How Biden and Trump insiders say their candidates are preparing for the debate

With barely two days to go until Joe Biden and Donald Trump stand face to face for the first time since 2020, the president’s closest aides and confidants say they are leaving nothing to chance.

Since last week, Biden has been hunkered down with a close coterie of his most trusted advisers — first at his beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware, and for the last five days at Camp David, the US Navy-run, rustic and remote presidential retreat in Thurmont, Maryland.

It’s there, in the arborous setting where Biden convened the leaders of Japan and South Korea for a historic summit last year, that the president’s brain trust has been dutifully preparing him for a debate with Trump.

Thursday night’s TV debate is “impossible yet unavoidable,” one White House insider said in a brief conversation with The Independent. Since decamping to Thurmont several days ago, Biden has been going through a period of intensive policy discussions and rhetorical workshopping with a cast drawn from his current campaign staff, his White House aides, and his longtime circle of Democratic greybeards, including his current and former White House chiefs of staff, Jeffrey Zients and Ron Klain.

Also making the trip to Camp David? His 2020 campaign boss, Jen O’Malley Dillon; his current campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez; former Democratic congressman Cedric Richmond; senior advisers Bruce Reed, Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn; and Biden’s White House and campaign communications directors, Ben LaBolt and Michael Tyler.

A Biden campaign official told The Independent that the president’s focus there will be on “prepping to hold Trump accountable for his extreme record and the dangerous things he’s been saying on the trail.” Specifically, that means hammering