Trump rejects Harris call for second debate, saying ‘it’s too late’

Kamala Harris has accepted an invitation from CNN to participate in another debate with Donald Trump, on 23 October, her campaign said on Saturday.

“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate. It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules and ratings,” the Harris campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement.

“I will gladly accept a second presidential debate on October 23,” Harris later posted on X. “I hope Donald Trump will join me.”

Trump debated Joe Biden in June when the US president was still running for re-election. Biden performed so badly that he ended up dropping out of the race in July, and Harris, his vice-president, ascended to the nomination.

Asked about Harris’s acceptance of the CNN invitation, a Trump spokesperson pointed to the former president’s prior statements that there would be no more debates.

Shortly afterwards, Trump spoke at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said that Harris only wants a rematch because she is losing.

“She’s done one debate, I’ve done two. It’s too late to do another, I’d love to in many ways but it’s too late, the voting is cast, the voters are out there, immediately – is everybody voting, please? Get out and vote,” Trump said.

The first in-person voting began in Minnesota, Virginia and South Dakota on Friday and some postal ballots were sent out a few days earlier.

Harris and Trump held their first presidential debate in Philadelphia on 10 September, with Harris, the Democratic nominee for the White House, widely deemed to have won – a judgment rejected by Trump.

The lead-up to that event was touch-and-go, scheduled originally when Biden had been at the top of the Democratic ticket, but Trump eventually acquiesced to appear, while the Harris campaign eventually agreed to the original rules of muted microphones when it was not the candidate’s turn to speak.

Two days after the debate, when Trump had said he wouldn’t do another, he cited Harris’s invitation for a rematch then as proof he’d won the first.

“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’” he wrote.

This prompted the Harris campaign to taunt Trump as a chicken, and Saturday’s ostentatious acceptance of another debate invitation also seemed designed to needle her opponent.

The vice-presidential debate is on 1 October between Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate and the governor of Minnesota, and JD Vance, a US senator for Ohio.

Debate scheduling and platforming have become almost as contentious as the election campaign itself. The Harris and Trump campaigns repeatedly clashed over where, on what TV network, with which moderators and in what format they should debate, such as with muted or unmuted microphones, or whether with an audience or not.

After the debate hosted by ABC News earlier this month, Trump criticized the network’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for what he claimed was a biased approach.

“They are the most dishonest, in my opinion, the most dishonest news organization,” he grumbled on Fox News.

But a post-debate YouGov poll found that registered voters who responded said, by double digits, that the moderators had been “fair and unbiased”.

While 43% said they had been fair, 29% said they had been biased in Harris’s favor and 4% said they had been biased in Trump’s favor. There was a big partisan split, with 55% of Republicans saying the moderators had been biased in Harris’s favor.

But Trump praised, in comparative terms, the debate he’d had with Biden in June, saying the cable network was “more honorable” than ABC.

CNN moderators did not live-fact-check the candidates, while ABC’s moderators did, including, most memorably, David Muir debunking as baseless the racist rightwing conspiracy theory repeated by Trump that the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, had been eating other residents’ pets.

Appearing on CNN on Saturday afternoon, Tim Ryan, a former Ohio representative and Democratic presidential candidate, who debated Vance when the two were in a race for the US Senate, said that Trump did not want to debate Harris again because “he is scared”.

He said of Trump and Vance: “Behind the beard and the tan and the hair there are two scared little boys.”

Meanwhile, Trump was not joined at his North Carolina rally by the Republican candidate for governor there, Mark Robinson, nor did he make reference to Robinson, who was plunged into scandal earlier in the week by a CNN report saying he had, years ago, referred to himself on a pornographic website as a “Black Nazi” and was in favor of slavery.

Earlier in the day, Walz was campaigning in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, about halfway between Philadelphia and Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, rallying at Freedom high school, where he alluded to Robinson, the current lieutenant governor.

Walz had drawn a parallel between northern Minnesota’s rich history of supplying iron ore to steel manufacturing in Pennsylvania, saying “it was our people who built the tanks that won world war two and freed the world from Nazi oppression”.

Then, without naming him, he appeared to segue to Robinson by saying: “And I don’t know if you have noticed, we have got folks that are running as Republicans for governor that are proud to refer to themselves as Nazis.”

The Harris-Walz campaign has begun running TV ads in North Carolina saying Trump and Robinson “are both wrong for North Carolina” and showing the former president praising the lieutenant governor as “outstanding” and “better than Martin Luther King”.

Such quotes are interspersed with statements Robinson has made opposing abortion, at one point saying the procedure is “about killing a child because you aren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down”.

Cecilia Nowell in Oakland and Reuters contributed reporting.