He went to a Modern Orthodox day school. Now he’s playing Trump in Harris’ debate prep.
Hillary Clinton talks with Philippe Reines shortly before the 2016 presidential election, which she lost to Donald Trump. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
By Beth Harpaz August 14, 2024
A former top aide to Hillary Clinton who’s a Ramaz alumnus from the Upper West Side of Manhattan will reportedly prep Kamala Harris for her upcoming debate against Donald Trump.
Philippe Reines will play Trump in the debate coaching sessions, anonymous sources from Harris’ presidential campaign told The Washington Post. Trump and Harris, rivals for the U.S. presidency, are scheduled to face off in a televised debate on ABC Sept. 10.
This won’t be Reines’ first time as a Trump stand-in: Reines played Trump in order to prep Clinton for their debates in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Reines (pronounced “RYE-ness”) was an adviser to Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state under President Barack Obama and also served as her press secretary when she was a U.S. senator from New York.
A famously in-your-face kind of guy, unafraid to take on critics, reporters or anyone else, Reines once told a Buzzfeed reporter to “F— off” and often clapped back at antisemites on Twitter in the pre-Elon Musk era.
In an op-ed he wrote six weeks after Oct. 7, he criticized universities for failing to protect Jewish students and for allowing faculty a “shocking” amount of leeway to make “incendiary statements.”
He’s now at CKR Solutions, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm. In a LinkedIn post late last year, he said he was “excited to be a part of the important and meaningful 10/7 Project,” which advocates for media coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict supportive of Israel.
Reines referred an email seeking comment for this story to a spokesperson for the Harris campaign. Neither of them immediately responded to further emails.
Playing Trump like a method actor
Reines tackled the role of portraying Trump in the Clinton debate prep with “the kind of method acting that would give Daniel Day-Lewis a run for his money,” Vanity Fair said. He acquired podiums, bought a Trump signature collection watch and got shoes with lifts to match Trump’s height, Politico Magazine reported.
“I lied. I bragged. I flailed my hands and arms. I wore a long red tie. Really long,” he wrote in another account of his Trump impersonation, adding that anyone facing off against the former president must be prepared for his “bluster, vulgarity, innuendo and refusal to admit he’s wrong.”
Reines’ prep with Clinton also anticipated what he called Trump’s “macho routine,” referring to the moment that Trump menacingly “loomed” over Clinton on stage in one of the debates. In a practice session to show Clinton how to “avoid the unwanted Trump hug,” Reines even jokingly grabbed her while she tried to high-five and dodge him. Reines later posted a video of the encounter on Twitter as “a favorite moment from debate prep.”
Not easy to avoid the unwanted Trump hug, sometimes it even takes practice...
— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) May 19, 2017
A favorite moment from debate prep (9/24/16): pic.twitter.com/JAAHaqKFoa
One can imagine similar prep for the Harris-Trump match: She’s 5-foot-4; Trump’s height has been variously given as 6-foot-1 and 6-foot-3.
Polls showed most viewers thought Clinton won the debates against Trump, though winning public opinion in those matches did not, of course, win the election.
When Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021, replacing Trump, Reines tweeted: “God willing, let years of boredom begin.”
Growing up
Reines, 54, was raised in an apartment on the Upper West Side where he lived with his grandmother and his mother, Judith, an insurance broker and single mom. He has said he met his father just once as a child.
His mother sent him to Ramaz, the elite Modern Orthodox day school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. One of his friends there told The Washington Post that Reines was a “lackluster student prone to daydreaming.”
He graduated from Columbia but didn’t complete the degree until he was 30. He volunteered on Al Gore’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2000 before going to work for Clinton.
Despite the spelling of Philippe, The New York Times said in a 2005 profile that he “doesn’t come off as French” because “he’s not. But no way will he answer to Phil.” His maternal grandfather was listed in the U.S. Census as Philip.
What he says about antisemitism and Israel
In a Nov. 13 op-ed published by Fox News, barely a month after the Hamas attacks in Israel and as pro-Gaza protests began to flare on campuses and in cities, Reines wrote, “It’s hard to explain how unnerved American Jews are right now.”
Until then, he said, Jews hadn’t realized “so much antisemitism was right below the surface,” adding that “the idea that all Jews are protected by the concept of an all-powerful Israel” had collapsed in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
He went on to say that in his circles, most people were troubled “when Israel uses a 2,000-pound bomb to kill a single Hamas leader that also kills 99 innocents.” But he also defended Israel’s response, citing “the reality” that Hamas had “embedded itself” in Gaza and was willing to sacrifice Palestinians there in order to destroy Israel.
Reines wrote the op-ed right before attending the Nov. 14 March for Israel in Washington, D.C. He ended the piece by saying he was experiencing a feeling “never before part of my emotional range: I’m scared.”
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