Washington.-At a news conference, Donald Trump pledged to debate Vice President Kamala Harris, while repeating old falsehoods and lashing out at questions about the enthusiasm his campaign is receiving.
As Trump addressed reporters at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate, ABC reported that Trump and Harris, the Democratic nominee, had agreed to hold a presidential debate on Sept. 10, marking a highly anticipated showdown in an unprecedented presidential election. Trump said he had proposed three presidential debates with three television networks in September.
Trump again insisted there was a “peaceful transfer of power” in 2021 and renewed attacks on Republican rivals like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Trump has sharply criticized since Kemp refused to support his false theories of election fraud. But in answering more than a dozen questions from reporters, Trump sought to draw a contrast with Harris, who has not held a news conference since becoming the Democratic nominee following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race.
Trump’s decision to appear on ABC, days after posting on his social media account that he would not do so, sets the stage for a highly anticipated moment in an election in which Biden’s disastrous performance in the final debate set in motion his withdrawal.
“I think it’s very important to have debates,” Trump said Thursday. “I look forward to the debates because I think we need to set the record straight.”
Thursday’s event was Trump’s first public appearance since Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. Trump called Walz a “radical leftist.”
“There has never been anything like that between her and him,” Trump said. “There has certainly never been anyone as liberal as these two.”
He repeatedly suggested that Harris was not smart enough to debate him. Harris, for her part, has tried to goad Trump into debate, recently telling an audience in Atlanta that if he had anything to say about her, he should “say it to my face.”
Trump was visibly shaken when pressed about the crowd surrounding Harris and her renewed Democratic enthusiasm, and dismissed a question about his lighter campaign agenda as stupid.
Trump says he has not “recalibrated” his campaign despite facing a new opponent, a dynamic that some Republican strategists have quietly complained about.
Asked what advantages Harris possessed, Trump said: “She is a woman. She represents certain groups of people.”
Trump has repeatedly — and falsely — accused Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, of downplaying her blackness in the past.
He insisted the issue “has become much less problematic” since the Supreme Court ended the federal constitutional right to abortion services and returned control of the issue to state governments. But the issue is widely seen as an overall election liability, and Trump cited states like Ohio and Kansas that have since voted to protect abortion rights.
Trump also said he hoped Florida would “take a little bit more of a liberal path than people thought” when it votes to repeal the abortion ban later this year, but he did not respond to questions about how he would vote.
Trump argued that Democrats, Republicans and “everyone” are satisfied with the results of the 2022 ruling that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
Trump’s actions within the Republican Party, however, suggest he knows Democrats have already capitalized on Republican opposition to abortion rights and could do so again. Trump single-handedly ensured that the GOP platform adopted at the 2024 convention in Milwaukee did not call for a national abortion ban, and he has repeatedly said that hardliners in the party could cost the GOP dearly in November.
The court’s decision, issued months before the 2022 midterm elections, is widely cited as a reason Democrats fared much better than expected in House and Senate races. And Democrats have lashed out at Trump in paid ads blaming him and the justices he appointed for upending Roe.
Donald Trump falsely claimed during a press conference that “no one died on January 6th,” the date in 2021 when pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol amid Congress’s effort to certify Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego, was shot and killed by a police officer as she climbed over a broken section of a Capitol door during the violent riot that engulfed the building.
Trump has, to be sure, often cited Babbitt’s death when lamenting the treatment of those who first attended a rally outside the White House that day and then marched to the Capitol, many of whom fought with police and entered the building.
“I think those people were treated very badly. If you compare it to other things that happened in this country, where a lot of people were killed,” Trump said Thursday, adding that “no one died on January 6th.”Infobae.
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2024-08-13 09:15:10
