Former President Donald Trump suggested Monday that he might back out of the scheduled ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10 because he said the network is hostile toward Republicans.
Speaking inside a Vietnamese restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia, Trump said he had watched ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday and didn’t like how Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was treated.
“When I looked at the hostility of that, I said, ‘Why am I doing it? Let’s do it with another network.’ I want to do it,” Trump told reporters.
In response to a question about whether he still plans to participate in the debate, Trump said, “We’re thinking about it. We’re thinking about it. They also want to change the rules. You know, the deal was we keep the same rules. Now, all of a sudden they want to make a change in the rules because she can’t answer questions … why doesn’t she do something like I’m doing right now? She can’t talk. We can’t have another dummy as a president.”
Trump said he wants to have a “fair debate” and said he welcomes “tough questions.”
ABC “really should be shut out,” he continued. “I’d much rather do it on NBC. I’d much rather do it on CBS. Frankly, I think CBS is very unfair, but the best of the group, and certainly I do it on Fox, I’d even do it on CNN. I thought CNN treated us very fairly the last time.”
Asked if he wants the microphones muted at the debate, Trump said, “We agreed to the same rules. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have it probably on, but the agreement was it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted.”
Negotiations over the rules for the Sept. 10 debate hit an impasse overnight, in part over a disagreement about whether the candidates would have live microphones.
Harris’ campaign said it asked ABC for both candidates to have “hot” microphones throughout the debate so that they can pick up any comments regardless of whose turn it is to speak.
Harris campaign spokesman Brian Fallon alleged that Trump’s aides prefer that the candidates’ microphones are muted when their opponent is speaking “because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”
“The Vice President is ready to deal with Trump’s constant lies and interruptions in real time,” he added. “Trump should stop hiding behind the mute button.”
Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller, however, said that both campaigns had already agreed to the debate rules, which he said mirrored the same ones used during the June CNN debate between Trump and President Joe Biden. That debate used muted microphones, which had been requested by the Biden campaign. Miller also claimed that the Harris campaign requested that candidates be seated during the debate and be allowed to have notes.
“We said no changes to the agreed upon rules,” Miller said. “If Kamala Harris isn’t smart enough to repeat the messaging points her handlers want her to memorize, that’s their problem. This seems to be a pattern for the Harris campaign. They won’t allow Harris to do interviews, they won’t allow her to do press conferences, and now they want to give her a cheat-sheet for the debate.”
Fallon, the Harris campaign spokesman, denied that the Harris team asked for a seated debate with notes allowed.
The disagreement over the rules, which was first reported by Politico, also comes after a Trump post on social media Sunday night suggesting he might back out of the debate because of what he called a “biased” interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
‘[W]hy would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump wrote.
Representatives for ABC, CNN, CBS and NBC did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Sept. 10 debate was originally scheduled months ago — before Biden dropped out of the race.
After Biden withdrew and Harris launched her campaign, Trump said at the beginning of August that he wouldn’t participate in the ABC debate next month and proposed that the two debate on Fox News instead. Eventually, Trump said he wanted to face Harris in three separate debates in September. So far, only the ABC debate has been confirmed.
This is the first election cycle that the Commission on President Debates hasn’t sponsored the presidential debates since the nonpartisan organization launched in 1987.
The Republican National Committee in 2022 withdrew from debates hosted by the CPD and said it would require Republican presidential candidates to instead pledge to only participate in debates sanctioned by the Republican Party.
The Biden campaign also eschewed the CPD-sponsored debates. In May, Biden campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon in a letter took issue with the schedule of the fall debates and also alleged that the commission was “unable or unwilling to enforce the rules in the 2020 debates.”
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