Anika Begay
Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris.
by Andrew Kelly | Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign on Saturday attacked Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for refusing to accept a debate scheduled for Sept. 10 hosted by ABC News, and instead trying to pressure her into accepting an earlier debate on Trump-friendly Fox News.
On Friday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had agreed with Fox News to hold a debate on September 4 against Harris, the de facto Democratic presidential nominee, with Fox News moderators and the full audience in attendance.
“Donald Trump is scared and is trying to back out of the debate he had already joined, running straight to Fox News for bailout,” Harris campaign spokesman Michael Tyler said in a statement released Saturday.
Trump cited the ongoing litigation with ABC News as a “conflict of interest.” Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“He needs to stop playing games and show up for the debate he’s already committed to on September 10. The vice president will be there one way or another to seize the opportunity to speak to a national audience in prime time,” Tyler said.
The Trump campaign responded to the statement by accusing the Harris campaign of being cowardly.
“Looks like @KamalaHarris & @KamalaHQ are too cowardly to agree to an early debate,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung wrote on X on Saturday.
In May, President Joe Biden and Trump agreed to two debates on mutually agreed-upon terms, one hosted by CNN on June 27 and the second by ABC News on September 10. Although Biden has since withdrawn from the race due to his disastrous performance in the June debate, Harris’s campaign has maintained that the terms of the May agreement still stand.
Days after Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris, Trump said he would be willing to debate the vice president multiple times. As Harris has surged in the polls and raised record funds, Trump has repeatedly backtracked on that initial May deal and floated the idea of skipping the debates altogether.
Harris’s campaign has said the vice president will attend the Sept. 10 debate regardless of whether Trump attends.
“It’s interesting how ‘any time, any place’ becomes ‘a specific time, a specific safe space,’” Harris wrote in an X-rated post on Saturday, doubling down. “I’ll be there on September 10th, as he agreed. I hope to see him there.”
Tyler added that the campaign would be open to negotiating further debates after the two complete the debate with ABC News: “Mr. Anytime, anywhere, anyplace should have no problem with that, unless he’s too scared to show up on the 10th.”
