Trump vs. Clinton debate Monday: Let the psychological games begin
WASHINGTON — To avoid having Stephen Harper’s debate preparations destabilized by some scandal-of-the-day, his entourage once banned smartphones from the room and devised a coded phrase to use in his presence.
They feared opposition parties would leak their most damaging material to media just before a debate, to pull the prime minister and his top aides out of debate training and into a time-wasting exercise in damage control.
So they used covert language around the boss.
“Somebody would come in and (say), ‘The pizza delivery has arrived,’” former aide Dimitri Soudas recalls of the 2011 campaign.