Former President Donald Trump's campaign reportedly has settled on a strategy to regain his momentum against Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to The Guardian, Trump's campaign is merely hoping at this point that he prevails at next month's big presidential debate on ABC News, despite the fact that the only debate he has ever definitively won was a debate earlier this year against President Joe Biden after the president delivered what many observers believe to have been the worst debate of all time.
"The game plan, in other words, has become one of hoping that Trump wins the debate so they can regain momentum – a stunning approach that shows the serious predicament for Trump and his campaign as he struggles to find ways to land effective attacks against the vice-president just months before the election," writes Guardian reporter Hugo Lowell.
This strategy is particularly risky because, while Biden performed worse than Trump during the debate, focus groups weren't exactly happy with the former president's performance either.
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That said, Trump's advisers believe that he will have a better shot at succeeding now that the parties have settled on particularly Trump-favorable rules for the September 10th debate hosted by ABC News.
Specifically, the former president's advisers have been buoyed by the likelihood that microphones will be muted when it is not a candidate’s turn to speak, believing it defangs Harris in being able to fact-check him in real time and in her ability to make quips of her own," writes Lowell. "The muted microphones have been a particularly big deal for Trump’s advisers, who internally have been repeatedly pushing for 'CNN rules,' in a reference to the disastrous CNN debate with Biden last month when microphones were muted."
