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    Trump rejects Harris call for second debate, saying ‘it’s too late’

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    Kamala Harris has accepted an invitation from CNN to participate in another debate with Donald Trump, on 23 October, her campaign said on Saturday.“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate. It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules and ratings,” the Harris campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement.“I will gladly accept a second presidential debate on October 23,” Harris later posted on X. “I hope Donald Trump will join me.”Trump debated Joe Biden in June when the US president was still running for re-election. Biden performed so badly that he ended up dropping out of the race in July, and Harris, his vice-president, ascended to the nomination.Asked about Harris’s acceptance of the CNN invitation, a Trump spokesperson pointed to the former president’s prior statements that there would be no more debates.Shortly afterwards, Trump spoke at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said that Harris only wants a rematch because she is losing.“She’s done one debate, I’ve done two. It’s too late to do another, I’d love to in many ways but it’s too late, the voting is cast, the voters are out there, immediately – is everybody voting, please? Get out and vote,” Trump said.The first in-person voting began in Minnesota, Virginia and South Dakota on Friday and some postal ballots were sent out a few days earlier.Harris and Trump held their first presidential debate in Philadelphia on 10 September, with Harris, the Democratic nominee for the White House, widely deemed to have won – a judgment rejected by Trump.The lead-up to that event was touch-and-go, scheduled originally when Biden had been at the top of the Democratic ticket, but Trump eventually acquiesced to appear, while the Harris campaign eventually agreed to the original rules of muted microphones when it was not the candidate’s turn to speak.Two days after the debate, when Trump had said he wouldn’t do another, he cited Harris’s invitation for a rematch then as proof he’d won the first.“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’” he wrote.This prompted the Harris campaign to taunt Trump as a chicken, and Saturday’s ostentatious acceptance of another debate invitation also seemed designed to needle her opponent.The vice-presidential debate is on 1 October between Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate and the governor of Minnesota, and JD Vance, a US senator for Ohio.Debate scheduling and platforming have become almost as contentious as the election campaign itself. The Harris and Trump campaigns repeatedly clashed over where, on what TV network, with which moderators and in what format they should debate, such as with muted or unmuted microphones, or whether with an audience or not.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter the debate hosted by ABC News earlier this month, Trump criticized the network’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for what he claimed was a biased approach.“They are the most dishonest, in my opinion, the most dishonest news organization,” he grumbled on Fox News.But a post-debate YouGov poll found that registered voters who responded said, by double digits, that the moderators had been “fair and unbiased”.While 43% said they had been fair, 29% said they had been biased in Harris’s favor and 4% said they had been biased in Trump’s favor. There was a big partisan split, with 55% of Republicans saying the moderators had been biased in Harris’s favor.But Trump praised, in comparative terms, the debate he’d had with Biden in June, saying the cable network was “more honorable” than ABC.CNN moderators did not live-fact-check the candidates, while ABC’s moderators did, including, most memorably, David Muir debunking as baseless the racist rightwing conspiracy theory repeated by Trump that the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, had been eating other residents’ pets.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      ABC’s debate moderators did what they said was impossible: fact-checking Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      They said it couldn’t be done. For years, we’ve heard all the reasons – excuses, really – that presidential debates cannot and should not be fact-checked in real time.Countering lies is not the job of the moderators, we were told; it is strictly the role of the candidates themselves. Fact-checking would take up too much time and interrupt the flow of the debate, we were told. And what about impartiality? How could moderators be expected to decide whom to challenge with fact checks?Fact-checking, we were told, was impractical and inappropriate, and simply a very, very bad idea. Yes, even in the age of Donald Trump, who wakes up each day and immediately begins lying about his dreams.But then came Tuesday night’s debate between Trump and Kamala Harris – and that memorable moment when the moderator Linsey Davis of ABC News piped up with just a few words after Trump went into one of his evidence-free rants about babies being executed.“There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said in an even tone. It didn’t take a lot of time, it did correct an oft-repeated lie and it did establish something important: the most egregious falsehoods might well be challenged by these moderators. The candidates were put on notice.Davis wasn’t alone in this. Her co-moderator, David Muir – in much the same neutral, polite tone and with much the same admirable brevity – did the same. After Trump made a wild claim about migrants in Ohio eating pets, Muir calmly stated that ABC had pre-checked this one and determined that it wasn’t true. And in another instance, Muir countered Trump’s charges of uncontrolled and rising crime, especially involving migrants, with this: “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”It was noticed. And largely, though not universally, praised. The moderators also did a good job of returning to questions that had not been answered, and in some cases, pressing for a clear yes or no.Trump’s allies were outraged, naturally, that he wasn’t allowed to fib at will. How terribly unfair, they charged. Why weren’t there equal numbers of fact checks and challenges for Harris, they demanded, never stopping to acknowledge that she had mostly stuck to that crazy little thing called the truth. (A lengthy New York Times listing of questionable statements by both candidates, published after the debate, identified a couple of times that Harris has strayed from reality or misled; but, as expected, there was really no comparison with Trump’s litany of lies.)Trump later posted on social media calling the moderator “hacks”. The debate, he charged, was “THREE ON ONE!”But, as CNN’s Abby Phillip drily observed: “When there is asymmetrical lying, there will be asymmetrical fact-checking.”The post-debate media coverage, in general, was up to its usual tricks of giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. Overall, it too often failed to convey with clarity what had happened in a debate dominated by the cool strength of Harris and the angry, incomprehensible ravings of Trump. Headlines tended to lapse into neutralizing, conventional language like this one in the Washington Post: “Harris crisply attacks Trump, prompting retorts with fiery language.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNPR, to its credit, noted: “The spotlight should now be on Trump’s incoherence and general lack of any serious grasp on policy.”And even over on Fox News, there were some abnormal glimmers of reality, as when Brit Hume allowed that Trump had “had a bad night”.No doubt, the debate was a win for Harris.And, with the help of ABC’s moderators, a better-than-usual night for the truth.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Kamala Harris, unlike Donald Trump, was well prepared for this debate – and won | Rebecca Solnit

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      The Trump-Harris debate was the most unsurprising thing that ever happened, except maybe for the part when, unlike previous debates, the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, pressed Trump to actually answer the question or noted that what he said was extremely not true at all.The former prosecutor and current vice-president Kamala Harris got on stage and spoke in lucid paragraphs that were clearly the result of careful preparation. She shared the stage with the adjudicated rapist who spoke in loose phrases that flapped and looped and circled around and usually reverted to some version of “millions of immigrants who are criminals and terrorists are why this country is in terrible shape worse than anyone thought possible and we are going to have world war three”, a litany of fear and rage and vagueness we’ve heard for eight years.Harris is widely said to have won the debate, by being herself, and being herself included a recurring facial expression of amused incredulity as the convicted felon on stage with her said yet another thing that was extravagantly untrue. One notable aspect of her rhetoric is how centrist it sounds – a bland but presumably strategic affirmation of support for a strong military, more healthcare, the usual Democratic party shout-outs to the middle class and support for Israel but also a two-state solution. She also expertly riled up Trump and let him go, and he went raging and free-associating throughout the 90 minutes. He is said to have lost the debate, also by being himself.His face crumpled into a resentful sulk when his mouth was closed, and it was more than closed at those times – it was clamped shut. But when he opened it, lurid, loopy stuff came out. He actually repeated onstage the grotesquely fearmongering racist untruth that JD Vance and Ted Cruz and other far-right Republicans had been spreading online, declaring: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” It’s an internet rumor as preposterous as offensive as untrue – one of the moderators actually interjected that it was untrue – but it was also classic Maga stuff, an incendiary distraction from actual policy and anything else that matters.Trump wasn’t quite as incoherent as in some of his recent public soliloquies, but he did say some very odd stuff, such as when he declared of Biden: “We have a president who doesn’t know he’s alive.” His most interesting slip-up came when the moderators asked him if there was anything he regretted about the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress he instigated. He inveighed and he waffled and he wove around and denied responsibility and tried to shift the conversation to Black Lives Matter protests and came back to blame Nancy Pelosi for what happened. But in one telling moment he said “we” of the insurrectionists and then shifted to say: “this group of people that has been treated so bad”.In other words, Trump was Trump and Harris was Harris, but the debate moderators were far, far better than Dana Bash and Jake Tapper of CNN during the disastrous 27 June debate. They and Harris went after Trump when he said, as he’s been saying since at least 2019 in defense of the anti-abortion position, that mothers and doctors are killing babies at or after birth – in other words that abortion rights are the same thing as infanticide (which, yes, is extremely illegal). “They have abortion in the ninth month,” he claimed. “The baby will be born and we will decide what to do with it, in other words they will execute the baby.” It’s the first time to my knowledge that he’s been told to his face that that’s extremely untrue.But still the questions came from within the bubble of assumptions and priorities that drive mainstream American media right now and drive media critics crazy. For example, a question about Harris’s position on fracking was an attempt to have a gotcha moment and portray her as a flip-flopper, and it came long before the final question, which was an afterthought of a throwaway question about climate.Harris’s answer was disappointingly all over the place – “I am proud that as vice-president over the last four years, we have invested $1tn in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” Trump didn’t answer the climate question at all, and that was that. The fate of the earth for the next 10,000 years or so was brushed aside, but on the other hand the world’s biggest pop star did choose this evening to endorse Harris, signing herself off as “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady”.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      Harris’s powerful abortion stance and Trump’s fact-checks: key takeaways from the debate

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      The presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went head to head on Tuesday night in their first – and potentially only – debate before voters head to the polls on 5 November. The candidates went into the event virtually tied in the polls with just weeks to convince a small but mighty minority of unsure voters on how to cast their ballot.After weeks of arguments over the format and rules, the debate aired live on ABC from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a key swing state, with no audience in attendance and each candidate’s microphone muted while their opponent spoke.This was the second presidential debate this year for Trump, who also went up against Joe Biden in June. The latter’s devastating performance triggered an upheaval within the Democratic party that would ultimately push Biden to step down and position Harris to head the ticket, an outcome Trump both takes credit for and complains about at his rallies.With just 55 days until votes are tallied, Harris strived to highlight that she has a plan, and clearly responded to criticisms that she hasn’t shared enough details with voters about her platform and priorities. With focused rhetoric on planning for the future, building the middle class, and reframing her record on everything from immigration to climate, Harris was able to show voters how she hopes to lead.Analysts, meanwhile, were watching Trump’s demeanor and clarity. The former president repeated frequent rhetoric from his rallies – including widely disputed claims about abortion, crime, and his belief that he won the 2020 election – but shared little about how he would address key problems Americans are facing.Beyond their differences in policy positions, the candidates also displayed diverging visions of the country. Trump promised his base to restore what he sees as the glory of the past, and Harris heralded the hope of a brighter future.Here are the highlights:1. Trump repeatedly spewed misinformationThroughout the debate Trump spread misinformation to make his points, repeating already debunked rhetoric on everything from the results of the 2020 election to his involvement in Project 2025 – a conservative-backed plan to change the US government from the inside out. The former president distanced himself from the January 6 attack on the Capitol, saying he was there only to make a speech, and blamed then House majority leader Nancy Pelosi for not beefing up security. He also incorrectly said crime rates had risen in the US when they have in fact fallen.2. … and was frequently fact-checked by the moderatorsABC’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, were largely praised for delivering a strong performance. They effectively rerouted discussions back to the questions they had asked on key topics including the economy, immigration, abortion rights and the peaceful transfer of power, and made important clarifying fact-check statements when they were warranted.Muir and Davis are veteran journalists who have collectively spent decades helping the American public navigate presidential positions. Feedback for their performance stands in contrast to the CNN debate in June, when moderators frequently missed opportunities to fact check Trump and Joe Biden.3. Harris defended Democrats’ position on reproductive rightsWhen challenged on his changing take on access to abortion care, Trump made some alarming – and easily refuted – claims that Democrats supported executing babies after they are born. He also took credit for overturning of Roe v Wade, a decision made by the supreme court after he appointed three members to make a conservative majority, that was unpopular with the majority of Americans. Trump did clarify his position though, that he believes in exceptions for rape, incest and threats to the mother’s life.Harris called his stances “insulting to the women of America”, and countered his statements that he delivered on a promise to bring the issue back to the states by saying “the people of American have voted for freedom”. She highlighted the difficult realities faced by women in states with abortion bans and would-be mothers who would struggle to access IVF care.4. The candidates both touted their work to improve the economyHarris was quick to tout her “opportunity economy”, a plan that includes tax reductions for those starting small businesses, relief for new parents and first-time homebuyers, and a crackdown on corporate price-gouging. “I am the only person on this stage that is about lifting up the middle class,” Harris said, noting her upbringing in a middle-class household.Trump, meanwhile, claimed that he oversaw the “best economy”, even with the downturn caused by the Covid pandemic, and accused his opponent of increasing costs on American families. “People can’t go out and buy cereal, or bacon, or anything else,” he said.Inflation did spike under the Biden-Harris administration, but it has fallen just as quickly. As of August, the US inflation rate settled at 2.9%, below the nearly 3.3% average.Trump also touted his stance on tariffs, which he plans to prioritize if he regains the White House.5. Trump spouted salacious and sometimes racist claims about immigrantsThroughout the debate, Trump pivoted his talking points to immigration, spouting salacious claims about criminals being welcomed into the country and towns where pets are eaten by incoming immigrants.While debate moderators attempted to counter the claims, challenging Trump on the validity and also on how he would execute the deportation of millions as he’s promised to do, Harris took the offensive. Highlighting her record as “the only person on the stage who has prosecuted transnational organizations”, she also accused her opponent of calling on the GOP to oppose legislation to bolster the border.“He preferred to run on a problem rather than fixing a problem,” she said.6. The candidates sparred over Ukraine and how they would handle the warHarris said that if Trump were currently in office, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, would have taken Kyiv, saying Putin would “eat you for lunch”.“I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up,” Harris also said.When Trump was asked by Muir how he would end the war – and specifically if he wanted Ukraine to win – the former president did not offer a clear answer.“I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly. People being killed by the millions,” he said. When pressed again on if it is in the US best interest for Ukraine to win he doubled down. “I think it’s the US best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, all right, negotiate a deal, because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.”7. Harris baited Trump by attacking him where it hurtsAs moderators pushed Harris to respond to criticisms she and Biden have faced over border policy, the vice-president expertly derailed her opponent’s rhetoric on what is perhaps his favorite issue to discuss by deriding his performances at rallies.She invited voters to view the speeches for themselves, saying that attenders can be seen leaving out of exhaustion and boredom, and characterized the events as a platform for Trump’s complaints and not plans that put the American people first.The jab landed well. An offended and flustered Trump jumped on the chance to defend attendance at his rallies, claiming Harris pays attendees at her own campaign events, and then pivoted to insults that failed to hit their mark. He accused Harris of planning to turn the country into “Venezuela on steroids”, and called the US a “failing nation”, before resurfacing false claims that immigrants were eating people’s pets.Read more about the 2024 US election:

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      Taylor Swift endorses Harris in post signed ‘childless cat lady’

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      Rally sizes, abortion and eating cats: the Trump and Harris debate – podcast More

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      Harris targets Trump for falsehoods on abortion and immigration in fiery debate

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump sparred on Tuesday in a contentious presidential debate that repeatedly went off the rails, as Trump pursued bizarre and often falsehood-ridden tangents about crowd sizes, immigration policy and abortion access.The Philadelphia debate marked arguably the most significant opportunity for both Harris and Trump since Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race in July, and the event began cordially enough. Harris crossed over to Trump’s podium to shake his hand and introduce herself, an acknowledgement that the two presidential nominees had never met face to face before Tuesday night.But the cordiality did not last long. After delivering some boilerplate attack lines about the high inflation seen earlier in Biden’s presidency, Trump pivoted to mocking Harris as a “Marxist” and peddling baseless claims that Democrats want to “execute the baby” by allowing abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy.That false claim was corrected by both Harris and the ABC News anchor Linsey Davis, who joined her fellow moderator David Muir in fact-checking some of Trump’s statements throughout the evening. Harris then segued into a stinging rebuke of Trump’s record on abortion, criticizing him for nominating three of the supreme court justices who ruled to overturn Roe v Wade in 2022.“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said. “And I pledge to you, when Congress passes a bill to put back in place the protections of Roe v Wade, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it in to law.”Despite broad public support for Roe v Wade, Trump boasted about his role in reversing it and applauded the supreme court’s “great courage” in issuing its ruling, while he dodged repeated questions about whether he would veto a national abortion ban as president.Trump seemed to trip over himself even when moderators offered questions on his strongest issues, such as immigration. When asked about Biden’s handling of the US-Mexico border, Harris pivoted to discussing Trump’s campaign rallies.“I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said. “You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about [how] windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”The tangent appeared to be a blatant attempt by Harris to bait Trump into squabbling over attendance at his rallies instead of discussing immigration policy – and it worked. Trump began attacking Harris with baseless accusations that her campaign was paying people to attend her rallies while celebrating his own events as “the most incredible rallies in the history of politics”.Then, rather than highlighting his immigration proposals, Trump chose to spread debunked claims that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city have started capturing and eating their neighbors’ pets.“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”The outburst instantly became a source of mockery on social media, as Democrats celebrated Trump for “doubling down on the crazy uncle vibe”, in the words of the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg.Even as moments of the debate bordered on absurdity, other exchanges regarding foreign policy and the January 6 insurrection felt heavy with meaning. Pressed on his false claims regarding widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Trump again refused to acknowledge his defeat, prompting a stark warning from Harris.“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so, let’s be clear about that. And, clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that,” Harris said. “But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election.”On foreign policy, Harris fielded difficult questions on the war in Gaza, as she expressed her support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” while calling for “security, self determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve” for Palestinians.Asked about his own stance on the war, Trump reiterated his bombastic claims that his presence in the White House would have prevented the wars in both Gaza and Ukraine.“If I were president, it would have never started,” Trump said. “If I were president, Russia would have never, ever. I know Putin very well. He would have never –and there was no threat of it either, by the way, for four years – have gone into Ukraine.”And yet, when asked directly whether he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Russia, Trump deflected.“I want the war to stop,” Trump said. “I think it’s the US’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, all right? Negotiate a deal because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.”The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.Read more about the 2024 US election:

      Fact-checking the presidential debate

      Harris slams Trump for falsehoods in fiery debate

      Taylor Swift endorses Harris in post signed ‘childless cat lady’

      ‘Maga mad libs’: How the debate played out on social media

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      Rally sizes, abortion and eating cats: the Trump and Harris debate – podcast More

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      Donald Trump threatens to pull out of 10 September presidential debate

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      Donald Trump has expressed doubt that he will participate in a scheduled televised debate with Kamala Harris next month, hurling a trademark “fake news” slur at the network that had agreed to host it.The former president and Republican nominee threatened to pull out of the 10 September meeting with Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee for November’s election, in a post on his Truth Social network on Sunday night.Referring to an interview on ABC’s This Week earlier in the day with the host Jonathan Karl and the Republican Arkansas US senator Tom Cotton, Trump questioned the network’s fairness for the only debate that both presidential candidates had already agreed on.“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s(K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump wrote with his usual penchant for erroneous upper case letters.He also alluded to his ongoing defamation lawsuit against the This Week host George Stephanopoulos and the ABC network over comments the anchor made in March stating Trump had been found “liable for rape” instead of sexual abuse in a case brought by the New York writer E Jean Carroll.It is not the first time that Trump, who trails Harris by seven points nationally in a new Fairleigh Dickinson University poll published on Saturday, has sowed doubt over his debate appearance.“Right now I say, why should I do a debate? I’m leading in the polls. And, everybody knows her, everybody knows me,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network earlier this month after Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.He stated he had pledged instead to take part in a 4 September debate on Fox News, to which the Harris campaign did not agree, saying he would see Harris there “or not at all”, before changing his mind again.Harris, meanwhile, seized on Trump’s wavering commitment before a lively crowd at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, last month. “If you got something to say, say it to my face,” she said.Trump’s latest hesitation comes amid a reported impasse between the two presidential campaigns over the conditions of next month’s debate. Politico cited four sources on Monday claiming that negotiations had broken down over the turning off of the participants’ microphones when it was not their turn to speak.According to the report, the Harris campaign is demanding that the microphones be left “hot” at all times, in the apparent belief that the vice-president can make Trump lose his cool under questioning and utter something damaging or inappropriate.Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, has been pressing for them to be turned off.“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, senior adviser for communications for the Harris campaign, told Politico in a statement.“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own. We suspect Trump’s team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don’t think he can handle himself … without the benefit of a mute button.”On Monday, Trump appeared to undercut his campaign’s position by declaring he would prefer to have the microphones on.“I’d rather have it probably on, but the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted. I didn’t like it the last time, but it worked out fine,” he told reporters.Trump’s campaign had insisted Harris was reneging on terms agreed for the debate by the Biden campaign when it accepted the 10 September date – and another meeting on CNN in June that never took place.Conditions for those debates included the turning off of microphones between exchanges, as was traditional in debates during previous presidential campaigns.“Enough with the games,” Jason Miller, a Trump senior adviser, told Politico in a statement on Sunday.“We accepted the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate. The Harris camp, after having already agreed to the CNN rules, asked for a seated debate, with notes, and opening statements. We said no changes to the agreed upon rules.”The Harris campaign disputed the accuracy of Miller’s statement, as well as his assertion that it was Harris seeking to withdraw from the debate – and not Trump.“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. My guess is that they’re looking for a way to get out of any debate with President Trump,” he said.The dispute comes as the Trump campaign seeks ways to blunt significant momentum built by Harris since she became the Democratic nominee, including a surge in both polling and donations.On Monday, the Guardian reported growing fears among the former president’s senior staff that “palace intrigue” over its leadership could distract from the urgency of regaining a solid footing in the race with little more than 10 weeks until the 5 November polling day. More

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      Harris and Trump agree to debate on ABC in September as race tightens

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will face off for the first time in a televised debate on 10 September, ABC News has confirmed.The event is expected to draw a huge viewership, and could be a make-or-break moment for both candidates in what polls indicate is an extremely close race.“I am looking forward to debating Donald Trump and we have a date of September 10. I hear he’s finally committed to it and I’m looking forward to it,” the vice-president told reporters in Michigan on Thursday.The former president had previously agreed to appear on ABC News to debate Joe Biden, but after the president stepped down from his re-election campaign, Trump suggested he would back out.During a rambling press conference on Thursday, he backtracked, saying he was willing to debate Harris three times in September – on ABC, and on Fox News and NBC.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionABC News confirmed in a statement it will “host qualifying presidential candidates to debate on September 10 on ABC. Vice-President Harris and former President Trump have both confirmed they will attend the ABC debate.”Harris had not committed to further debates on NBC or Fox, but told reporters: “I am happy to have that conversation about an additional debate, or after September 10, for sure.”More than 51 million people tuned in to watch the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden in June. Biden’s faltering performance at the event marked the beginning of the end of his campaign. Over the next month, Trump survived an assassination attempt, Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic candidate, launching a campaign that is quickly gaining momentum.Whereas Biden had been trailing Trump in key swing states, Harris has made gains – in some cases leading her rival in polls. An Ipsos poll published on Thursday found Harris ahead of Trump by 42% to 37%, compared to a 22 to 23 July Reuters/Ipsos survey, which showed her up 37% to 34% over Trump.Harris’s swift ascent has left the Trump campaign scrambling and struggling to develop a coherent attack line against her. During his Thursday press conference, which was his first public appearance since Harris named the Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Trump repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s name, questioned her racial identity, and made a number of outlandish, false claims about the economy, the Biden administration’s record and his own. More

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      ABC host reportedly received death threats after Trump interview

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      ABC News’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott has reportedly faced threats to her life after her piercing interview of Donald Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists convention left the former president fuming.The NABJ’s executive director told members at a meeting on Saturday that “Scott had received death threats following her work asking incisive questions of … Trump at the group’s national convention” three days earlier, Eric Deggans of National Public Radio wrote in an X post published Saturday.Deggans didn’t elaborate, and the Guardian has asked the NABJ, ABC and Scott for comment.Scott asked Trump on Wednesday, “Why should Black voters trust you?” given his history of inflammatory comments about Black people. Among other questions, she also quizzed him about whether he believed Vice-President Kamala Harris had risen to the top of the Democratic ticket for November’s White House election solely “because she is a Black woman”.Trump replied to Scott by accusing her of being “rude” and having presented a “nasty question”. In reference to Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, he said: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black.“So, I don’t know. Is she Indian, or is she Black?”Trump’s comments about Harris drew widespread derision at a time when polls, including one Sunday from CBS News, show the pair essentially tied in key battleground states. Notably, on Sunday, US senator Lindsey Graham – one of Trump’s fellow prominent Republicans – urged him to focus on condemning her policies rather than her heritage.“Every day we’re talking about her heritage and not her … record … is a good day for her and a bad day for us,” Graham said on Fox News Sunday.Scott’s encounter with Trump added to the former president’s long record of hostility toward reporters. Frequently, he excoriates journalists as unpatriotic enemies of the people, uses his lectern as a platform from which to hurl insults at the press and singles out reporters by name as purveyors of “fake news” – often in the presence of an irate mob of supporters.Some in his circle even blamed the failed 13 July assassination attempt targeting Trump on news coverage that was critical of the former president, who just in May was convicted in criminal court of falsifying business records to hide hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.United Nations experts have previously warned that such vitriol from Trump and his supporters – hundreds of whom attacked the US Capitol after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden – enhances the possibilities of violence against the press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBlack journalists criticized organizers of the NABJ’s convention in Chicago for booking Trump’s appearance, citing his anti-Black, anti-journalist and anti-democracy stances.The NABJ’s president, Ken Lemon, defended the decision to invite Trump to speak as continuing a tradition of questioning national political figures. But the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah resigned from her position as co-chairperson of the convention’s organizing committee in protest of having Trump address the gathering.Scott moderated Trump’s session Wednesday at the NABJ convention with co-moderators Harris Faulkner of Fox News and Kadia Goba of Semafor. More

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      Biden says only ‘the Lord almighty’ could make him drop out in pivotal TV interview

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      Joe Biden has insisted that only “the Lord almighty” could persuade him to exit the US presidential race in a potential make-or-break TV interview aimed at quelling a burgeoning rebellion in the Democratic party.In an exchange free from major gaffes but unlikely to appease his critics, Biden was asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC News how he would feel if he were to remain the nominee and lose to Donald Trump. “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” the president replied.In other responses his opponents may see as arrogant or out of touch, the 81-year-old claimed that he is “running the world” and no one is “more qualified” to be president.The interview on Friday came at a critical stretch as the 81-year-old strives to salvage his imperiled re-election campaign after last month’s disastrous debate performance. Four members of Congress have called on Biden to step aside, and it was reported that Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, is looking to assemble a group of Democratic senators to ask the president to drop his re-election bid.But on Friday, speaking to Stephanopoulos in Madison, Wisconsin, after a fiery campaign rally, the embattled president continued to strike a defiant tone. “Look. I mean, if the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get outta the race,’ I’d get outta the race,” he said, his voice sounding strained after the rally. “The Lord Almighty’s not comin’ down.”Biden insisted that after meeting with Democratic leaders such as Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi and state governors, they continue to back him.Stephanopoulos, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, pressed Biden on what he would do if told that his friends and supporters were concerned that his candidacy would cost Democrats the House of Representatives and Senate.The president replied: “I’m not going to answer that question. It’s not going to happen.”Stephanopoulos had begun the primetime interview by citing Pelosi, who this week questioned whether Biden’s feeble performance represented an episode or a condition.“It was a bad episode,” Biden insisted. “No indication of any serious condition. I was exhausted. I didn’t listen to my instincts in terms of preparing and – I had a bad night.”Stephanopoulos noted that Biden had returned from Europe 12 days before the debate and that he had spent six days at the presidential retreat Camp David. “Why wasn’t that enough rest time, enough recovery time?” he asked.The president replied: “Because I was sick. I was feeling terrible. Matter of fact, the doc’s with me. I asked if they did a Covid test because they’re trying to figure out what was wrong. They did a test to see whether or not I had some infection, you know, a virus. I didn’t. I just had a really bad cold.”Stephanopoulos asked whether Biden had watched the debate afterwards. Instead of giving a firm yes or no, he hedged: “I don’t think I did, no.”The interviewer went on to ask what Biden had been experiencing during the debate and whether he had known how badly it was going. Just as he did on that night, the president zigzagged in his answer from one point to another. He said: “Yeah, look. The whole way I prepared, nobody’s fault, mine. Nobody’s fault but mine.“I – I prepared what I usually would do sittin’ down as I did come back with foreign leaders or National Security Council for explicit detail. And I realised – partway through that, you know, all – I get quoted the New York Times had me down, 10 points before the debate, nine now, or whatever the hell it is.“The fact of the matter is, what I looked at is that he also lied 28 times. I couldn’t – I mean, the way the debate ran, not – my fault, nobody else’s fault, no one else’s fault.”Stephanopoulos challenged Biden that concerns about his fitness for office followed a pattern, citing a recent New York Times article that reported his lapses were becoming more frequent, pronounced and worrisome.Biden said: “Can I run a 110 flat? No. But I’m still in good shape.”Asked whether he would be willing to have an independent cognitive evaluation and release the results to the American people, Biden said: “Look, I have a cognitive test every single day. Every day I’ve had tests. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, I’m running the world. And that sounds like hyperbole but we are the essential nation in the world.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe interviewer asked: “Are you sure you’re being honest with yourself when you’re saying you have the mental and physical capacity to serve another four years?”Biden shot back: “Yes, I am because, George, the last thing I want to do is not be able to meet that. I think as some of the senior economist and senior foreign policy specialists say, if I stopped now I’d go down in history as a pretty successful president. No one thought I could get done what we got done.”The 22-minute interview was shown to a national audience on ABC. It was part of a major campaign offensive over the weekend to assuage doubts over Biden’s fitness for office and ability to beat Trump.The Biden campaign’s response to the crisis over the past few days has frustrated many Democrats. Some financial backers are holding off or canceling upcoming fundraisers.And at least four House Democrats have called for him to step down as the nominee: Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Lloyd Doggett of Texas and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona and Mike Quigley of Illinois are pushing for an alternative. Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said in a carefully worded statement on Friday that Biden now has a decision to make on “the best way forward”.In the interview, Biden dismissed those calls, as well as opinion polls that show he has a low approval rating and claimed that he remains better placed than other candidates to beat Trump. “I don’t think anybody is more qualified to be president or win this race than me,” he said, bristling.Stephanopoulos followed up: “The heart of your case against Donald Trump is that he’s only out for himself, putting his personal interests ahead of the national interest. How do you respond to critics who say that by staying in the race you’re doing the same thing?”Biden responded impatiently: “Oh, come on. I don’t think those critics know what you’re talking about. It’s wrong. Look, Trump is a pathological liar. You ever seen anything Trump did that benefited somebody else and not him?”The president may have just days to make a persuasive case that he is capable of beating Trump. Early reactions to his rallies and interviews have been mixed.John Fetterman, the Democratic senator for Pennsylvania, wrote on the social media platform X: “Democrats need to get a spine or grow a set — one or the other. Joe Biden is our guy.”But David Axelrod, a former strategist for Barack Obama, posted: “The president is rightfully proud of his record. But he is dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have about his capacities moving forward and his standing in this race. Four years ago at this time, he was 10 points ahead of Trump. Today, he is six points behind.” More