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Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is insisting that Donald Trump honor his commitment to the ABC News debate on Sept. 10, rather than schedule an entirely different debate with new terms and a new date.
“Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out,” the Harris campaign said in a statement on Saturday. “He needs to stop playing games and show up to the debate he already committed to on Sept. 10.”
After refusing for several weeks to commit to debating Harris, the former president wrote in a post on Truth Social on Friday that he had “agreed” to a Fox News debate against her on Sept. 4 with a “FULL ARENA AUDIENCE,” reneging on previously agreed-upon debate rules that he had set with President Joe Biden’s campaign. Fox News did not respond to a request for comment sent by NBC News early Saturday.
Not having a live audience at the debate had been one of the Biden campaign’s key demands, especially against an opponent who is more prone to lying and delivering sound bites than to engaging in substantive policy discussion.
Trump has waffled on his participation in the Sept. 10 debate since Biden dropped out of the race. Harris has repeatedly challenged Trump to meet her on the debate stage, and Democrats have taunted the former president as being “afraid” to go up against Harris, a former prosecutor.
In his Truth Social post, Trump claimed the ABC News debate had been “terminated” because Biden had stepped aside, and he cited his ongoing litigation against ABC News and George Stephanopoulos as a “conflict of interest” (while using a disparaging distortion of Stephanopoulos’ name). Trump’s defamation lawsuit against Stephanopoulos and ABC News had already been underway when his campaign agreed to the Sept. 10 debate with the network.
The Harris campaign said Saturday that it would be “happy to discuss further debates after the one both campaigns have already agreed to.” The de facto Democratic nominee will still appear at the ABC News event whether or not Trump participates, her campaign said.