Former president Donald Trump said Tuesday he will participate in a debate next month against Vice President Kamala Harris, two days after he suggested he could skip it.
“I have reached an agreement with the Radical Left Democrats for a Debate with Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform, confirming the debate will be Sept. 10 in Philadelphia.
Trump agreed earlier this month to take part in the ABC News debate, which will be his first debate against Harris since she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. But Trump threw the debate into uncertainty Sunday when he criticized ABC as biased in a social media post and suggested people should “stay tuned” about his participation.
The campaigns spent Monday sparring over whether to preserve a rule from Trump’s June debate against Biden where the candidates’ microphones were muted when it was not their turn to speak. The Harris campaign said the microphones should be live throughout the Sept. 10 debate, while Trump’s campaign argued for the “the exact same terms” from the June debate with CNN.
Trump himself sent mixed messages, saying during a campaign stop in Virginia that the microphone muting “doesn’t matter to me” and that he would “rather have it probably on, but the agreement [for the Sept. 10 debate] was that it was the same as it was last time.”
Trump on Tuesday said the rules for the Sept. 10 debate “will be the same as the last CNN debate.”
The Harris campaign and ABC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Sept. 10 debate is the only debate to which Trump and Harris have both agreed so far. Trump has pushed for more debates, while Harris’s campaign has said she is open to that if Trump shows up for the Sept. 10 debate.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), is scheduled to debate Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on Oct. 1 on CBS News.
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