Attention-Seeking Trump Desperately Flip-Flops on Debating Kamala

Donald Trump announced Thursday he has agreed to debate Vice President Kamala in not just one September debate but three.

The news of the three new dates, however, didn’t arrive without a confusing flub. In the middle of a rambling, short-notice press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced his intentions to debate Harris on September 4 on Fox News, September 10 on NBC News, and in another September 25 debate on ABC News.

But moments after Trump made the claim, it appeared he had mixed up some of the dates and their networks. Spokespeople for ABC said the network had agreed to proceed with the originally scheduled September 10 debate, while NBC News said they had agreed to host a debate on September 25, reported The Daily Beast’s Corbin Bolies.

“She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview,” Trump said of Harris. “But I look forward to the debates.”

Harris’s campaign reaffirmed that she would be up for the September 10 ABC News debate shortly after the details were ironed out.

Trump’s announcement came as a complete reversal of where he stood on the debates just last week, when he wrote on Truth Social that he had “terminated” the September 10 ABC News showdown over the fact that the Democratic nominee had changed when he had only agreed to debate “Sleepy Joe Biden.” In its place, Trump offered an alternative debate on Fox News in front of a live crowd, which Harris’s campaign did not sign up to.

The sudden announcement of three back-to-back debates may have been a last-ditch effort to regain lost favor with some of his fans, who were stunningly disappointed by his decision to back out of the first scheduled debate—so much so that they got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending on Truth Social after the news broke.

Stephen Miller tried to invent a new, outrageous attack against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, calling them the “number one traffickers” of “girls into sex slavery on planet Earth” on MSNBC Wednesday night.

On The Beat With Ari Melber, the former White House adviser and Trump campaign surrogate went into a rant after Melber questioned Miller about the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.  

“A lot of innocent people have been persecuted by a corrupt system!” Miller shouted. “What kind of corrupt system throws Republican lawyers in jail for offering good, sound legal advice but does nothing with secretaries of state who plainly violate their own state laws and constitutions? How many people are in jail right now?

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the number one traffickers of children—girls into sex slavery on planet Earth! How many people are in jail for that?” Miller added, before Melber stepped in to cut him off. 

“We’ve gone this far—we’ve gone. We’ve gone this far in an exchange, we’re not doing just anything you want to rip off the internet that’s false. And we’re not doing defamation here!” Melber replied. “As you know, there’s other Trump allies who’ve got a lot of trouble with that. We’re not doing that here.” 

The exchange was a small part of a 30-minute interview Melber conducted with Miller, who has not reacted well to Biden stepping away from the 2024 election and Harris taking his place. He freaked out the day the news was announced, loudly complaining on Fox News.

“They held a primary!” Miller lamented at the time. “People—they had ballots! They filled out circles that went to the voting booths! They spent money on advertisements, and as President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden.”

Miller has spent his post–White House career concern-trolling, from TV appearances attacking Democrats over immigration policies or spreading lies about Hunter Biden, to fake, culture-war-driven lawsuits over stuff like allegedly gay Pop-Tarts. His latest rant proves that the architect of the Muslim ban is a professional troll now, and will take on that role again if Donald Trump returns to the White House. 

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted President Joe Biden to drop out because she was startled by his poor debate performance and, apparently, not that impressed by his political machinations.

In an interview with David Remnick for The New Yorker published Thursday, Pelosi discussed the debate, her appearance on Morning Joe, and her influence over Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race.

To hear Pelosi tell it, she was always one step ahead of Biden and his campaign.

Despite what Pelosi described as a pervasive confidence among her people that Biden would outperform Donald Trump in the debate, she claimed to have advised Biden against participating. “I said, [Trump’s] doggy doo-doo. You’re going to get doggy doo-doo on your shoe. It’s not a good thing,” Pelosi said.

Like many Americans, Pelosi was “startled” and “stunned” by Biden’s poor performance in June’s presidential debate.

Pelosi appeared on Morning Joe in July, where she signaled that she was no longer aligned with the messaging of the Biden campaign. While the campaign continuously asserted the incumbent’s unwavering intention to seek reelection, Pelosi spoke with a less definitive tone.

“It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run,” Pelosi said, an implicit rejection of the decision stated by the campaign. “I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is.”

Although Pelosi did not cop to her status as a highly influential political operator, Remnick wrote that Pelosi’s appearance on Morning Joe signaled a “permission structure” to others to call on Biden to end his campaign.

It was previously reported that Pelosi, along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, made direct appeals to Biden urging him to drop out.

“I really wanted him to make a decision for a better campaign, because they were not facing the fact of what was happening.… We couldn’t see it go down the drain because Trump was going to be president and then he was going to take the House. Imagine! Imagine how that would be! Well, we don’t have to imagine. We saw,” Pelosi said.

“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she admitted of Biden. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: This ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The president has to make the decision for that to happen.”

Unprompted, Pelosi denied rumors that she was in any way the mastermind behind Biden’s decision. “People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with him. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines; I was talking to Chuck [Schumer]. I didn’t talk to Chuck at all,” she said.

“I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next?”

Her goal, she added, was simple: “That Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”

After President Biden backed out of the 2024 presidential election and was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump attempted to weasel out of a previously agreed on debate on ABC News scheduled for September 10. Now Trump wants back in. 

The Washington Post reports that Trump is expected to propose a new debate in the next few days to Harris moderated by ABC News or NBC News with Univision, citing anonymous sources. The move comes after Trump had proposed a September 4 debate moderated by Fox News but was rebuffed by the Harris campaign and criticized by his own supporters. 

Only on Wednesday, the Trump campaign was dodging questions about how the former president and convicted felon ducked out of the previously scheduled debate. This followed a litany of excuses Trump has made since Harris entered the race. He claimed that he couldn’t go on ABC because of ongoing litigation against the network and that he didn’t need to debate because he was already leading in the polls (he wasn’t). His team said that he couldn’t debate someone who wasn’t officially the Democratic nominee and didn’t have former President Barack Obama’s endorsement. Hours later, Obama endorsed Harris. 

The real reason Trump has been hesitant to debate Harris is probably because he’s worried. Trump reportedly thinks it’s unfair that he has to run against Harris, complaining to confidants about the media coverage Harris is getting and about being overtaken in polls. He and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have been struggling to come up with any effective attacks against Harris and Tim Walz, trying out accusations of antisemitism and attacks on Walz’s military record that so far haven’t picked up any traction. 

But in a debate, Trump will have the opportunity to come up with new soundbites and insults, albeit against an opponent sharper than Biden, and he probably wants to do it on a bigger stage than Fox News, even though they would give him a home-field advantage. As Trump would say, the ratings will probably be sky-high.  

Donald Trump is losing in more ways than one. According to a Marquette Law School Poll national survey published Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee is trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by four percentage points.

Americans have identified Trump as the old man in the race since President Joe Biden dropped out last month, and key swing states that had previously identified as red are now considered toss-ups, according to the Cook Political Report.

Yet one issue above everything else is really gnawing at the bloviating populist: his dwindling crowd size.

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was—And she pays for her ‘Crowd,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

Photographic evidence proves otherwise. Pictures of Trump’s Philadelphia rally in late June—which was held at the same arena as Harris’s event on Tuesday—stand in stark contrast to images of the Democrat’s packed crowds. Photos of Trump onstage include backgrounds loaded with empty seats and even entirely empty sections.

Meanwhile, Harris’s explosion onto the campaign trail just a handful of weeks ago has brought scores of crowds lining up to see her speak, with some queues (like the one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin) trailing for more than half a mile to enter the arena, reported AFP.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Harris’s ability to meet and exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. On Thursday, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”

Other top stories on the site hinted at more chaos inside Team Trump, including concerns that Trump is “panicking” and that a short-notice afternoon press conference at Mar-a-Lago, which is reportedly only permitting the attendance of reporters hand-selected by Trump’s team, is evidence of Trump losing faith with his campaign.

“Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking,” wrote former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham on X (formerly Twitter.) “I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/’save’ his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.”