My bet is that Trump will have a "hidden" earpiece in the debate...

[PatSeg]

87. Yes, apparently there were a couple of moments like that

His behavior came across as extremely odd at the time.

In the first debate, during a reply to Kerry, he ranted, "Let me finish!" Oddly, neither his opponent, Senator Kerry, nor the moderator, Jim Lehrer, was attempting to cut him off, and he had plenty of time left on the clock. One explanation is that he was disoriented and confused, as he often is without a script. But a somewhat better explanation, in view of the pictures and his sudden debating competence, is that he was addressing not his opponent or the moderator, but a remote coach who had prompted him to move on to a fresh topic before he was ready to do so.

At one point, when Bush had taken a question, and Kerry had delivered a spirited rebuttal, moderator Charlie Gibson decided to extend the session. But he had trouble getting the words out, as Bush leapt up and leaned into his face, repeatedly demanding the very extension that Gibson was attempting, without success, to offer him.

A fair reading of the scene would have Bush's remote coach urging him to respond at that moment, with enough vehemence to distract the President from what was happening right before his eyes. "You've got to respond to that - you can't let it go. He's insulting our allies," we can imagine the coach saying. And we can imagine Bush getting flustered to the point that he failed to grasp what the moderator was trying to tell him.

https://www.theregister.com/2004/10/12/bush_wireless_coaching/

Trump has been so painfully awful, that it is easy to forget what a real dope GW was. Bush was stunningly incompetent and unsuited for the job. Bush's entire administration was about deceiving the American people by exploiting the threat of terrorism to further their agenda. I remember whenever there was some criticism of the administration, all of a sudden the threat level went up from yellow to orange or some old video tape of Bin Laden would magically appear. The deceit was so obvious and predictable. A truly contemptable lot. Who knew at the time that it could get much, much worse?