Former President Donald Trump suggested Monday that he might drop a scheduled Sept. 10 debate on ABC News because he says the network is hostile to Republicans.
Speaking at a Vietnamese restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia, Trump said Sunday he was watching ABC’s “This Week” and Sen. R-Ark. Tom Cotton said he didn’t like the way he was treated.
“When I saw the hostility of this, I said why am I doing this, let’s do it with another network. I want to do it,” Trump told reporters.
Asked if he still plans to participate in the debate, Trump said: “We’re thinking about it. We’re thinking about it. And they want to change the rules. You know, the deal was us. The same rules. Now all of a sudden they want to change the rules, because he can’t answer questions … He can’t talk now. We can’t have another dummy president.”
Trump said he wants to have a “fair debate” and welcomes “tough questions.”
The ABC “really should be shut down,” he said. “I’d rather do it on NBC. I’d rather do it on CBS. Frankly, I think CBS is very unfair, but it’s the best of the bunch, and of course I’m doing it on Fox, I would even do it. On CNN last time i thought CNN treated us very fairly.
Asked if he wanted the microphones muted during the debate, Trump said: “We agreed to the same rules. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter to me. I probably would have liked to have it on, but that was the deal. It was going to be like last time, in which case it was muted.”
Negotiations over the rules for the Sept. 10 debate stalled overnight, in part because of a disagreement over whether the candidates would have live microphones.
Harris’ campaign asked ABC to have both candidates have “hot” microphones throughout the debate so they could get any comments regardless of whose turn it was.
Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, claimed that Trump’s aides prefer that the candidates’ microphones be muted while their opponent speaks because “they don’t think their candidate can handle the presidency on his own for 90 minutes.”
“The Vice President is ready to deal with Trump’s constant lies and interruptions in real time,” he added. “Trump needs to stop hiding behind the mute button.”
Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, said both campaigns already agreed to debate rules, which he said mirrored those used during June’s CNN debate between Trump and President Joe Biden. The debate was conducted using silent microphones requested by the Biden campaign. Miller also claimed that the Harris campaign demanded that the candidates sit down during the debate and be allowed to take notes.
“We said there were no changes to the agreed rules,” Miller said. “If Kamala Harris isn’t smart enough to repeat the messaging points she wants her handlers to remember, that’s their problem. This seems to be the pattern for the Harris campaign. They won’t let Harris do interviews, and they won’t let her hold press conferences and now they want to give him a cheat sheet for the debate.”
Fallon, the Harris campaign spokesman, denied the Harris team’s request for a sit-down with authorized records.
Disagreement about the rules, First reported by Politico. It comes after Trump posted on social media Sunday night that he may withdraw from the debate because of what he called a “biased” interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
‘[W]Why would I debate Kamala Harris on that network? Trump wrote.
Representatives for ABC, CNN, CBS and NBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Sept. 10 debate was originally planned months ago — before Biden dropped out of the race.
After Biden withdrew and Harris launched the campaign, Trump said in early August that he would not participate in the ABC debates In the next month and two debates instead, Fox News offered. Finally, Trump said he wanted to face Harris in three separate debates in September. So far, only the ABC debate has been confirmed.
This is the first election cycle in which the Commission on Presidential Debates has not sponsored a presidency discussions since the non-partisan organization It was launched in 1987.
The The Republican National Committee withdrew in 2022 said it would require Republican presidential candidates to pledge to participate in debates hosted by the commission only in debates sanctioned by the Republican Party.
The Biden campaign also avoided commission-sponsored debates. In May, Biden campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon took issue with the fall debate schedule in a letter, also claiming the commission was “unable or unwilling to enforce the rules in the 2020 debates.”