Vice President Kamala Harris is maximizing pressure on Donald Trump over his refusal to debate her.
In a new statement, the Harris campaign says she’ll be at the Sept. 10 ABC debate whether or not Trump shows.
“As Vice President Harris said last week, the American people deserve to hear from the two candidates running for the highest office in the land and she will do that at September’s ABC debate,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler said.
“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. Vice President Harris will be there on September 10th—we’ll see if Trump shows.”
ABC will be there, too. “Full steam ahead,” a source from ABC told CNN last Friday. That was after Trump whined about the changed campaign.
“I haven’t agreed to anything,” Trump said. “I agreed to a debate with Joe Biden.” He insisted that he wants to debate Harris, “and she’ll be no different because they have the same policies.”
Except he really doesn’t seem to want to do that. Trump is either chicken or still in denial about not running against Biden, and he’s still making excuses to not show. The official line from the Trump campaign on Sunday was that Harris is not the nominee yet and he can’t possibly agree to a debate—that he already agreed to—until she is the nominee.
That didn’t stop him from debating President Joe Biden in June, before Biden was officially the nominee. And Harris is the only serious contender to have filed the necessary paperwork to seek the nomination. She has more than enough pledged delegates. She raised $200 million in a week and signed up 170,000 volunteers. All of which makes her the de facto nominee.
But that’s still not enough for the Trump campaign.
“We need to make sure the Democrats actually go through and lock in Kamala Harris,” Trump adviser Jason Miller told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing on Sunday. “It was only a month ago, Chris, that many Democrats who wanted to throw Joe Biden overboard were saying, we need to go to this mini primary…. The exact same people that were saying Joe Biden was okay are the same people saying now we have to get behind Harris.”
Sure, dude. You cling to that.
It is true that Trump has a lot on his plate right now. He has to decide whether to show up to the debate; whether to kick his weird running mate, JD Vance, off his ticket; and of course which golf club to use. Keeping track of his opponent is a lot to ask of the old, easily confused Republican nominee.
Let’s keep scaring Trump and keep Kamala Harris surging!
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