The Harris Campaign on Saturday responded to former President Donald Trump’s offer of a September 4 debate on Fox News by lying furiously and accusing the Republican nominee of cowardice.
So far, the new Democrat nominee has not negotiated a new set of debates with her Republican opponent. Instead, Kamala expected to simply take Biden’s place in the September 10 ABC News debate that the Biden and Trump campaigns agreed to back in May.
Trump understandably pulled out of the second Trump/Biden debate after his opponent pulled out of the race entirely.
This isn’t hard to noodle out.
Vice President Harris isn’t honoring her agreement to debate with JD Vance now that she is no longer the vice presidential nominee. So why should Trump stick to a debate with Biden now that Biden is no longer the presidential nominee?
A presidential election isn’t baseball. Kamala isn’t Joe Biden’s pinch hitter. She is a separate Democratic nominee. If she wants to debate Donald Trump, her campaign should negotiate terms with the Trump campaign.
But she won’t. Like everything in Kamala’s career, she wants to ride on the road built by others rather than forge a path herself.
Joe Biden’s campaign negotiated the conditions for the June 27 and September 10 debates. Trump agreed to Biden’s conditions. With Joe Biden out of the race, the agreement is void.
The Trump campaign confirmed after Biden’s withdrawal that the Republican nominee was open to arranging a new debate schedule once Kamala Harris became the official Democrat nominee.
Rather than accept, Kamala and her team framed Trump’s withdrawal from the Trump/Biden debate as cowardly.
Trump was “afraid” to face her, Kamala and her surrogates claimed.
The tough-talking vice president, who has yet to face questions from reporters since Biden endorsed her for the nomination, spent more than a week mocking Trump for refusing to let her play Biden’s pinch hitter, sarcastically reminding the former president that he agreed to debate Biden “any time, anywhere.”
She doubled down at her Atlanta campaign rally, telling Trump that if he had anything to say to her, he should “say it to my face.”
True to his word, after Kamala officially nabbed the nomination last Friday, Trump challenged the Democrat nominee to a debate hosted by Fox News.
You would think that the woman who spent the past two weeks demanding that Trump debate her would have jumped at the opportunity to have Trump “say it to my face,” but she didn’t.
Instead, Team Kamala, which includes the American news media, accused Trump of backing out of the agreed debate to run to his favorite outlet Fox News because he is afraid to face Kamala on “neutral ground.”
Some even claimed that Trump pulled out of an agreed debate with Harris. But Trump never agreed to debate Harris. Repeating the lie doesn’t make it true.
In a tweet Saturday afternoon, Kamala blasted Trump for demanding “one specific time” and “one specific safe space,” and said she would be at the ABC News debate on September 10 regardless of whether Trump shows up.
CNN reported that the Harris campaign planned to use the 90 minutes ABC set aside for the debate to appear in a solo town hall.
Talk about painting yourself into a corner.
There’s a reason Kamala Harris hasn’t given a single interview since launching her presidential campaign. She is a verbally incontinent hot mess who is incapable of speaking off the cuff without looking like a fool. Her meandering word salads are the stuff of legend.
A 90-minute Kamala town hall will produce a bumper crop of embarrassing video clips the Trump campaign can exploit.
But Kamala painted herself into a corner.
If she refuses to debate Trump on Fox, she can’t back out of a solo appearance on ABC News, otherwise, voters will suspect that her tough talk was just as phony as everything else about her.
Now, you can argue that the moderator of the ABC town hall would stick to softball questions to minimize the damage, and you’d probably be right. But after more than four years of running for national office, Kamala Harris has proven herself more than capable of tanking even the friendliest interviews.
In her first and only off-the-cuff remarks since becoming the Democrat nominee, Kamala Harris delivered a 20-second word salad in response to a softball question.
When asked how she felt about the return of American hostages from Russia, Kamala offered up a meandering, circular comment about the power of diplomacy and understanding the significance of diplomacy.
If she can’t make it through a 20-second answer without tossing a word salad, how does Kamala expect to survive a 90-minute town hall on ABC News?
But what choice does she have? She either lives up to her tough talk or runs the risk of looking like a bloviating fraud. Either is fraught with danger.
Team Kamala is walking a fine line here. They have to sustain the initial rush of excitement of her candidacy all the way to Election Day while preventing Kamala from sticking her foot in her mouth.
Most voters aren’t paying attention to the presidential election until the fall. Will Team Kamala risk a 90-minute solo off-the-cuff event less than two months from the election?
As a matter of reference, it was around that same time in the 2016 election cycle that Hillary Clinton said that Trump supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” and then, two days later, collapsed like a sack of potatoes on her way to the campaign van.
There is no doubt that those back-to-back September incidents played a key role in Hillary’s 2016 defeat.
Kamala Harris is even less likable than Hillary Clinton. She can’t afford a similar September disaster.
The smart move is accepting Trump’s offer to debate on Fox News. It would create the illusion that Kamala, unlike Trump, is not afraid to appear in a debate hosted by an unfriendly news outlet. Her supporters would cheer her courage while her campaign and the media could continue portraying Trump as a coward.
But she won’t do it because, at the end of the day, Kamala Harris is a vacuous lightweight whose “tough as nails prosecutor” persona is as much of a campaign fiction as her childhood memories of celebrating Kwanzaa.
