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Louise Thomas
Editor
Former president Donald Trump spent nearly an hour at his Palm Beach, Florida social club on Thursday ranting to a room full of reporters with no apparent purpose except to let the Republican presidential nominee try grabbing the spotlight back from a resurgent Democratic ticket fronted by Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
The ex-president’s campaign had called the hand-picked group of journalists to his social club, the location where he allegedly hid stolen classified documents from the government after taking them during his time in the White House, in an effort to reclaim attention that has been laser focused on Harris, Walz, and the massive crowds they have drawn in their initial appearances together as a ticket.
Ostensibly, the former president said he was there to “talk about debates,” and after a rambling monologue in which he claimed that America is “in the most dangerous position it's ever been in” and “very close to a world war” without offering evidence to support those assertions, he did say that he has “agreed” to debates hosted by Fox News on September 4, ABC on September 10 and NBC on September 25.
“We have spoken to the heads of the network, and it's all been confirmed, other than some fairly minor details,” he said.
But only the September 10 debate on ABC had been part of an agreement between the Trump campaign and the Democratic campaign now headed by Harris and previously fronted by President Joe Biden.
Trump had previously backed out of the debate in a fit of pique after Biden’s exit from the race in favor of Harris last month, but in a post on X, ABC Washington Bureau Chief Rick Klein confirmed that both the Trump and Harris campaigns have agreed to participate in the debate on the Disney-owned network.
The Harris campaign has not agreed to participate in any other debates, but the former president suggested that a failure to do so on the vice president’s part would be evidence that she’s incapable of debating even though she has run for office and debated opponents on numerous occasions.
“I don't know if they're going to agree they she hasn't done an interview, she can't do an interview, she's barely competent, and she can't do an interview. But I look forward to the debates, because I think we have to set the record straight,” he said.
The ex-president also took a swipe at the record crowds drawn by Harris and Walz, claiming at one point that one of his events once drew more people than the 1963 March on Washington featuring civil rights activist Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr. That event drew more than 250,000 people — far more than have attended any of Trump’s political rallies.
Harris and Walz have been filling venues to capacity since they were rolled out as a ticket, including more than 12,000 people at their first joint event in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
Trump then proceeded to attack Biden, who is no longer running for president, calling him “the worst president in the history of our country” and repeating an oft-told lie that other countries are deliberately emptying prisons and mental institutions and sending their former inmates to the United States.
He also complained that Harris is now leading the Democratic ticket, calling her “a vice president who is the least admired, least respected, and the worst vice president in the history of our country, the most unpopular vice president” who is now running in Biden’s stead “because of political reasons ... even though she never received a vote.”
In reality, Harris and Biden both received more than 81,000,000 votes when they ran against Trump and then-vice president Mike Pence in 2020, defeating them in both the popular vote and the electoral college.
But Trump continued to fixate on Harris’s previous record in presidential politics, citing her unsuccessful 2020 campaign which ended before the Iowa caucuses, and suggested that Biden, who has said picking Harris to run with him was the best decision he ever made, might not be happy with the move because she has now succeeded him on the Democratic ticket.
“The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I'm no Biden fan, but I tell you what, from a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away, and people were saying he lost after the debate, he couldn't win. Well, I don't know that that's true, necessarily, but whether he could win or he couldn't win, he had the right to run. And they took it away,” he said.
He added that he is now “running against someone else” — Harris — and claimed that he was “leading” even though many recent opinion polls show him trailing her or in statistical ties since she became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee.
Yet Trump also claimed he was “not complaining” about the situation even as he suggested it was somehow unconstitutional for Democrats to nominate Harris.
“He had a rough debate. But that doesn't mean that you just take it away like that. You or you go out to a vote, you do something. He had 14 million votes. She had no votes. She got no votes,” he said.
Asked if he was changing anything about his campaign now that Harris is the opponent and not Biden, Trump replied: “I haven't recalibrated strategy at all.”
In a press release, the Harris campaign called Trump “the most insecure man in America.”
Campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said Trump was “throwing tantrums online and today at his country club for the media” because he wasn’t getting the attention he craves.
“ The self-obsessed, convicted felon is incensed he’s not in the spotlight as Vice President Harris and Governor Walz barnstorm the nation talking about their vision for an America of opportunity and security – where freedom and democracy are protected and everyone has a fair shot not just to get by, but to get ahead,” he said.
“Trump has no vision, he has no solutions, and he is running a campaign of revenge and retribution to enact his Project 2025 agenda and make people’s lives worse. It’s why voters will reject him again at the ballot box this November.”
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