Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and ABC News are battling in public over what appears to be a now-canceled debate scheduled to air on the network on September 10.
Trump says that he “terminated” the debate for a simple reason: President Joe Biden was scheduled to be his opponent, and Biden has now dropped out of the race. Trump appears to have no intention of allowing ABC to simply slot-in Vice President Kamala Harris (now the presumptive Democrat nominee replacing Biden in the election) as the Democratic National Committee has done.
It appears that Democrat heavy-hitters like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with others, heavily pressured Biden to drop out of the race. While the Democrats have been anything but candid, it is obvious to any observer regardless of political preference that Biden is in progressive senility of some sort. Republicans have described the overnight Biden-Harris switch-out as a “coup”.
But that’s not the only obstacle standing in the way of the September debate. Trump has also sued ABC News for defamation for remarks made by its correspondent, George Stephanopolous, a former Bill Clinton adviser turned journalist. The legal battle obviously makes for icy relations between the Trump camp and the network.
Predictably, Democrats and Kamala Harris are saying Trump has chickened out of the debate, ignoring the fact that Harris was never scheduled to be part of this debate, because she was never supposed to be the nominee under any normal circumstances. But of course, politics in America have been anything but normal for several years. Trump points out that his staff and ABC specifically negotiated a debate between Trump and Biden, not Harris.
For her part, Kamala Harris has said she will show up for the debate whether Trump does or not, according to her campaign. Spokesman Michael Tyler said “the Vice President will be there” for the chance to address a national audience on primetime television.
