'Very unnerving': Trump debate stand-in says ex-president's health is 'clearly diminished'

The political consultant who stood in for Donald Trump during Kamala Harris' debate preparations was struck by how much the former president's health has seemingly declined.

Philippe Reines, a political consultant and former State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton, closely studied the seven other debates the Republican nominee has taken part in since 2015, and he noticed that Trump tried to drown out the other candidates onstage.

"Imagine if we were talking right now and [fellow panelist] Kate [Bedingfield] was standing here with a chainsaw," Reines said, as host Kasie Hunt and others laughed. "It would be very hard to hit me and to hear me, and that's the only way he can win is to block out what someone is saying, and what you saw the other night was I was watching the people that were quoted and you made the point about people that know that he scuttled the immigration bill and that is an important point."

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"Whatever was going on there, which looked like malfunctioning, was important to give her the space to talk about what she wants to do and to remind people, the guy had a record," Reines added. "You'd never know it listening to him that he served for four years and this whatever you want to call it, this amnesia that people are somehow having pleasant memories of his term is odd, and it's important to really point that out a question for you along those lines."

Reines closely watched Trump's performance in previous debates going back nearly a decade, and he said the former president's mental and physical fitness were clearly diminished.

"The first thing I noticed, and I later compared notes with Bob Bauer, who played the same role for [then-]vice president [Joe] Biden [in 2020]," Reines said. "There is something going on with his language. He always digressed. He would be talking about China tariffs and then talked about the Chinese bank being in Trump Tower. Now there's just this staccato, stopping short, not using proper nouns as much. I think we're all used to it, and there's a lot of laughing, but that he is ... think about it, and we all have friends with a laptop that's a little old and they should be replacing it, it drains the battery a little fast and it's heavier than it should be, and he is a different person."

"That is hard to tell because he looks generally the same and he's equally loud," Reines added, "and somehow being louder and tanner has been equated to health, and it's just not there is something and, we saw today, irrespective of what the vice president did, what the former president did is very unnerving."

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