From her earliest campaigns in California to her serving as President Joe Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris has honed an aggressive but calibrated approach to debates.

Tuesday’s presidential debate will put the Democratic vice president’s skills to a test unlike any she’s seen. Harris faces former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, who will participate in his seventh general election debate since 2016 for an event that will be seen by tens of millions of viewers just as early voting in November’s election starts around the country.

For Trump, it seems a strange twist of American history that the only man to have run against two female nominees in two presidential elections is one with a long and explicit record of denigrating women.

From the earliest days of his presidential candidacy in 2015 to a Trump Tower news conference Friday, Trump has repeatedly attempted to attack, embarrass and threaten the women standing in his way — especially on the debate stage.

Trump has, of course, treated men with intense bellicosity, launching a blizzard of interruptions against President Joe Biden during their first debate in 2020 and lobbing personal insults at the likes of Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz during the primary in 2016.

But a review of his onstage clashes with women shows how, over nine years in politics, he has honed a playbook of explicitly gendered attacks against both female candidates and journalists that he is likely to draw from Tuesday when he debates Harris.

Trump has used his physical presence and body language to intimidate women, made veiled threats, complained that they were uniquely mean and belittled their qualifications in a way that many women view as open sexism.

Harris, in her past debates, has displayed a completely different style.

She tries to blend punch lines with details that build toward a broader narrative. She might shake her head to signal her disapproval while her opponent is speaking, counting on viewers to see her reaction on a split screen. And she has a go-to tactic to pivot debates back in her favor: saying she’s glad to answer a question as she gathers her thoughts to explain an evolving position or defend a past one.

People who have competed against Harris and prepared her rivals say she brings a series of advantages to the matchup, including her prosecutorial background juxtaposed with Trump being the first U.S. president convicted of felony crimes. Still, Harris allies warn that Trump can be a challenging and unpredictable opponent who veers between policy critiques, personal attacks, and falsehoods or conspiracy theories.

A former Harris aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about her approach, said the vice president views the events like a jury trial she would have led when she was district attorney in San Francisco or querying a judicial nominee on Capitol Hill as a U.S. senator. The idea, the former aide said, has always been to win the debate on merit while leaving more casual or piecemeal viewers with key takeaways.

When Harris faced then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2020, it was a mostly civil, substantive debate. But she got in digs that framed Pence as a serial interrupter, as Trump had been in his first debate with Biden.

“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” she said at one point, with a stern look. At another: “If you don’t mind letting me finish, we can have a conversation.”

Still, debates have sometimes put Harris on the defensive.

Pence made Harris sometimes struggle to defend Biden’s positions. Now, her task will be to defend not just Biden’s record, but her own role in that record and what policies she would pursue as president.

Trump’s debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016 showed how deeply she could get under his skin. He grimaced and interrupted his way through much of their showdowns, and he sometimes snapped.

In their first debate, he launched a barrage of interruptions as she raised her experience as a senator and as the secretary of state, and he instead brought up her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

It’s a tactic that now mirrors the way Trump sometimes pivots from attacking Harris to attacking Biden — as if it is the man who merits more of his attention even if he is not actually running against one for president.

A couple of weeks after that debate, Trump met Clinton for their second debate, at the lowest point of his candidacy. The “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, had leaked just a couple of days before.

In a counterattack that shocked Clinton’s aides, Trump invited women who had accused Bill Clinton of unwanted sexual advances to sit in the debate audience and sought to deflect from the attention over the “Access Hollywood” tape by directing his own attack at Hillary Clinton.

“Bill Clinton was abusive to women,” Trump said. “Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously.”

He sought to make the set inhospitable to Hillary Clinton in another way too. Trump prowled the stage as she spoke, looming behind her in key moments. Clinton often stayed seated when he spoke, and sometimes he approached her, towering over her and pointing in her direction.

The New York Times and Associated Press contributed.