Member Newsletter
One thing that gets a bit lost in all the helter-skelter of the last few days: Trump caved big time. Harris said he needed to show up on September 10th. And after three weeks of threats and whining he agreed.
Right out of the gate after Harris’ entry into the campaign, Trump pulled out of the debate which had been scheduled with former candidate Biden. In typical Trump fashion he didn’t definitively pull the plug. He said he should pull the plug, said ABC was biased, and a lot of other nonsense. Clearly he was pulling out and of course he soon did so officially. His campaign tried to make all these arguments about why he was entitled to pull out. And of course he was entitled. Any candidate can do anything they want. And it’s at least a halfway decent rationale to say you made the agreement with another candidate. But that was beside the point: he could decide to pull out. He could do whatever he wanted. But he didn’t have to. The reason he did was that he clearly did not want to debate Harris, at least not on those terms.
After that went on for a while he came up with that Fox debate, which Fox may or may not have even heard of, that was essentially supposed to be a debate at a Trump rally: hosted by Fox, in an arena. He also claimed that the ABC debate had been “terminated” on Biden’s exit from the race. But that didn’t work either. Harris said no. And now Trump’s back to agreeing to what Harris insisted he agree to almost three weeks ago.
At first I wasn’t sure if the debate was really back on, if Trump had absolutely positively agreed to it. If you listened to what he actually said at the Thursday press conference, he said he was agreeing to a debate on NBC on September 10th. I was confused by this but apparently everyone gave him the standard Trump cognitive mulligan and just assumed he must have meant ABC, which apparently he did. Now AP, ABC and Politico are each saying it’s back on, so who am I to second guess it.
The whole thing is pretty clear cut: Trump did not want to debate Harris, at least not on neutral ground. I mean, I think everyone gets that the split screen won’t be pretty. But now his campaign realizes, with the shift of about 6 points in Harris’ direction, that he’s the one who needs the debate. So he agreed to do so on her terms.
He now wants more than one debate, which makes sense and she’s saying, wisely, that she’s open to discussing additional debates — but only after Trump shows on September 10th. She put a collar around Trump’s neck and she’s walking him. Don’t think there’s any other way to put it.
One additional point that hasn’t been totally ignored but has also gotten a bit lost in the shuffle of weird and nonsense. Trump has barely campaigned lately — he is holding a rally today in Montana, which isn’t a swing state and is only his second this month. He suggested at the press conference he would remain off the trail for at least an additional two weeks. He explained that as staying off the campaign trail during the Democratic convention, which actually doesn’t make a lot of sense? You might not counter-program during the last two days of the convention. But one presidential candidate staying almost entirely of the campaign trail for almost a month? Well, that’s weird.