‘She needs to let Trump be Trump’: Inside Kamala Harris’s unconventional debate prep

Less than three months ago, a disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden put Kamala Harris on a collision course with Donald Trump.

Now at the top of the Democratic ticket, Harris’s first public face-off with Trump on the ABC debate stage in Philadelphia is just days away. Right now, she is hunkered down in Pittsburgh for intensive preparations with a close circle of aides and confidantes who are getting her ready for her best — and perhaps only — chance to convince Americans that she, and not the former president, should spend the next four years in the White House.

According to NOTUS, the vice president will be participating in sessions led by Paul, Weiss partner Karen Dunn, the Washington super-lawyer who masterminded then-Senator Harris’s prep for her 2020 debate against her predecessor, Mike Pence. Harris will also reportedly be coached by her veteran policy adviser Rohini Kosoglu, as well as Democratic National Convention mastermind and longtime operative Minyon Moore; domestic policy aide Brian Nelson; campaign chief-of-staff Sheila Nix; veteran adviser Sean Clegg; and Cedric Richmond, the former Louisiana congressman who is a co-chair of her campaign.

She is understood to have spent weeks and months preparing for a debate that was originally supposed to be a vice presidential debate against JD Vance, the Ohio senator who Trump tapped as his running-mate at the GOP convention in Milwaukee this past July. But Biden’s decision to stand down has thrust her into an unprecedented situation. Never before has a major party presidential candidate gone into a general election debate with more rust and without any opportunity to clean up an error.

Because the then-Biden and Trump campaigns agreed to only two