UPDATE (September 12, 2024, 3:36 p.m. ET): Shortly after I published this piece, Donald Trump published an item to his social media platform declaring, “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!”
In context, I think he’s counting his debate against President Joe Biden in June as the first debate, and this week’s debate as the second. Or put another way, as far as the Republican nominee is concerned, there will no additional presidential debates this election cycle.
Donald Trump spent weeks hedging on whether he’d debate Vice President Kamala Harris, leaving little doubt that he was less than confident about the outcome. As it turns out, the former president’s foresight was uncharacteristically accurate: On Tuesday night, the Democratic nominee prevailed with relative ease.
Almost immediately after the event in Philadelphia, Harris’ campaign announced that it wants a second debate. Not surprisingly, the Republican nominee seemed far less eager.
As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim noted, Trump published an item to his social media platform the morning after the debate, pretending he’d triumphed the night before and asking, “[W]hy would I do a Rematch?”
Hours later, the former president told reporters that he would participate in additional debates on NBC and Fox News, before adding moments later, “[B]ut right now we have to determine whether or not we’d want to do it.”
In case that wasn’t quite confusing enough, one of Trump’s senior advisors told CNN the morning after the debate that the GOP candidate “is going to do three debates,” right around the same time that the former president himself appeared on Fox and said, “I don’t know that I want to do another debate.”
But that wasn’t all.
During the same on-air appearance, Fox’s Steve Doocy raised the prospect of a debate moderated by his colleagues Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. As a New York Times report noted, Trump didn’t exactly endorse the idea.
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to have Martha and Bret; I would love to have somebody else other than Martha and Bret,’ Mr. Trump said, before ticking off his preferred alternatives, including the Fox pundits Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters. ‘Let’s give other people a shot,’ he said.”
The Republican added that, as far as he was concerned, Baier and MacCallum weren’t “good” during Fox’s post-debate coverage, which apparently means they’ve fallen out of favor. Fox’s Brian Kilmeade defended the Fox anchors and assured Trump that Baier and MacCallum would be “extremely fair.” That apparently didn’t prove persuasive — because fairness almost certainly isn’t what the former president is looking for. In case anyone’s forgotten, when Trump tried in August to get out of the ABC event, he published an online item specifically saying he wanted a Fox News debate, adding, “The Moderators of the Debate will be Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.” That, of course, was before the anchors failed to pretend he fared well on Tuesday night. What happens now? Your guess is as good as mine, though with roughly 54 days until Election Day, time is of the essence. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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