With just 15 days until the Sept. 10 presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, negotiations between their two campaigns have reached an impasse over whether the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak, according to four people familiar with the matter.
In June, President Joe Biden’s campaign reached an agreement with Trump’s: There would be two debates — CNN on June 27 and ABC on Sept. 10 — that would be conducted under mutually negotiated rules. One of the Biden team’s demands — to which Trump’s team agreed — was that microphones “would be muted for the entire debate, except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak.” As CNN announced on June 15.
But Biden is no longer running for president, and the Harris campaign wants microphones on at all times during the ABC debate, as has historically been the case in presidential debates.
“We’ve told ABC and other networks looking to host a potential debate in October that we believe both candidates’ microphones should be on for the entire broadcast,” Brian Fallon, a senior communications adviser for the Harris campaign, tells POLITICO. “We understand that Trump’s advisers prefer the microphone muted because they don’t think their candidate can act like a president for 90 minutes on his own. We suspect the Trump team hasn’t even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit that they don’t think he can hold his own against Vice President Harris without the benefit of a mute button.”
Privately, the vice president’s team believes Harris can make Trump lose his cool and say something inappropriate into the microphone.
“She’s more than happy to have back-and-forth with him if he tries to interrupt her,” a person familiar with the negotiations told Playbook. “And given how affected he seems to be by her, he’s very prone to angry outbursts and… I think the campaign would want viewers to hear that.”
For its part, the Trump campaign sees this as a bait-and-switch. They want the ABC debate to play by CNN rules, even though those rules were agreed to by the Biden campaign, not Harris’s.
“Enough of the games. We agreed to the ABC debate under exactly the same terms as the CNN debate. The Harris team, having already agreed to CNN’s rules, asked for a sit-down debate, with notes and opening statements. We said there would be no changes to the agreed-upon rules,” Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, told Playbook last night. “If Kamala Harris isn’t smart enough to repeat the message points her advisers want her to memorize, that’s her problem. This seems to be a pattern for the Harris campaign. They don’t allow Harris to do interviews, they don’t allow her to do press conferences, and now they want to give her a debate cheat sheet. I guess they’re looking for a way to avoid any debate with President Trump.”
Trump on Sunday night openly questioned whether he will participate in the ABC-hosted event, suggesting the network might be biased, without mentioning anything about the microphone mishap.
Trump himself has suggested additional debates with Harris, governed by different rules than CNN’s standard ones, including proposing a Fox News-hosted debate on Sept. 4 with “a packed stadium audience.” As Trump posted on Truth Social earlier this month.(The CNN debate had no in-person spectators.)
The stance against using live microphones is also at odds with the Trump campaign’s demand in the 2020 campaign, when it wanted microphones to remain on while the then-president faced off against Joe Biden.
“We understand … that an internal meeting will be held soon to discuss other potential rule changes, such as giving an anonymous person the ability to turn off a candidate’s microphone,” said Trump’s then-campaign manager, Bill Stepien. wrote to the Commission on Presidential Debates on October 19, 2020“It is completely unacceptable for anyone to exercise such power… This is reminiscent of the first debate in 2016, when the president’s microphone was swinging, and it is not acceptable.”
As for Miller’s claim that Harris wanted a seated debate with notes, Fallon responded firmly. “All three parties (Trump, Harris and ABC) have agreed to stand-up and no notes, and we have never asked for anything else,” Fallon said. Another person familiar with the negotiations laughed when asked if Harris ever asked to sit down and said that was not true.
At the time she accepted ABC’s invitation, Harris’ campaign did so by making clear to the network that the rules themselves were up for debate. And if this current issue is any indication, that debate is far from settled.