Vice President Kamala Harris is pressuring former President Donald Trump to rebuff his advisers’ suggestion that microphones should be muted between candidate statements in their Sept. 10 presidential debate.
In Trump’s CNN debate against President Joe Biden, the opposing candidate’s microphone was muted while the other candidate spoke in an attempt to prevent the interruptions that Trump was famous for in past debates. Harris wants to change that before her first showing.
“Donald Trump is surrendering to his advisors who won’t allow him to debate with a live microphone,” Harris posted on X. “If his own team doesn’t have confidence in him, the American people definitely can’t. We are running for President of the United States. Let’s debate in a transparent way—with the microphones on the whole time.”
ABC News, the network presiding over the debate, has sent proposed rules to the Harris and Trump campaigns, with the rules including muted mics. The Trump campaign agreed to the rules, but the Harris campaign hasn’t.
Harris’s public statement suggests the campaigns are still at an impasse over the rules of the debate just 11 days away. Trump has suggested holding additional debates with Harris, with them being on on Fox News and NBC, but Harris’s statement suggests the only debate in which the two campaigns have firmly agreen on could be in jeopardy.
Trump has also wavered on the ABC News debate at times, suggesting the network is too hostile for him to debate on. He called it “ABC FAKE NEWS” and said it is “by far the nastiest and most unfair newscaster in the business.”
Trump has also expressed his preference for microphones to always be on during the debate, but his campaign already agreed to rules on the unmuted microphones.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Trump campaign for comment on Harris’s proposal.
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The ABC News debate rules will be similar to Trump’s June 27 CNN debate with President Joe Biden. Biden dropped out less than a month after the debate’s conclusion as his campaign’s polling tanked.
Onlookers joked that Harris wants unmuted microphones to produce another viral moment like the one she produced in her 2020 vice presidential debate with then-Vice President Mike Pence, in which she repeatedly said, “I’m speaking.”
