Then-Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris (left) speaks during a debate Oct. 7, 2020, in Salt Lake City, and former President Donald Trump speaks during a debate June 27 in Atlanta. Trump said Friday that he’s pulling out of a scheduled debate with his likely Democratic opponent, Vice President Harris, and instead has agreed to a date earlier in September on Fox News Channel.
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The expected Democratic nominee for U.S. president, current Vice President Kamala Harris, has responded to GOP nominee and former President Donald Trump after he posted on social media about switching the date and format of the next televised presidential debate.
Trump had originally agreed to debate President Biden on Sept. 10 on ABC News, but on Trump’s Truth Social platform late Friday, he wrote that he had instead now “agreed with Fox News” to debate Harris on that network instead, on Sept. 4.
Harris responded to his posts, on the social media platform X, saying it was “interesting how ‘any time, any place’ becomes ‘one specific time, one specific safe space.’ ”
Trump said in his Truth Social posts that there were two reasons for his decision to switch from the originally scheduled ABC News debate: firstly, Biden’s withdrawal from the race, and, secondly, what he described as his ongoing “litigation” against ABC and its chief political anchor, George Stephanopoulos, that he described as a “conflict of interest.”
The Fox News-hosted debate that Trump referred to would be held, he wrote, in front of a full arena audience in Pennsylvania.
Trump, in a separate post, had said the slightly earlier date of Sept. 4 — rather than the 10th — was “convenient and appropriate” since it would be just days before the start of early voting in the presidential election, which will be on Nov. 5.
A statement from Harris’ campaign said President Trump was “running scared and trying to back out of the debate he had already agreed to,” and was now expecting Fox News to “bail him out.”
A spokesperson for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
The Harris statement continued that Trump was “playing games” and that the vice president would be happy to discuss further debates with him once Trump had participated on Sept. 10, as earlier agreed.