making. They are very tight. They don't allow for a lot of crosstalk or, frankly, follow up to two minute answer at least that is the design. Anderson. Of course anything can happen on stage, but both of these campaigns have been really litigating these rules for weeks. But these are the final set of rules going into the debate. This debate will be 90 minutes long, with two commercial breaks. There will not be a live audience at all. So it will be the first time the two candidates have ever met one another face to face. And they certainly will not be allowed to bring props or briefing papers. There also will not be opening statements. There will be closing statements. And because of a coin toss earlier this week, donald trump will have the final word here. But we also got a sense earlier today of what the stage actually looks like this video from abc news shows the podiums. First and foremost. Look how close they are. Six feet apart. This is very close range. After these candidates have been sparring at long distance for so long these clocks, perhaps one of the most important things here the candidates have two minutes to speak. These clocks right here will count down and they are color coded as well the arrival will have two minutes to rebut, but finally, the microphones. This was the most contentious issue of all among the candidates. Should the microphones be muted or not, the agreed upon rule is when the rival is speaking the person's microphone will be muted. So when the former president is speaking, vice president harris's mike will be muted and vice versa. We will see if that actually happens or if we can hear the crosstalk between them or not but after the debate, after that 90 minute debate, all of the advisers and supporters will come right here to the spin room. It's already getting pretty busy in here. We've seen several senators come in we've seen rfk jr just a couple of minutes ago come in. He of course, is supporting former president donald trump but for all the talk of spinning this debate, what actually happens in the debate on the debate stage that is going to resonate with voters? so yes this room will fill up. You will see people giving interviews, but the reality is the 90 minutes are the most important thing. Perhaps for the rest of this campaign. All right, jeff, thanks very much. I want to get more on the debate rule about muted microphones. Cnn's chief media analyst brian stelter joins us. So the harris campaign talk, but ultimately agreed to the muted mic rule that was also in play during the bidentrump debate on cnn in june. What do you know about kind of inside this right back in june, tv critics and political professionals were generally supportive of this change. It helped create an actual debate. But when harris became the nominee, some of these conversations changed. Harris aides wanted the mics to be live and hot the entire time they even tried to goad trump into agreeing to it, and they suggested that the trump campaign were were cowards for not going along with it but eventually, the harris campaign agreed to these terms. The mics will be muted. Here's the interesting scuttlebutt, though. Tonight anderson, here in the spin room at abc news, there is talk that abc producers may open up the mics if something really newsworthy happens, if something editorially significant happens, maybe the producers will in real time, make a change. Abc says no agreements have been made about that but it will be very curious. Also, there will be a small group of outside reporters inside this debate hall, so they'll be able to hear whatever happens between trump and harris. Even if television microphones don't pick it up. However, this goes tonight, anderson. However, abc performs, will go a long way to determining if there will be another debate later this fall. All right. Brian stelter, thanks very much. Back with the team. I mean, it's interesting, david, with these debate rules you know, these things are timed out when you are moderating one of these things. You have gained this out. You know, everything that donald trump has said. You know, everything that kamala harris has said. You think about trying to figure out three questions ahead. Well if i ask this, he's going to say this then i'll follow up with this. But with these rules, it's two minutes. It's one minute, it's one minute. There's not a lot of follow up. There's not unless people break the format and break the rules. And that's always a chance with him. One thing that i wanted to say is the harris people have been preparing in much the way we did, which is they created a facsimile of the set, an exact facsimile. They do a series of mock debates that follow those rules precisely. The whole idea is to make your candidates so comfortable and so familiar with what's likely to happen, that they're not in a position to try and do too much on the stage, that they know what they're going to do when these situations arise. That's not how trump operates. No. And by the way, if if the editors or whomever decides to change the rules on the fly, i think the world will come apart. Yeah, i find that. I find that hard to imagine. I don't think anyone's going to decide like, oh, we're going to unmute her mic all of a sudden, or unmute his mic. The world would come apart. But listen, donald trump's a nontraditional candidate. He's been doing this for many years. He's got a sense of stagecraft and and television, you know, did the apprentice for 13 years. The guy knows tv and he knows production. And so that's where he makes one thing that's striking, though. You look at the debate eight years ago and him today, not really the same guy. He really isn't. Look at me eight years, not a crisp. You know what i think is great? you haven't changed a bit. We've talked a lot about the muted mics, but i actually think as important as the fact there's no audience. Yeah it's huge and in the in the republican primary we covered these debates out here. I hated it that it felt like a roman coliseum. It just you know, it was weird playing to the crowd. And so you take the audience out of it and you also take for trump, you know, he doesn't feel like he has to entertain 500 people sitting in front of him. He can talk directly to the camera and do. And so i like that they've done, and i hope this is the norm because i think the other way, it's much more so when you think back to the last debate. Not that a lot of democrats want to think back to the last debate, but but you could watch trump sort of analyze the situation in real time of the implosion of president biden. Yes assessing how much do i need to actually engage? how much do i need to attack? and sort of realizing he could just i mean, he's like playing. He's like riding a surfboard. He's sort of sensing the currents, i think. I think that's right. I think not that he would get on a surfboard but but i like the visual but i think i think what's interesting is that trump has not been present the past couple of weeks. He has been increasingly weird. His syntax is weird. He jumps all around. He doesn't make a lot of sense. If you've been following the trump soap opera, you can kind of keep up with what he's saying. But if tonight, if he shows up and kamala is doing well and he starts to decompensate the way he's been doing on stage, it could be a very weird night. If he turns to him and says to him, what he said to biden, which is i don't even know what he said. I'm not sure he did that'd be that would be the line of the night. That would be the clapback. The other unknown is, you know clearly anybody who covered kamala harris back in a run in 2019 didn't make it to 2020. Excuse me 2020, 2020. Um, you know, she's a much better candidate giving a speech. I mean her skill level has gone up a lot. We haven't seen a lot of interviews so we don't know how good she is on that. She did fine, you know, seemingly in the dana bash interview. Um we don't really know what her debating skills now are like, how they've evolved from the last time, everything we have seen so far. She's a completely different candidate than she was running in the primaries. However, however she had a debate with mike pence, a one on one debate back in the primaries where she was not a very good debater. That was with the crowd. So we haven't seen her at this moment. There's no question in what we have seen, the sample we have of speeches, the convention retailing, even the bus tours. She's a very different person, a much more confident, a much more steady campaigner however, we have not seen this and this is the defining test of her life. She'll do well. We're nearing the start of the harris trump debate and the first look at how the candidates interact or don't interact on stage they've never met before still ahead, a high profile harris supporter joins us live. California governor gavin newsom. It's debate night in america. Stay with us this election. Stay with cnn with more reporters on the ground and the best political team in the business, follow the candidates. 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