() – The greatest showman has just turned his back on tens of millions of viewers.
At least for now.
Donald Trump’s refusal to participate in another presidential debate with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris marks a significant moment in the 2024 campaign and highlights the vulnerability of a political career built on the foundations of his television fame and mastery of stagecraft.
The former president said he doesn’t need a rematch because he won Tuesday night’s debate, despite overwhelming criticism that he underperformed against a vice president who outperformed a former reality TV star.
“Because we have had two debates and because they were successful, there will not be a third debate. It is too late anyway, the voting has already started,” Trump said during a wild campaign speech in Arizona on Thursday, also referring to his first debate against Joe Biden, on in June, which led to the president being pushed out of the race by his own party.
But there is a possible alternative explanation: that Trump — who normally can’t resist a chance to dominate the small screen — doesn’t fancy a repeat of a showdown in which he was unprepared and unfocused and squandered his best chance to topple his opponent in a cliffhanger. The former president might be right to mitigate the risk; after all, polls show him in a dead heat with Harris in a race where the fundamentals of top voter priorities like the economy and immigration may favor him.
After Tuesday’s onstage encounter, Harris had said she and her opponent owed voters another debate. Trump’s move paved the way for the Democratic nominee’s team to gloat that he is afraid to debate her and to push a performance in which she mocked and berated a grumpy former president with bravado and a smile. Harris’s top campaign adviser, David Plouffe, called Trump a “chicken” on Social Media X.
The Republican candidate often changes his mind. But his announcement that there will be no other debate seemed firmer than many of his previous statements and twists.
His Arizona rally — which was apparently set to focus on economic policy, judging by a backdrop that read “No tax on tips” and “Make Housing Affordable” — revealed that Trump is still fuming over Tuesday night’s debate. He spent a long moment early in his speech rehashing the debate, complaining bitterly about Harris’s answers and saying that ABC News had set him up. His litany of complaints, however, contradicted his claim that he had won. “People said I was angry in the debate, angry, and yes, I am angry that he[Biden]allowed 21 million illegal aliens to invade our communities,” Trump said, using unverified figures on undocumented immigration.
Trump’s pivot against a second debate with Harris came as the two candidates have ramped up their campaigns, trading attacks in recent days. Trump has also been embroiled in another controversy over the type of extremist companions at his rallies, after attending a 9/11 commemoration with Laura Loomer, a far-right polemicist known for promoting conspiracy theories about the 2001 attacks. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman whose penchant for conspiracy theories has made her popular within the “Make America Great Again” movement, criticized Loomer for a “shocking and extremely racist” social media comment that denigrated Harris’s Native American heritage.
The furor over whether there will be another debate and Loomer’s proximity to Trump are examples of the heated controversies that erupt at the end of campaigns, which can often seem irrelevant to the final outcome. But now that the close race has been reduced to the daily grind of a few hundred thousand voters in a few states, these firestorms reveal much about the candidates and their campaigns.
Trump’s extreme defensiveness and Harris’ exuberance on Thursday in North Carolina show how each campaign thinks its candidate fared in the debate.
As she did after her euphoric convention in Chicago, the Democratic candidate pleaded with her supporters not to get complacent. “Understand that we are the losers,” the vice president told a crowd in Charlotte.
It’s still too early for a critical mass of polls to map the debate’s true impact on the race eight weeks before Election Day. And the outcome of debates is not typically a good predictor of the outcome of the election.
But the candidates’ itineraries Thursday showed each side understands how close the election can be. Democrats haven’t won North Carolina since 2008, but the state could help pave an alternative path to the White House if Harris can’t win critical Pennsylvania. Trump’s trip to Arizona underscored that a state that once appeared to be turning red when Biden was still a candidate is competitive again with Harris as the candidate as she has widened the electoral map for Democrats.
Both candidates need to win over moderate, suburban and swing voters in battleground states. And they are taking very different approaches to doing so. On Thursday, Harris promised to unite the country and courted traditional Republicans disaffected with Trump. She touted her endorsements from former GOP Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, adding: “Democrats, Republicans and independents are supporting our campaign.”
If Harris is trying to woo the suburbs, Trump is trying to scare them. He mused on a series of dark scenarios around the idea that America was being overrun by foreigners, escaped convicts and criminals overwhelming small towns with “Harris immigration crime.” He repeated false claims peddled by conservatives that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, steal and eat pets.
Though he occasionally returned to what appeared to be a prepared text highlighting Americans’ economic hardships — announcing that he would propose ending taxes on overtime, for example — Trump displayed exactly the same lack of focus that had hampered his debate performance. And he again seemed more willing to deploy his outlandish rhetoric and dark humor than to address the issues that could win him the election.
At times, Trump veered into odd distractions. For example, and not for the first time, he seemed fixated on the size of a large man in the auditorium. He asked, “Wasn’t ‘The Apprentice’ a great show?” and wistfully recalled the final night of his election campaign in 2016. He also recounted conversations with former first lady Melania Trump in which he called her “honey” and she criticized his jokes, his hair and his habit of mocking the way Biden walked down a flight of stairs.
It is increasingly clear that Trump is underperforming in his own campaign. His shocking ads and his vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, are making a stronger economic case than he is.
Still, Trump remains ahead of Harris in most polls when voters are asked who they trust more to handle the economy and immigration. So while his rhetoric may seem atrocious to many progressives, his message resonates clearly with millions of Americans. The economic argument buried deep in his speech about the performance of the Biden-Harris administration hinted at why the former president may yet win the election. His behavior throughout most of his speech in Arizona showed why he may not.
The former president’s continued misbehavior on Thursday suggests one reason his campaign may not want its candidate to step onto a debate stage again, after 60 million people watched his first meeting with Harris.
But Bryan Lanza, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, insisted that this is a tactical decision. “It’s not about being scared, it’s about what our priorities are going into the end of the election,” he said on ’s “The Situation Room.” Lanza added: “We have a better chance through one-on-one interviews — through our rallies, through going into these states and having this impact — than we do going into a debate that’s going to stack the deck against President Trump.”
But Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, said Harris had intimidated the former president. “Donald Trump was weak, he honestly came across as a little desperate,” Pritzker told Wolf Blitzer. “Kamala Harris was strong and presidential. If he had another debate with her and it happened again, that would be it for his campaign: he would be done.”
Pritzker was putting on the best image of Harris. But she might not perform the same in a second debate. And in 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was judged the winner of each of her debates with Trump, but it was he who was sworn in the following January.
Not everyone who knows Trump believes his decision is final. Alyssa Farah Griffin, a commentator who used to work as Trump’s White House communications director, envisions a scenario in which the former president could change his mind if he finds himself behind close to Election Day.
“I would predict he might change his mind about this,” Griffin said on “The Situation Room.”
“If Kamala Harris gets a surge in the polls because of her debate performance, which most people think she won, I could see a world in a couple of weeks where Donald Trump says, ‘I challenge her to a debate,’” Griffin said.
“I can see him thinking, if things get a little tighter down the final eight-week stretch, that he might need some big momentum to remain competitive against her.”
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