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A man who described Donald Trump as a “malevolent George Costanza” and a “malfunctioning appliance” is helping Kamala Harris prepare for her first debate with the former president.
Philippe Reines, a former deputy assistant secretary of state and senior advisor to Hillary Clinton, is the stand-in for Trump in mock debates ahead of the real thing on September 10.
This is the second time he has played the role after acting as Trump in Clinton’s own preparations in September 2016, and he takes the job seriously.
“I dressed up like him, but I didn’t put on an orange face or a wig,” Reines told The Michael Smerconish Program on Sirius.
“Although one day I put self-tanner on one half of my face and no one noticed, so I didn’t bother again.”
Reines had worked on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign before joining Clinton for her first failed run for the White House in 2008. At the time, Vogue magazine described him as Clinton’s "Michael Clayton-esque image man and fixer”.
In her memoir Hard Choices, Clinton described Reines as “passionate, loyal, and shrewd” and said she could “always trust him to speak his mind.”
He worked for Clinton for 17 years. He was a senior advisor when she became secretary of state and was at the center of her second campaign for the presidency.
It was then that he became her Trump whisperer.
Around three weeks before Clinton’s first debate with Trump, in September 2016, Reines joined a team of around 10 advisors in a ballroom at the Doral Arrowwood Hotel in Westchester.
I didn’t stand there all the time yelling ‘crooked Hillary!’ or ‘email email email!’ That’s not helpful— Philippe Reines on what it was like to play Donald Trump with Hillary Clinton
Among them were a handful of researchers and a smattering of consultants. Ron Klain, who would later become Joe Biden’s chief of staff, was running the show, as he had done for Barack Obama in 2012 and would do so later for Biden in 2020.
A replica of the debate stage had been set up in the room, where the advisors huddled for days discussing Clinton’s positions and running drills. They performed around eight full debate run-throughs — 90 minutes at a time with no breaks and everyone staying in character.
Reines described the experience as “kinda like batting practice.”
“In the case of Donald Trump, a lot of it is learning how to filter out the noise and expect the unexpected,” he said in the Sirius interview.
To prep, he studied Trump’s performances in the Republican primary debates and other forums he took part in. He even watched them with the sound off so he could mimic his mannerisms and body language.
A video of their 2016 mock debate released after the election shows Reines and Clinton preparing for an unwanted hug from Trump. The two burst into laughter as Reines bear hugs Clinton and she attempts to run away.
Not easy to avoid the unwanted Trump hug, sometimes it even takes practice...
— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) May 19, 2017
A favorite moment from debate prep (9/24/16): pic.twitter.com/JAAHaqKFoa
Reines said he rarely went full-Trump in their mock debates, but he did try his best to get under Clinton’s skin.
“I didn’t stand there all the time yelling ‘crooked Hillary!’ or ‘email email email!’ That’s not helpful,” he said. “The balance that I brought was knowing enough about Trump and studying enough about Trump, but also knowing Hillary.”
If Reines has a grand unifying theory on debating Trump, it is that the former president is both a terrible debater and incredibly difficult to debate.
The frequency of his lies and mistruths makes it difficult to answer all of them. He has instead argued for striking a balance between countering them and sticking to the message.
“There’s a hard balance where you wanna stand up for yourself, but you also don’t wanna kill time,” Reines said.
Clinton said the same in one of her many debriefs after the debates.
“It is a waste of time to try to refute Mr. Trump’s arguments like in a normal debate. It’s nearly impossible to identify what his arguments even are. He starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather,” she wrote in the New York Times in June this year, ahead of Biden’s ill-fated debate with Trump.
Trump’s lack of filter — obnoxious though it may be — makes him appear more at ease and natural than most of his opponents, who have likely rehearsed lines and practiced talking points.
Reines believes that to beat Trump requires fighting dirty.
“Democrats need to be able to communicate and attack in the same kind of blunt language that has until now been inappropriate in national politics,” he wrote in a Politico article in 2019.
“So forget the ‘glass houses’ rule and get out your slingshot,” he added.
He noted in the same article that Biden’s refusal to take full responsibility for his past mistakes in office in the Democratic primary debates in 2019 actually helped him.
If his various interviews given in recent years are any guide, Reines will likely advise Harris to pursue a similar strategy: Don’t get bogged down in defending your record, hit back instead.
On that note at least, Harris may be a step ahead of Clinton. The vice president has made mocking Trump and his running mate JD Vance for being “weird” a feature of her campaign, and the strategy appears to be working.
Harris has also shown a willingness in previous debates to match her opponents’ energy when they are rude to her. In 2020, when she was repeatedly interrupted by vice president Mike Pence, she responded with words that would instantly become a viral meme: “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.”
In short, viewers should expect her to come out swinging.
But overall, there may not be a substantial difference between how Harris and Clinton handle Trump. Reines believes Clinton won both of her clashes with him, and so may seek to pursue a similar strategy as before.
“They were her most successful three days between the high of accepting the nomination and the low of Election Day,” he wrote in Politico.
The public generally agreed with him, according to polls taken after the debates; but the margin was insufficient for her to win the race.
Harris will likely face the same problem the then-secretary of state faced. Clinton was graded on a curve for the entirety of her campaign, and the debate was no different. She was expected to win the debate and needed to crush him decisively to claim the greater victory.
When that didn’t happen, the debates were looked back upon as a missed opportunity for her.
But Harris will have a few things working in her favor, however.
Trump was something of an unknown quantity on the debate stage in 2016 — his match-up against Clinton was the first time he’d been in a head-to-head match.
Reines will now have much more footage to study, more foibles to exploit, and more traps to set.
Harris, as her campaign stump speech has been clear to point out, believes her experience as a courtroom prosecutor, district attorney of San Francisco, and attorney general of California, gives her an edge against Trump.
"In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain," she has said in her speech at campaign events across the country.
"So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
