Trump caught doing undercover debate prep at Mar-a-Lago: New York Times report

Donald Trump was caught out Friday doing something at Mar-a-Lago the New York Times reports he doesn't want the public to know about: debate prep.

Reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report the former president has looped in former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to help sharpen his attack tactics when it comes time to debate Vice President Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania on Sept. 10.

"Trump likes to say he doesn’t need to prepare for debates, and his team is under instructions to use the term 'policy time' to describe their sessions," the Times reports.

"But Mr. Trump has spent more time this year practicing for debates than he did in either 2016 or 2020, according to advisers who have worked with him."

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The Times describes Trump's first debate against President Joe Biden in 2020 as "disastrous" but notes the tables turned this year when Biden's poor debate performance spurred concerns that he was unfit to mount a successful reelection campaign.

Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party in 2022 over concerns about "wokeness," was once able to "eviscerate" Harris during a 2020 Democratic presidential debate by attacking her prosecutorial record, the Times states.

"[Harris] put over 1,500 hundred people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked marijuana," Gabbard said. "She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so."

Harris did laugh in an interview during which she admitted to having smoked and inhaled marijuana, but a Mercury News fact check later found most defendants charged with low-level pot possession charges were not incarcerated.

A Sacramento Bee fact check from 2019 notes the innocence of the man who found himself on death row had not yet been determined.

Such attacks on Harris' prosecutorial record could prove difficult to replicate considering Trump has been convicted on felony charges and, as the Times reports, Gabbard's attacks "all came from the left."