Trump says he’s willing to debate Harris three times

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said that he is willing to debate his Democratic rival Kamala Harris three times in September on different networks during a news conference yesterday at his Palm Beach, Florida, residence.
Trump said he wanted to hold debates on September 4 on Fox, September 10 on NBC, and September 25 on ABC.
He did not offer specific terms, such as whether there would be an audience, and it was not immediately clear whether his campaign had made a proposal to Harris’s camp.
The conference was Trump’s first public appearance since Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday.
Harris, the US vice-president, and Walz headlined rallies in the battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday, drawing tens of thousands of attendees in a fresh sign of how her late entry into the race has galvanised Democrats.
Her rapid rise, following President Joe Biden’s decision last month to abandon his faltering campaign, has sent Trump’s team scrambling to recalibrate their strategy and messaging.
Opinion polls show Harris has erased the lead Trump had built over Biden, and Democrats have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from voters and big donors in a matter of weeks.
Harris and Walz were scheduled to meet with auto workers in Detroit yesterday, following the United Auto Workers union’s endorsement of their candidacy, as part of a push to mobilise blue-collar workers in key battleground states.
The Harris campaign cancelled events yesterday in North Carolina and today in Georgia, where Tropical Storm Debby is bringing heavy rain and dangerous flooding.
The Democrats will head to Arizona and Nevada later this week, visiting two more swing states likely to play a key role in the November 5 election.
Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, also cancelled campaign events in North Carolina yesterday due to the storm.
He has spent the last few days trailing Harris and Walz around the country, an unusual move intended to provide a “contrast”, he told reporters on Wednesday.
The Trump campaign has criticised the Democrat vice-president for not taking questions from reporters since launching her campaign 2-1/2 weeks ago.
Trump has conducted a steady stream of media interviews, though they are usually with friendly, right-leaning outlets and reporters.
On Wednesday, he called into the Fox & Friends morning programme and took questions from the programme’s hosts.
Biden has meanwhile warned that he is “not confident at all” of a peaceful handover of power to Harris if Trump loses November’s election, in an extract of a CBS interview broadcast on Wednesday.
The president said Trump’s hints on the campaign trail about not accepting a defeat should be taken seriously.
“If Trump loses, I’m not confident at all,” Biden told the US network in the interview, which was due to air fully on Sunday, when asked if he believed there would be a calm transfer in January 2025.
“He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it – all the stuff about ‘if we lose there’ll be a bloodbath,’” added Biden.
While campaigning earlier this year, Biden regularly brought up the fact that Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, after Biden beat him in the 2020 election.
Biden also frequently quoted Trump as saying there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost – although the Republican said he was talking in the context of electric car imports from China.
Trump has, however, maintained his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and in the CBS interview Biden accused the former president of trying to install allies in key electoral positions in US states to manipulate counts if the same thing happened again.
“You can’t love your country only when you win,” said Biden.
The ageing president has long framed Trump as a threat to US democracy.
Harris has sometimes echoed that theme, while focusing more on a positive vision in a campaign that has reenergised Democrats, brought in millions of dollars and helped her nose ahead of Trump in opinion polls.
In the news conference at his residence yesterday, Trump said that there would be a peaceful transfer of power after the US presidential vote – but immediately questioned whether there would be “honest elections”.
“Of course there’ll be a peaceful transfer, and there was last time,” Trump told a news conference, despite a mob of his supporters storming Congress in 2021 after his loss. “I just hope we’re going to have honest elections.”