US Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign on Saturday branded former US president Donald Trump “scared” after he proposed changing the debate schedule, as the Republican presidential nominee rallied in Georgia seeking to blunt Harris’ surging momentum in her bid to become the US’ first female president.
In an overnight post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he was willing to debate Harris on the conservative-leaning Fox News network on Sept. 4, while declining to participate in a previously scheduled debate on American Broadcasting Co.
Trump pitched the idea before going to a rally in Atlanta, where he gathered supporters in the same arena where Harris addressed an excited crowd of some 10,000 on Tuesday last week.
Photo: Bloomberg
Trump unleashed his extreme scaremongering on illegal immigration, falsely saying that there is a flood of murderers from around the world — he singled out “Congo” — being let into the US by Harris, who he said has “destroyed our country.”
His rambling, 92-minute speech also included Trump’s oft-repeated lie that the 2020 election was “rigged” by the Democrats.
As for debating Harris, Trump said he had “agreed” to the plan with Fox, and that it would occur in Pennsylvania — a crucial battleground in the presidential electoral system — before a live audience.
“We’re doing one with Fox, if she shows up,” Trump told his Atlanta rally. “I don’t think she’s going to show up. She can’t talk.”
The Harris campaign dismissed Trump’s idea as “games.”
“Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to, and running straight to Fox News to bail him out,” Harris’ campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, said in a statement. “He needs to ... show up to the debate he already committed to on Sept. 10.”
Trump’s proposal to confront Harris on Fox, a network that has long supported him, was his latest effort to recapture momentum in a campaign that had been focused on a rematch against Biden, until the 81-year-old dramatically dropped his reelection bid last month.
Harris is due imminently to announce her vice presidential pick, with popular Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a frontrunner.
Tomorrow she launches a countrywide tour with her running mate.
Facing a new rival, Trump was racing to define her to voters as he delivered a stream of personal attacks, calling her “crazy,” a “Marxist prosecutor” and a “radical left freak” who would cause a “Kamala economic crash” if she were elected.
“We have to work hard to define her,” Trump told supporters. “She’s a horror show.”
Meanwhile, former US president Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 on Oct. 1, has told family he has a secondary motivation for becoming a centenarian: voting for Harris.
Carter, who entered into hospice care in February last year has defied all odds, persevering far longer than the public expected.
“I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” Carter told his son, Chip Carter, last week, his grandson, Jason Carter, said in a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.
Jimmy Carter, a Nobel peace laureate, champion of charitable causes and a former peanut farmer, is the longest-living president in US history.
Jason Carter said his grandfather had been “more alert and interested in politics and the war in Gaza” in the past few days, the report said.
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