Vice President Kamala Harris is committed to debating former President Donald Trump on Sept. 10—whether or not he shows up.
In a statement first shared with The Hill, Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said that Harris will attend the ABC face-off that Trump had previously scheduled with President Joe Biden.
“As Vice President Harris said last week, the American people deserve to hear from the two candidates running for the highest office in the land and she will do that at September’s ABC debate,” Tyler said. “If Donald Trump and his team are saying anything other than ‘we’ll see you there,’—and it appears that they are—it’s a convenient, but expected backtrack from Team Trump. Vice President Harris will be there on September 10th—we’ll see if Trump shows.”
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The promise comes after Harris hit Trump repeatedly for shying away from the debate stage.
“What happened to ‘any time, any place’?” the vice president wrote on X Thursday, soon after the former president’s team suggested there were no specific debate plans in place.
“Given the continued political chaos surrounding Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrat Party, general election details cannot be finalized until Democrats formally decide on their nominee,” the Trump campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said in a statement.
Trump senior adviser Jason Miller told MSNBC on Sunday that Trump would “of course” debate the Democratic nominee, but that the nominee had not been locked in yet.
The former president previously said he would be willing to debate Harris, multiple times even, although he expressed qualms about the particular network that had been chosen.
“I’m not thrilled with ABC,” he said. “I guess they committed but I have at least equal say, and I don’t like the idea of ABC.”
Those were the comments the vice president latched onto last week when she told reporters “he’s backpedaling,” before reiterating that message on X.
“Voters deserve to see the split screen that exists on a debate stage,” she wrote. “I’m ready. So let’s go.
