The Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, debates the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Center on Sept. 10, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
After a poor showing in Tuesday night’s ABC News presidential debate, Republican nominee Donald Trump said Thursday in a post to his social media platform he will not participate in any more debates with Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris before the Nov. 5 election.
Former President Trump and Harris had differing proposals for a future debate. Trump pushed for an NBC News-hosted meeting on Sept. 25 and Harris’ campaign team said immediately after the Tuesday event that she wanted another debate sometime in October. Fox News had offered to host an October debate.
But Trump put in definitive terms Thursday that he would not take part in another debate with Harris. He claimed victory in Tuesday’s meeting – which initial polls show Harris got the better of – and compared Harris’ call for a rematch with that of a boxer who’d lost.
Harris’ time would be better spent working to solve the country’s myriad problems, he said.
“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH.’ Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate,” Trump wrote in the Truth Social post.
“KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD. THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” he added.
In her own tweet roughly an hour after Trump’s, Harris renewed her call for another debate.
“Two nights ago, Donald Trump and I had our first debate,” she wrote. “We owe it to the voters to have another debate.”
In an average of three national polls compiled by 538, the polling news and data division of ABC News, 57% of respondents said Harris won the debate and 34% said Trump won. That included a Republican-sponsored survey.
Trump and conservative allies spent the post-debate period Tuesday night and Wednesday morning arguing that ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis were biased in favor of Harris.
Trump and several others complained that the moderators fact-checked Trump, including on false claims about infanticide and migrants eating pets in Ohio, while not doing the same to Harris.
There will be one more debate, though — between vice presidential nominees U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, a Republican, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, who are scheduled to meet Oct. 1 in New York City.
Trump debated President Joe Biden in June when Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee. The president’s poor performance in that debate spurred his exit from the race — and Harris’ arrival — weeks later.
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