According to four sources familiar with the matter, discussions between the campaigns of former president Donald Trump and vice president Kamala Harris have reached a deadlock over the question of whether or not the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their time to speak, with only fifteen days remaining until the scheduled September 10 presidential debate.
The campaigns of President Joe Biden and Donald Trump reached a consensus in June: two debates, one on June 27 on CNN and one on September 10 on ABC, with rules that were agreed upon by both parties. On June 15, CNN revealed that the Biden team had requested that microphones be muted “throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak,” a request that the Trump team had agreed to.
But Biden has decided not to seek the presidency anymore. In keeping with tradition for presidential debates, Harris’s team has requested that the microphones remain on high during the ABC debate.
According to Brian Fallon, the senior counsel for communications for the Harris campaign, “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.” He informs AWN. The reason Trump’s aides like to keep the microphone muted is because they doubt their candidate can carry himself presidentially for three quarters of an hour. Because it would be too humiliating to confess they don’t think Trump can handle himself against Vice President Harris without the benefit of a mute button, we anticipate that Trump’s crew has not even informed their boss about this argument.
In secret, the veep’s crew thinks Harris can provoke Trump into losing his temper and making an unseemly public comment.
“She’s more than happy to have exchanges with him if he tries to interrupt her,” says a source familiar with the negotiations, who spoke to Playbook. And considering how rattled he appears by her, he’s prone to having quite angry outbursts and… The campaign probably wants people to hear that.
According to Trump’s campaign, this is all part of a larger scheme. They insist on using CNN’s guidelines for the ABC debate, despite the fact that the Biden camp, and not Harris’s, agreed to those rules.
Put an end to this nonsense. We were fully prepared to embrace the ABC debate just as we had the CNN debate. The Harris camp requested a sitting debate with notes and opening speeches despite previously agreeing to the CNN guidelines. Trump senior adviser Jason Miller told Playbook last night that the president had insisted on sticking to the previously agreed-upon parameters. The problem lies with Kamala Harris’s advisers if they think she lacks the intelligence to recall the key parts of their messages. The Harris campaign appears to be following this pattern. They already want to provide Harris with a cheat sheet for the debate and have barred her from doing interviews and news conferences. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re trying to find an excuse not to debate President Trump.
Without addressing the microphone contretemps, Trump publicly questioned Sunday night whether he would participate in the ABC-hosted event, implying the network might be biased.
More debates between Trump and Harris are being considered, with parameters that differ from the CNN standard. One such proposal is a debate on September 4th, hosted by Fox News, with “a full arena audience,” as Trump stated on Truth Social earlier this month. (There were zero live watchers of the CNN debate.)
The no-live-mics position also conflicts with what the Trump campaign desired during the 2020 campaign, when the president faced Joe Biden: for the microphones to stay on.
“According to what we’ve been informed… you’re planning to have an internal meeting soon to go over additional potential rule changes, like giving an anonymous person the power to silence a candidate’s microphone,” Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien informed the Commission on Presidential Debates in a letter dated October 19, 2020. Anyone in a position of such authority is wholly unacceptable… This is just as unacceptable as the 2016 inaugural debate, when the president’s microphone was jiggled.
Fallon strongly refuted Miller’s claim that Harris desired a sitting debate accompanied by notes. There will be no notes or standing because “all three parties (Trump, Harris and ABC) have agreed to it, and we never sought otherwise,” Fallon stated. We questioned if Harris ever requested to be seated, and another individual with knowledge of the negotiations chuckled and said it wasn’t true.
The Harris campaign made it known to ABC when it accepted their offer that the regulations may be debated. That discussion is far from over, as this present roadblock shows.
