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      Harris calls out Trump again for ‘looking for an excuse’ to avoid a second debate

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      Kamala Harris laid down another challenge to Republican rival Donald Trump to meet her for a second debate before November’s presidential election, telling supporters in New York that her opponent “seems to be looking for an excuse” to avoid a second confrontation.On Saturday, the vice-president and Democratic nominee said she had accepted an invitation from CNN to debate the former president, but Trump said it was already “too late”.In her remarks at a New York fundraiser, Harris doubled down in her taunting of Trump over the issue, saying: “I think we should have another debate.”“I accepted an invitation to debate in October, which my opponent seems to be looking for an excuse to avoid when he should accept,” she added. “He should accept because I feel very strongly that we owe it to the American people, to the voters, to meet once more before election day.”The question of the US’s high stakes presidential debates has hung over the candidates since Joe Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance in June. The single scheduled debate between Trump and Harris, earlier this month, was widely viewed to have gone Harris’s way and been a serious blow to Trump.But it did not move the polls as much as the Harris campaign hoped and her campaign is still tasked with introducing her to US voters. Last week, Harris went on Oprah to help smooth the introduction along.This week Harris is due to reveal a set of new economic policies. Polls show she is steadily gaining trust on the key issue of the economy, which often favors Trump and the Republican party.On Sunday, Harris returned to the key themes of the message Democrats wish to underline – a threat to democracy they perceive a second Trump terms represents and the knife-edge that polls suggest the race remains balanced upon.“This is a man who said he would be a dictator on day one … just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said in New York. “This race is as close as it could be. This is a margin of error race … and I am running and we are running as the underdog.”Harris called Trump an “unserious man”, but said the consequences of putting him back in the White House were “very serious”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHead-to-head polls tend to show Harris with a narrow but solid lead over Trump, though the situation is more mixed in the crucial swing states that will decide the race to the White House. That is a reverse of the situation when Biden was in the race, where Trump had established a firm lead over the US president. More

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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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      Trump Heads to North Carolina as Mark Robinson’s Campaign Reels

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      With somewhat awkward timing, former President Donald J. Trump plans to campaign in North Carolina on Saturday as his pick for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, faces accusations of making disturbing posts on a pornographic website.Mr. Trump’s visit to Wilmington, N.C., for a rally will take place two days after CNN reported that Mr. Robinson had once called himself a “black NAZI!” and defended slavery years ago on a pornographic forum.Mr. Robinson, whom Mr. Trump endorsed in March, has denied the report and vowed to stay in the race. But both parties are looking closely at the fallout, which could have a spillover effect in the presidential contest, given that North Carolina is a key battleground state that Mr. Trump won twice but that Democrats see as competitive.The lieutenant governor, who has a long history of making inflammatory and offensive remarks, is not expected to attend Mr. Trump’s rally on Saturday, according to a person familiar with the program’s details. Mr. Robinson was also absent when Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, visited the state on Wednesday, the day before CNN released its report.A spokesman for Mr. Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. The Trump campaign avoided weighing in on the controversy when asked for comment on Friday.Democrats, who last carried North Carolina in the 2008 presidential race, are seeking to remind voters in the increasingly competitive state about Mr. Trump’s past praise for Mr. Robinson. Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign released a television ad on Friday, “Both Wrong,” highlighting Mr. Trump’s past warm words for Mr. Robinson and some of Mr. Robinson’s past polarizing statements. At least nine electronic billboards around the state will display ads on Friday and Saturday paid for by the Democratic National Committee linking the two Republicans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With Robinson Candidacy, North Carolina Republicans Fear Damage to Years of Gains

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      Explosive posts by the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, are sending waves of anxiety through a state party that has long been tactical and disciplined.The great Republican wave that swept the South starting in the late 20th Century — the very wave that Lyndon Johnson predicted after signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 — came relatively late to North Carolina. But when it finally hit in 2013, with Republicans controlling both the legislature and the governor’s mansion for the first time since Reconstruction, it did so with breathtaking force. Led by a group of savvy, tactically skilled state lawmakers, North Carolina Republicans set out to undo decades of center-left policy enshrined by Democrats, and to remake the rules of the political game in their favor.They engaged in gerrymandering that ensured the party a near-lock on the state legislature and lopsided control of the state’s House delegation in Congress. They paved the way for a conservative state Supreme Court that upheld a strict voter ID law. And after gaining a veto-proof majority last year, they banned most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.And while Republicans lost the governorship in 2016, they had harbored hope of winning full control of state government again this year, bringing North Carolina in alignment with most other Southern states.Then came Mark Robinson.Long before this week, when CNN reported that Mr. Robinson had called himself a “black NAZI!,” discussed his pornography habits and praised slavery in an adult online forum, the bellicose Republican nominee for governor (and current lieutenant governor) was polling poorly against his Democratic rival, Josh Stein.But now more than ever, Mr. Robinson, with his antisemitic and anti-gay rhetoric and performative, polarizing brand of politics, is sending waves of anxiety through the state party.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance Stands By False Pet-Eating Claims Roiling Ohio City

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      Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, doubled down Sunday on the false claims that he and former President Donald J. Trump have spread suggesting Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, which has received numerous bomb threats in the days since the claims surfaced.Mr. Vance said on CNN that the claims, which have been debunked by city officials in Springfield, had come from “firsthand accounts from my constituents,” and attacked the interviewer, Dana Bash, for fact-checking him, calling her a “Democratic propagandist” for connecting his and Mr. Trump’s words to the bomb threats.“I’ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months,” he said in the interview. He went on: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”When Ms. Bash noted he had said “creating,” Mr. Vance replied, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”The false claims about the immigrants in Springfield have exploded since Mr. Vance became the first prominent national figure to promote them last week, repeating them on social media. The Trump campaign quickly amplified them, and Mr. Vance subsequently acknowledged that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”But Mr. Trump repeated the claims to an audience of tens of millions of people during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday.During the interview, Ms. Bash noted that Springfield city officials had asked national figures like Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump to stop demonizing the migrants, who are mostly in the country legally under a temporary authorization program for people whose homelands are in crisis. “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it,” the mayor, Rob Rue, told WSYX, a local news station in Ohio.Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, said in an interview on ABC News on Sunday morning that the claim that migrants were eating pets was “a piece of garbage that was simply not true.” He said that while there were some “challenges” involved in accommodating thousands of migrants, they had benefited Springfield economically. More

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      Brian Stelter Returns to CNN as Chief Media Analyst

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      Mr. Stelter, who left CNN two years ago, will be helming his newsletter for the network, but without a Sunday show.CNN’s “Reliable Sources” is back. Kind of.Brian Stelter, a media reporter and pundit who left CNN two years ago amid differences with the network’s previous leadership, is returning to the company as its chief media analyst and writer of its “Reliable Sources” newsletter.The network’s Sunday morning round table of media criticism that he had hosted, also called “Reliable Sources,” will not return. In his new role, Mr. Stelter will serve as an on-air analyst in addition to writing his newsletter and reporting for the network.Mr. Stelter, 39, announced his return to CNN on Tuesday in the newsletter he founded, saying he was back at the network in a somewhat different capacity.“I loved my old life as the anchor of a Sunday morning show but, to borrow some lingo from my video game blogger days, I finished that level of the game,” Mr. Stelter said. “Time for new levels, new challenges.”Mark Thompson, CNN’s chief executive, said in a statement that he was “happy to welcome” Mr. Stelter back to CNN, calling him “one of the best global experts in media commentary.”Mr. Stelter replaces Oliver Darcy as author of the newsletter. Mr. Darcy recently left the network to start his own subscription-based news site, Status, which focuses on media and entertainment news. CNN also regularly calls upon Sara Fischer, a media reporter for Axios, as an on-air analyst.Mr. Stelter, a former New York Times reporter, joined CNN in 2013 as host of “Reliable Sources” under the network’s president at the time, Jeff Zucker, and left in 2022 after a new leader, Chris Licht, reprogrammed the network. When Mr. Licht took over, he sought to steer the network away from partisan analysis that had become popular on CNN during the administration of President Donald J. Trump. In some cases, that meant removing voices that he perceived as too liberal. Mr. Stelter was among the prominent network hosts who audience research showed were most closely associated with having a liberal tilt.Mr. Stelter began negotiating his return to CNN in the last three weeks, after Mr. Darcy announced plans to leave the network, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Darcy’s decision was unrelated to Mr. Stelter’s appointment, another person said.In the inaugural edition of his new newsletter, Mr. Stelter was reflective about his bumpy departure from CNN, saying it allowed him to experience the news “more like an everyday consumer,” honing his focus on “the attention economy and the information ecosystem.”“I always scoffed at people who said ‘getting fired was the best thing that’s ever happened to me’ — until, well, it happened to me,” Mr. Stelter wrote. More

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      Maybe We Are Asking Presidential Candidates the Wrong Questions

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      If the goal of the CNN interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was to relitigate the campaign controversies of the last month — to get the candidates to talk about the major narratives of the election so far — then it was a rousing success. Harris easily dispatched questions about her identity and gave a strong defense of President Biden’s record. Walz, likewise, made short work of the charge that he had misled the public when he spoke about using one fertility treatment when it was actually another, similar treatment.But if the goal was to learn something about a prospective President Harris — to gain insight into how she might make decisions, order priorities and approach the job of chief executive — then I think the interview was not a success. Not so much for Harris or the viewing public.It might be interesting to journalists to know how Harris explains her changing views from 2019, when she ran for the Democratic nomination, to now, when she is the nominee. But it is not at all clear to me that it is interesting to viewers, who may be less concerned with how she deals with the question and more concerned with the actual substance of what she wants to do as president. A soft-focus question about a photograph, however iconic, seems less valuable than a question about Harris’s view of the presidency now that she’s spent almost four years in the passenger’s seat as vice president.Speaking for myself, I am less interested in hearing candidates navigate controversies or speak to narratives than I am in hearing them talk, for lack of a better term, about their theory of the office. How does a candidate for president conceptualize the presidency? What would she prioritize in office and how would she handle an endless onslaught of crises and issues that may, or may not, demand her attention? How does she imagine her relationship with Congress and how would she try to achieve her goals in the face of an opposition legislature? How does she imagine her relationship with the public and what value does she place on communication and the bully pulpit? Are there presidents she most admires — and why? Are there presidential accomplishments that stand out and how so? What are the worst mistakes a president can make? Why do you want this job in the first place?I can think of other questions along these lines, but you get the gist. To know what candidates for president think about the office and their role in it is, I believe, a better guide to what they may do in the White House than almost anything else. The only thing better is prior experience. These kinds of questions may not make for the most scintillating television, but I think they could provide the kind of insights that could actually help Americans decide what they want out of a national leader.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris’s interview: Democrats swoon while Republicans grimace

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      Democrats lauded it as the perfect pitch; Donald Trump dismissed it as “boring”, while fellow Republicans invoked derogatory terms like “gobbledygook”.Between the two extremes, Kamala Harris appeared to have achieved what she wanted from Thursday’s groundbreaking CNN interview, given along with her running mate, Tim Walz – her first since become the Democratic presidential nominee.Under fierce scrutiny after nearly six weeks of interview radio silence, the vice-president earned lavish praise from the Democratic base while denying Republicans a clear line of attack simply by avoiding major missteps of the type that undid Joe Biden’s candidacy in June’s climactic debate.The performance is also unlikely to shake up a race that has reversed itself since Harris entered it and replaced Biden, flipping a narrow but solid Trump lead into a contest in which she is now firmly ahead.A commentator with AZCentral.com – a news site in the key swing state of Arizona – called the performance “too sane to be great TV”, an implicit comparison with Trump’s frequently ostentatious media appearances.Commenting on her championing of Biden’s record in office, the New York Times noted that “it turns out, Ms Harris is a better salesperson for Mr Biden’s accomplishments and defender of his record than he ever was”.But the highest praise came from Harris’s party supporters.“This interview with Dana Bash is a moment to recognize that it is absolutely under-appreciated that Vice President Harris is running a perfect campaign,” Bill Burton, a former deputy press secretary in Barack Obama’s presidency, posted on X.“She took over a campaign that she did not hire. She added pieces to the team who have made it stronger. She ran a convention that was absolutely electric in its energy. And she stepped up to the biggest speech of her life and achieved at the highest level … She is a true inspiration.”Ed Krassenstein, a pro-Democrat X user with 1m followers, wrote: “Kamala Harris is killing it. She’s showing she is a unifying, non-divisive force … Her poll numbers will go up after this interview.”Another vocal Democratic supporter, Alex Cole, praised Harris for sidestepping a question from the interviewer, Dana Bash, on Trump’s recent comments denigrating her mixed racial identity, which the vice-president dismissed as “the same tired old playbook”.“Kamala isn’t playing by Trump’s or the media’s rules. They can’t lay a hand on her,” Cole wrote. “Trump craves the attention.”Harris’s low-key approach even won the grudging praise of the Republican pollster Frank Luntz when she vowed to enact a bipartisan immigration bill that Trump had pressured his GOP congressional allies into torpedoing.“Harris reminding voters that Trump sunk a bipartisan immigration solution makes him look pretty bad. Smart approach,” Luntz wrote.Predictably, the most forceful attacks came from Trump himself, who began went on the offensive even before the interview was broadcast.On Harris’s response to being pressed on her abandonment of previous leftwing policy positions, Trump wrote: “Her answer rambled incoherently, and declared her ‘values haven’t changed.’ On that I agree, her values haven’t changed.”A related post conjured up Trump’s frequent and bizarre depiction of Harris as a communist, reading simply: “Comrade Kamala: ‘My values have not changed.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnder a Harris presidency, “America will become a WASTELAND,” Trump wrote, reverting to his habit of using block capitals.He even took issue with the interview’s setting, a Black-owned restaurant in the historic Georgian city of Savannah, suggesting it made Harris look unpresidential.“She was sitting behind that desk – this massive desk – and she didn’t look like a leader to me,” Trump said at a campaign event in Wisconsin. “I’ll be honest, I don’t see her negotiating with President Xi of China. I don’t see her with Kim Jong-un like we did with Kim Jong-un.”Jason Miller, a Trump spokesperson and former presidential assistant, asked why the interview lasted only 27 minutes, well short of the hour CNN had slotted for it in its schedule.“How many minutes of fluff filler did CNN have to run to make up for the ridiculously short interview?” he wrote, asking if the network was forced to “cut some of Kamala’s answers, and that’s why they couldn’t fill the hour?”The rightwing Fox News channel highlighted the mocking responses of conservative commentators to Harris’s comments on the climate crisis, when she extolled her work on the Green New Deal and said the administration was “holding ourselves to deadlines around time”.“Gobbledygook,” posted a conservative commentator, Steve Guest, on X. “The definition of a deadline is ‘the latest time or date by which something should be completed’.”But having promised a presidency that would seek “consensus” and vowed to appoint a Republican to her cabinet, Harris may have noted with quiet satisfaction Trump’s ultimate verdict on her interview: “Boring!”The judgment could have been a tacit admission that Harris’s performance had denied him a clear target as he prepares for a keynote debate with her in two weeks.“On issue after issue, Harris signaled moderation and a gauzy centrism that has been the hallmark of every winning Democratic presidential campaign for decades,” Politico said on its Playbook column. “The interview suggested to us how tough Donald Trump’s job is now – and especially at the Sept. 10 debate.” More