Bob Bauer: I Played Donald Trump to Get Joe Biden Ready for Debate

A close Joe Biden ally has revealed the secrets of acting as an “unhinged” Donald Trump in preparation for presidential debates.

In a new book, Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel who played Trump to help Biden prepare in 2020, says he was “as personally insulting and unhinged as Trump can be.”

But when he tried to relax by playing fetch with one of Biden’s dogs, Bauer slipped and fell into a swimming pool, soaking himself to the waist.

“My ‘Trump’ was met with some rough justice,” Bauer writes.

Four years on, Biden and Trump are preparing to debate again, in Atlanta next week, hosted by CNN. Whether either candidate experiences rough justice remains to be seen but Bauer’s book, The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis, will be published in the U.S. on Tuesday. The Daily Beast obtained a copy.

Now 72, Bauer was White House counsel to Barack Obama between 2010 and 2011. In 2020, he helped the Biden campaign vet contenders for vice president.

Bauer is also an old debate hand, having helped prep Al Gore in 2000 and having been a member of a 2015 University of Pennsylvania working group on debate reform. In 2020, he also gave his best Bernie Sanders when Biden was getting ready for debates in the primary.

To help Biden prepare for the first debate against Trump, in Cleveland on Sept. 29, Bauer says he “watched hours of tapes of the 45th president, as a businessman, a 2016 candidate, and then in office, and read transcripts of his extemporaneous remarks on every conceivable topic.”

“I got into the role,” he writes.

Noting the judgment of Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, that he figured out “how to get under her brother’s skin”, Bauer says special sessions were scheduled in which he would be “at my Trump-worst—as personally insulting and unhinged as Trump can be,” though he concedes that “it could well be that nobody can really be Trump as only Trump can be.”

Bauer says he did not attempt a “full-scale impression”, with costume and makeup, working only to mimic hand gestures, to move in Trump’s manner and to do “a light imitation of his voice.”

That stands in contrast to the approach taken by Philippe Reines, an aide to Hillary Clinton who dressed as Trump when he took the debate prep role in 2016—even going so far as to chase the candidate round their mock stage, seeking to give her a hug.

Bauer also notes a key part of becoming Trump, writing: “I needed to become comfortable with heaving insults at Joe Biden.”

Bauer did not knowingly hurl something else at Biden—COVID-19, for which, Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows would later reveal, the then-president tested positive before the Cleveland debate.

Nonetheless, Bauer credits himself with playing a “dependably Trump-like Trump, the same one who later showed up for the debates (two of them, as he dodged one).”

At the Cleveland debate, Trump insulted and harried Biden until he drew from his one of the most memorable lines of the contests from the Democrat: “Will you shut up, man?"

Bauer does admit, however, that once in his prep sessions with Biden, he “badly missed [his] target,” when he blew past Trump’s stance on abortion to call for the end of Roe v. Wade.

At the time, Trump was not calling for it openly – although he would later take credit for its fall.

“In replying to a question about Roe v Wade”—the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established federal abortion rights—Bauer “had Trump going well beyond his right-to-life rhetoric and calling for the decision to be overruled.”

“I knew he hadn’t,” Bauer writes, “and I still somehow had my Trump say that he supported the end of Roe.”

According to Bauer, senior Biden adviser Ron Klain, later Biden’s White House chief of staff, joined with senior adviser Anita Dunn—Bauer’s wife—to tell him he’d gone too far.

“I immediately agreed I had botched the reply,” Bauer writes.

The real debate was held in the shadow of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a hero to liberals everywhere, who had died on Sept. 18, 2020. To replace her, and to tilt the court 6-3 to the right, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett.

Coney Barret was introduced at the White House on Sept. 26, three days before the first debate, and confirmed a month later. Suggesting she was expected to overturn Roe could have upended the forcing through of her nomination, so the real Trump would not have betrayed that view in public.

Bauer adds a postscript, though, noting that Trump now takes credit for building the right-wing Supreme Court majority that did strike down Roe in June 2022, thereby removing the federal right to abortion.

Bauer also includes a lighter moment from 2020, when his attempt to play with Biden’s dog, Major, went wrong.

Unlike headline-grabbing incidents involving Biden’s other German Shepherd, Commander, Bauer’s interaction with Major did not result in a bite. (Major now lives with Biden family friends.) Instead, Bauer made a splash of his own.

Major—“a regular presence at these preps and always looking for a playmate”—returned a tennis ball Bauer had thrown. As Bauer threw the ball again, he slipped and “fell into the pool, up to my waist in water.”

Bauer “sloshed back into the prep area, a chastened Trump: all wet. I hope to hide my soaked lower half from view, behind the lectern. As I left hurriedly after the session concluded, [Biden] bade me farewell and told me to ‘get dry.’

“How did you know?”

“Major told me.”