Donald Trump said he was pulling out of a scheduled September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on ABC and instead wanted them to face off on Fox News, making it increasingly unlikely that the candidates would have a fact-to-face confrontation on a public stage before the November election.
In a series of Truth Social posts on August 2, the Republican nominee and convicted felon said his agreement to a September 10 debate on ABC “has been terminated” because he will no longer face Democratic President Joe Biden, who ended his campaign last month after a disastrous performance in their first debate.
Critics were quick to point out that Trump’s decision showed he was running scared, and unable to control the news cycle after President Joe Biden withdrew from his election campaign.
Trump now claims he will appear on Fox News on September 4 in Pennsylvania with a format and rules that he could control. Instead of an empty studio there would be a full audience and no safeguard for fact-checking all of Trump’s lies.
Trump issued an ultimatum that if Vice President Harris, the likely Democratic nominee, did not agree to the new terms at his allied network, he would do a “major Town Hall” with Fox News on that date instead.
Michael Tyler, a Harris spokesperson, said 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.”
It was not immediately clear whether ABC would turn its September 10 event into a Harris town hall in Trump’s absence. Tyler said Harris was committed to the time slot and would appear “one way or the other to take the opportunity to speak to a prime-time national audience.”
In a subsequent Truth Social post on August 3, Trump said of Harris, “I’ll see her on September 4th or, I won’t see her at all.”
Trump has gone back and forth on debating with Vice President Harris since she entered the presidential race. He had told reporters he felt an obligation to debate but also said in a recent Fox News interview that he thought Americans “already know everything” about both candidates.
Vice President Harris has pressed Trump to keep the commitment he made when President Biden was in the race. Noting Trump’s criticisms of her, the Vice President dared him recently to “say it to my face.”
In his Truth Social posts, Trump also cited his litigation against ABC News as “a conflict of interest” in his participation in the network’s debate.
Trump sued the network in March following an assertion by anchor George Stephanopoulos that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” A New York jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
But Trump agreed, two months after filing his lawsuit, to the September 10 debate on ABC, as well as the June 27 debate on CNN that helped knock Biden out of the race. David Muir and Linsey Davis, not Stephanopoulos, are set to be ABC’s debate moderators.
Trump has skipped debates before, including all those that had been scheduled for the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
