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Former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee for president in the 2024 election, indicated in an interview on Monday that he may back out of a planned debate with presumed Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
When asked by Fox News’s Laura Ingraham whether he would debate Harris, Trump gave a vague answer. He is currently scheduled to square off against the likely Democratic nominee on September 10, with the debate airing on ABC.
“The answer is yes, I’ll probably end up debating. … But I can also make a case for not doing it,” Trump said.
The former president then suggested that his reluctance to appear on the debate stage was due to the venue.
“I don’t like rewarding fake news … They’re going to make tens of millions of dollars with this debate,” Trump said, falsely insinuating that ABC News is biased against him.
“I don’t like ABC,” he added.
Trump also claimed he didn’t have to debate Harris because voters “already know everything” about her views. When pressed by Ingraham to respond to speculation that he is simply afraid to debate her, Trump said people made similar assertions about him when it came to President Joe Biden, who was the Democratic nominee until he dropped out of the race earlier this month.
Trump then falsely stated that he had “many debates” with Biden, even though the two have only debated once this election year.
It’s been widely reported that Trump preferred that Biden remain in the race, viewing him as an easier candidate to win against than Harris or another Democratic nominee.
“I’m leading in all of the polls, I’m leading big in all of the swing states,” Trump also said in his Fox News interview, despite several polls — including a recent set of surveys by Fox News — showing he is statistically tied with Harris in several swing states, and a newly published Morning Consult poll showing he’s virtually tied with her nationally as well.
Harris’s campaign social media accounts have teased Trump over his wishy-washy answers regarding whether he will participate in a debate.
“What happened to ‘any time, any place’?” the campaign’s account on X posted last week.
In response to Trump’s comments on Monday, a Harris spokesperson said she would be at the debate in September, even if Trump decides to opt out.
“If Donald Trump and his team are saying anything other than ‘we’ll see you there’ — and it appears that they are — it’s a convenient, but expected backtrack from Team Trump,” said Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler. “Vice President Harris will be there on September 10th — we’ll see if Trump shows.”
Notably, Trump had no issue with debating on ABC network television when the current president was still in the race, but changed his tune after Biden dropped out and Harris became the heir apparent to the Democratic nomination, prompting several observers to speculate that Trump was scared of debating Harris in front of a national audience.
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