US presidential candidate Donald Trump has questioned his planned television debate with opponent Kamala Harris on September 10. The Republican accused the broadcaster ABC News, where the debate is to take place, of being biased against him on his online platform Truth Social on Sunday evening (local time). He asked the question: “Why would I do a debate against Kamala Harris on this network?”
Trump called the station “ABC Fake News.” He was angry about the station’s coverage on Sunday, in which a reporter conducted a “ridiculous and biased interview” with Republican Senator Tom Cotton. He called the political experts who appeared on the station a “so-called discussion group of Trump haters.”
Trump did not cancel the televised debate, but he said the broadcaster had “many questions to answer.”
ABC News announced two and a half weeks ago that Trump and Harris would face off on the network on September 10. Both the Republican and the Democrat had confirmed their participation on that date, the network announced at the time. It is the only televised debate scheduled between the Vice President and the former President before the election on November 5.
However, there is also a dispute between the Harris and Trump campaign teams over the rules of the debate. Harris wants the rivals’ microphones to remain switched on throughout the entire debate, as the Harris campaign’s communications director, Brian Fallon, announced. This means that the microphone of the opponent whose turn it is not currently should not be muted, as was the case in the TV debate between President Joe Biden and Trump on CNN at the end of June.
The muting, which was agreed at Biden’s request, was intended to prevent disruptive interruptions. The same procedure was to be followed at the originally planned second TV debate between Biden and Trump on September 10. Harris, who replaced Biden as candidate after he dropped out of the presidential race after his disastrously erratic performance in the TV debate, now wants to do things differently.
“We think both candidates’ microphones should be on for the entire broadcast,” Fallon explained. Trump’s people, on the other hand, prefer the microphone to be muted “because they don’t believe their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes,” the Harris spokesman added.
Apparently, Harris and her team are counting on Trump to put himself in a bad light during the debate by losing his temper and interrupting his opponent with rude remarks.
The Trump team refused to change the rules and insisted on muting the microphones. “Enough of the games. We agreed to the ABC debate on exactly the same terms as the CNN debate,” Trump adviser Jason Miller told Politico magazine.
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