Excuses Donald Trump Has Given For Not Debating Harris

With news today that Donald Trump will “probably” debate Vice President Kamala Harris, it appears we are a few steps closer to a presidential debate getting back on the calendar in coming weeks. Trump initially refused to commit to such a public match up in the hours after President Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris.

It’s been clear for days that Trump doesn’t actually want to debate Harris, who is younger, more articulate and better suited to fact check and verbally spar with the former president on the fly than President Biden, whose debate performance earlier this month sparked the uproar that would ultimately lead to him dropping out of the race.

The default date on the calendar is an ABC hosted event on September 10, which Trump agreed to when Biden was the nominee. Fox News has proposed a Sept. 17 debate and both NBC News and CBS News reportedly want in on some action, too, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Trump initially refused to debate Harris when it was not clear whether she would have Democratic challengers for the nomination, and he has been waffling around on the issue ever since her nomination became a sure thing. The Harris campaign has said the vice president will happily debate Trump on September 10.

‘Fraud’

When Biden first dropped out of the race, Trump declared that he would no longer participate in the September 10 debate due to his not-at-all sore-loser-like belief that the Republican Party should be “reimbursed for fraud” because the “Fake News” supposedly hid facts about President Biden’s health. It’s a line that he’s tried to push for some time, with diminishing returns — that he should be reimbursed, somehow, by someone, for the money his campaign spent campaigning against Biden.

So “fraud” was one of the first excuses the former president offered for not going head to head with Harris. The justifications have gotten funnier since.

‘Not Thrilled With ABC’

A messaging point that Trump has been flicking into the void since a few days after Biden dropped out of the race involves trying to make Americans suss of ABC News. While he finally said he was “willing” to debate Harris more than once on the Tuesday after Biden tapped Harris as his nominee pick, that’s also when he began pushing for Fox News to be the network to actually host a potential debate. He also claimed that ABC was “a joke” and more favorable in its coverage of Biden/Harris than it is of him. Around this point in the week he was also telling reporters he hadn’t agreed to debate her but, don’t worry about it because she will be “easier” to beat than Biden “because he was slightly more mainstream, but not much.”

“I haven’t agreed to anything. I agreed to a debate with Joe Biden,” Trump also said early last week, per CNN. “But I want to debate with her, and she’ll be no different because they have the same policies. I think debating is important for a presidential race, I really do. You sort of have an obligation to debate.”

They Might Change Their Minds Again

Around the middle of last week, Trump’s campaign was aggressively pushing the talking point that Trump wouldn’t commit to a debate with Harris until she was officially made the Democratic nominee at the convention. By that point in the week, any MAGA fever dreams about a contentious Democratic convention were out the window, as Harris had secured enough delegates pledges to be the presumptive nominee.

It “would be inappropriate to schedule things with Harris because Democrats very well could still change their minds,” Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign communications director said in a statement Thursday last week.

‘I Don’t Like ABC’

Finally we get the truth. Trump just doesn’t want ABC, a network he, apparently, does not like, to make any money off of his debate performance.

“The answer is yes, I’ll probably end up debating,” Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night, continuing with his non-committal approach to matter, which the Harris campaign has described as “backpedaling.”

“The answer is yes, but I can also make a case for not doing it,” Trump added. “Also, I don’t like rewarding fake news … They’re going to make tens of millions of dollars with this debate. I don’t like ABC.”

It is still unclear if Trump will actually commit to debating Harris on September 10 or any other day between now and Election Day.