ATLANTA:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested that Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris be debated on Fox News on Sept. 4, but the Harris campaign responded that Trump was trying to pull out of a debate already scheduled to air on ABC.
The rules will be similar to the first debate with President Joe Biden, who has since withdrawn his re-election bid, Trump said in a Truth Social post late Friday. But this time it will have a “full audience” and take place in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Trump said.
Trump and Biden had agreed to a second debate on Sept. 10 on ABC News, which the former president had proposed moving to Fox, the most popular network with his followers.
Harris, who on Friday secured the delegate votes needed to win the Democratic nomination for the Nov. 5 election, said Saturday that she plans to participate in the originally scheduled debate.
“It’s interesting how ‘any time, any place’ becomes ‘a specific time, a specific safe space,'” he wrote on the social media platform X. “I will be there on September 10, as agreed. I hope to see him there.”
Harris spokesman Michael Tyler said Trump was “running scared” and that her campaign was happy to discuss further discussions after the Sept. 10 debate, which “both campaigns have already agreed to.”
On Saturday, Trump told Truth Social that Harris is “afraid to do it” and that he will see her on Sept. 4, “or, I won’t see her at all.”
Both candidates have been aggressively criss-crossing the country, with Trump testing new lines of attack against Harris, who some polls show is in a near-death battle with the former president.
At a rally in Atlanta on Saturday night, Trump attacked Harris’ character and the policies she has promoted as vice president and continued to raise questions about her racial identity.
On Thursday, Trump had falsely suggested at the nation’s largest annual gathering of black journalists that Harris had downplayed her black heritage. Harris, who is of Indian and Jamaican heritage, has long identified as Black and Asian. He attended a traditionally Black university, where he joined a prominent Black fraternity.
Trump, speaking at the same stadium where Harris held a rally on Tuesday, said Saturday that there were “19 different ways” to pronounce Harris’ name, while also calling her “crazy” with a “low IQ.” Before Trump took the stage, his campaign showed an article on a big screen that referred to Harris as the “first Indian-American senator.”
The former president also spent much of his speech attacking Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and the state’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. Both men drew Trump’s ire for failing to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss to Biden in Georgia.
Trump’s combative performance contradicted the advice of some senior Republicans who urged him to avoid attacks on Harris’ identity and friendly fire aimed at conservatives.
After Trump’s speech, the Harris campaign released a statement from Jeff Duncan, the Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia from 2019 to 2023 and a staunch Trump critic.
“If you could see the incoherence and vindictive behavior of Donald Trump tonight, you saw a Donald Trump who has no interest in uniting this country or speaking to the voters who will decide this election,” Duncan said.
Is the conversation over?
In his Friday post on Truth Social, Trump said the ABC debate “ended with Biden no longer participating” and because he was in a legal battle with ABC.
The ABC on July 26 outlined the qualification requirement for the debate, but did not mention any candidates by name. Those requirements include proof of election support and access to state ballots by Sept. 3.
Recent polls show a tight contest between Harris and Trump, who had opened up a clear lead over Biden after the president’s setback, ending the first debate on performance.
ABC News had no comment on Trump’s statement, a spokesman said. Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s suggestion of the Fox debate came shortly after the Democratic National Committee launched an ad campaign mocking him as a “convict afraid to talk” and questioning whether it was because of his stance on abortion.
David Plouffe, an adviser to former President Barack Obama who recently joined the Harris campaign, posted on social media: “Now, he seems comfortably in a cocoon, asking Fox’s happy place to host a Trump rally and call it a conversation. Maybe he can only handle talking to someone his own age.”
Trump is 78 and Harris is 59.
a href=”https://tribune.com.pk/story/2485425/trump-suggests-alternative-election-debate-harris-declines”>Source link
