The two campaigns are at odds over the September 10 debate on ABC News as Harris’s team is requesting live mics, which Trump’s camp is against.
Just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump and Vice-President Kamala Harris seemed to do the impossible: They agreed on something. Their teams officially came to terms on a September 10 presidential debate, an ABC News–hosted forum that was initially agreed to by President Joe Biden back in May. But the Trump and Harris campaigns are now reportedly at odds over the terms of the debate, particularly surrounding the potential use of a mute button by the moderators.
The first indication of trouble came from Trump, who floated the possibility of skipping the ABC News debate altogether on Truth Social. In a post on Sunday, Trump denounced a morning interview on the network with Senator Tom Cotton as containing a “so-called Panel of Trump Haters,” writing, “I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?”
On Monday, Politico reported that the two campaigns had reached a stalemate over whether the candidates’ microphones could be muted. When Trump and Biden consented to this face-off and the ill-fated June debate, their camps had agreed to allow moderators to turn off their mics whenever they weren’t responding in an effort to prevent noisy cross talk. However, Harris, who wasn’t part of those negotiations at the time, is in favor of keeping the microphones live. The vice-president is likely hoping to capitalize on Trump’s tendency to go off-script, especially as he continues to adapt to the last-minute shift in candidates from Biden to Harris.
