Surging Harris, Trump spar over debate dates

(COMBO) This combination of file pictures created on August 3, 2024 shows US Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaking on March 26, 2024 in Raleigh, North Carolina; and former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaking in the first presidential debate with US President Joe Biden in Atlanta, Georgia on June 27, 2024. (Photos by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI and ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP)

Kamala Harris’s campaign branded Donald Trump “scared” Saturday after he proposed changing the debate schedule, as the Republican rallied in Georgia seeking to blunt the vice president’s surging momentum in her bid to become America’s first woman president.

In an overnight post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he was willing to debate Harris on the conservative-leaning Fox News network on September 4, while declining to participate in a previously scheduled debate on ABC.

Trump pitched the idea before going to a rally in Atlanta, where he gathered supporters in the same arena where Harris addressed an excited crowd of some 10,000 on Tuesday.

The former president unleashed his extreme scaremongering on illegal immigration, falsely claiming there is a flood of murderers from around the world — he singled out “Congo” — being let into the United States by Harris, who he said has “destroyed our country.”

His rambling, 92-minute speech also included Trump’s oft-repeated lie that the 2020 election was “rigged” by Democrats.

As for debating Harris, Trump said he had “agreed” to the plan with Fox. And he said it would occur in Pennsylvania — a crucial battleground in the presidential electoral system — before a live audience.

“We’re doing one with Fox, if she shows up,” Trump told his Atlanta rally. “I don’t think she’s going to show up. She can’t talk.”

The Harris campaign dismissed Trump’s idea as “games.”

“Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out,” Harris’s campaign communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement. “He needs to… show up to the debate he already committed to on Sept 10.”

Trump’s proposal to confront Harris on Fox, a network that has long supported him, was his latest effort to recapture momentum in a campaign that had been focused on a rematch against Joe Biden, until the 81-year-old dramatically dropped his reelection bid last month.

Since then, Harris, 59, has reenergized the Democratic base almost overnight.

She has raked in donations, reassembled the team behind Barack Obama’s two historic election victories, and neutralized the solid lead that Trump, 78, had built against Biden in opinion polls.

On Friday, she secured the official Democratic nomination, backed by near unanimous party support.

Harris is due imminently to announce her vice presidential pick, with the popular governor of key state Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, a frontrunner. On Tuesday, she launches a countrywide tour with her running mate.

Facing a new rival, Trump was racing to define her to voters as he delivered a stream of personal attacks, calling her “crazy,” a “Marxist prosecutor” and a “radical left freak” who would cause a “Kamala economic crash” if she were elected.

“We have to work hard to define her,” Trump told supporters. “She’s a horror show.”

Trump, however, stopped short of openly questioning his rival’s racial identity.

He drew gasps this week at a Black journalists’ convention by falsely claiming Harris, who has identified closely with her Black roots all her life, recently “became a Black person” for political convenience.

– Battleground rally –

On Saturday, Trump was joined by his vice presidential pick, Senator J.D. Vance, at the rally in Georgia — another battleground state that will help decide who wins on November 5.

Vance seized on the theory popularized by Republicans that Harris and a White House coterie participated in a “massive cover-up of the president’s mental incapacity,” referring to Biden’s age-related capability to serve effectively.

“Anybody who is too blind to see Biden’s incompetence — or, let’s be honest, too dishonest to admit it — doesn’t deserve to be commander in chief,” Vance told the crowd.

Trump lost narrowly to Biden in Georgia in 2020 and the state was at the center of his unprecedented attempts to overturn the election results.

The size of Harris’ Tuesday rally was a warning sign to Trump’s campaign, which has long touted its ability to draw thousands of passionate supporters, in contrast to Biden’s usually meager crowds.

The situation is a remarkable turnaround in a campaign where Trump had been appearing to gather force while Biden — hurt by a disastrous debate performance in June and mounting voter concerns over his mental acuity — was steadily slipping.

Harris’ rapid entry has left Trump’s campaign scrambling — and Trump now the oldest presidential nominee in US history.

Adding to the changed dynamics, Harris is vying to become the first woman president and the first of Black and Indian biracial heritage.