"He's now terrified of debating her": Trump's debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out

Donald Trump is not feeling great. This year alone he’s been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, convicted by another jury on 34 felony counts of fraud, and shot at by a young registered Republican at a campaign rally, the one previously safe space where the president could comfortably rant and complain to certain applause. Then he had to spend a week at home watching Democrats pull off their convention without a hitch, just a month after an unprecedented switch at the top of the ticket.

The former president’s own campaign is publicly predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris will now surge in the polls (after already leading, nationally, by an average of about 3.6%). In a similar situation, the current president and his team decided it was time to debate, saying a televised contest would “reset” the race; the subsequent performance cost Joe Biden the Democratic nomination.

Perhaps that’s why Trump himself is doubting his own commitments.

“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump posted on social media Sunday night, complaining about an ABC News interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and panel discussion earlier that day, saying the former was “biased” and the latter full of “Trump Haters.” The Republican nominee filled the rest of his post with tedious name calling — “Crooked,” “Marxist” — and attacks on the insufficiently fawning journalists of ABC.

“They’ve got a lot o questions to answer!!!” Trump posted just after 10 p.m. Eastern. “Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”

The former president already agreed to debate Harris on Sept. 10, which was originally slated to be the second of two televised confrontations with Biden. He did so after previously trying to pull out of the event when Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, initially claiming the debate was off because Biden was out of the race and then trying to move it to the friendlier waters of Fox News, a media platform that was forced to pay out $787 million after admitting that it cynically aired what its knew to be MAGA lies about the 2020 election.

It is possible, even likely, that Trump will still show up next month, not wanting to miss an opportunity to be on prime-time television (Harris has previously said she would appear whether her opponent did or not). What his evening anger suggests, however, is that the 78-year-old knows he’s not the favorite — not in the race, and not even on TV, the platform that made him a reality star.

“He has to appreciate she is charismatic and charming on television in a way he fancies that he is,” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius commented Monday morning on MSNBC. “The camera loves Kamala Harris,” he continued. “She’s learned in the cadence of her speeches, the way she presents herself, to be a formidable TV presence. Donald Trump knows TV. He’s smart enough to know he’s got a problem here.”

The Harris campaign, in turn, knows that it benefits from voters being reminded of what Trump is like, not just when he goes off script but when he gets flustered. As Politico reported Monday, it not only wants Trump to show up on Sept. 10, but it wants people to hear literally everything he has to say.

“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Harris campaign spokesperson Brian Fallon told the outlet, which noted that hot mics were the norm in previous years, including in 2020, when the Trump campaign insisted on them. This time around, the Harris campaign — clearly goading the former president, as it would like to do on TV — is claiming Trump’s team is trying to shield him from the public by having the candidates’ microphones muted when they are not talking.

“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Fallon told Politico. “We suspect Trump’s team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don’t think he can handle himself against Vice President Harris without the benefit of a mute button.”

Speaking Monday on MSNBC, Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, urged Trump to show the public how he really feels, saying it’d be a “huge disappointment for the American people” if he pulled out of the Sept. 10 debate. But he also suggested Trump, not just his team, is now wary of letting voters see the contrast between the two candidates, contrasting Harris’ support for reproductive and other freedoms with the hard-right Project 2025 agenda for a second Trump term.

“This former president is so scared to get on the debate stage,” Harrison charged. “But I guess if I had his positions, I’d be scared to let the American people know what they were as well.”

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The push for hot mics is a pivot from the cautious Biden campaign, which seemed to fear Trump steamrolling their candidate — and appearing more energetic and forceful — more than than it saw an advantage in letting an elderly man continue to rant and rave when his time was up. With the Democratic candidate now a 59-year-old former prosecutor, letting Trump talk (and talk) is no longer a concern.

“The Harris team wanting to unmute Trump’s debate mic so that he can interrupt her suggests they may have finally learned the lesson liberals until now have not: the key to beating Trump is not muzzling him, but letting voters hear him unfiltered so they remember whey they dislike him,” Yair Rosenberg, a columnist at The Atlantic, posted on social media Monday. Past efforts to limit public viewing of Trump’s outbursts, whether online or on the debate stage, “just sanitizes his image for the public,” Rosenberg argued, “making him look more reasonable that he is.”

Radley Balko, a reporter who previously covered criminal justice issues for The Washington Post, likewise credited the Harris campaign with having "figured out" Trump. The Republican nominee may well pose a threat to democracy, at home and abroad — lauding dictators like Vladimir Putin while calling for the "termination" of the U.S. Constitution — but that is perhaps a better point to be made by analysts, Balko suggested, allowing Trump to "project strength."

Calling him a "weird" old man who only cares about himself? "It's driving him nuts," Balko wrote on social media. "And it's why he's now terrified of debating her."