Trump says he won’t debate Harris again as candidates hold dueling swing state rallies – as it happened
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Trump repeats claims he won the matchup to Arizona crowd; Harris says in North Carolina that Americans should see another debate. This blog is now closed.
Donald Trump announced he will not participate in a second debate with Kamala Harris, saying she has turned down previous opportunities to meet and alleging she lost their Tuesday night face-off.
“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH.’ Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate,” the former president wrote on Truth Social.
Trump restated his much-repeated claim that Harris and Joe Biden have “destroyed our Country”, then said:
Everyone knows this, and all of the other problems caused by Kamala and Joe - It was discussed in great detail during the First Debate with Joe, and the Second Debate with Comrade Harris. She was a no-show at the Fox Debate, and refused to do NBC & CBS. KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD. THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!
The Harris campaign has previously said she would be willing to debate Trump again sometime in October. Trump’s running mate JD Vance remains scheduled to debate Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, on 1 October in New York.
This blog is closing soon, thanks for joining us. Here’s a recap of today’s main developments:
Donald Trump announced he would not participate in a second debate with Kamala Harris, saying she has turned down previous opportunities to meet and alleging she lost their Tuesday night face-off. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found Harris the overall winner of the Tuesday evening face-off, and slightly improving her lead nationally.
Republicans blamed the influence of Laura Loomer, a rightwing conspiracy theorist, for Trump’s botched debate performance on Tuesday. The Semafor website quoted an unnamed source close to Trump’s campaign as saying they were “100%” concerned about Loomer’s sway over the Republican nominee.
The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, said a bomb threat that forced the evacuation of the city hall and other buildings on Thursday, had used “hateful language” towards Haitians and other immigrants. Springfield was thrust into the spotlight this week after Donald Trump and other Republicans including JD Vance promoted the false rumour that immigrants in the city are eating people’s pets.
Donald Trump had two counts tossed from his criminal case in Georgia over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, after the presiding judge decided on Thursday they fell under the supremacy clause in the US constitution that bars state prosecutors from charging federal crimes.
Donald Trump has failed in his latest attempt to lift the limited gag order imposed on him by Juan Merchan, the judge who presided over the trial in which the former president was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments. New York’s appeals court declined Trump’s request today “upon the ground that no substantial constitutional question is directly involved”.
A North Dakota judge struck down its near-total ban on abortions, saying the state constitution protects some access to the procedure, and the law as written is vague, the Associated Press reports. District judge Bruce Romanick’s decision comes in a lawsuit filed by North Dakota’s sole abortion clinic, which has moved to neighboring Minnesota since the ban was signed by Governor Doug Burgum in 2022.
The joint session of Congress scheduled for 6 January 2025 to count and certify electoral votes will be considered a “national special security event” by the homeland security department, all because of what happened last time.
Alberto Gonzales, a Republican who served as attorney general under George W Bush, announced he will vote for Harris. “As the United States approaches a critical election, I can’t sit quietly as Donald Trump – perhaps the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation – eyes a return to the White House,” he wrote in a column for Politico.
The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, has said a bomb threat that led to the evacuation of City Hall and numerous buildings on Thursday “used hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community.”
“Springfield is a community that needs help,” mayor Rob Rue told the Washington Post. The mayor added that national leaders should provide that help and not “hurt a community like, unfortunately, we have seen over the last couple of days.”
Springfield was thrust into the spotlight this week after Donald Trump and other Republicans including vice presidential candidate JD Vance promoted the false rumour that immigrants in the city are eating people’s pets.
Kamala Harris took the stage in Greensboro, North Carolina, and immediately brought up this week’s debate and Donald Trump’s decision not to take part in another.
We “owe it to the voters” to have another, she said, to big applause from the crowd.
She also talked more about her past as a prosecutor and her plans for new home-owners and small businesses: “From the courtroom to the White House, my client have been the American people,” she said.
“I will always put the middle-class and working-class families first, I know where I came from,” she said. “I’m clear about that.”
The White House has rebuked Donald Trump for his association with far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who has been traveling with him this week and who has been identified as a key promoter of the false rumour that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating people’s pets.
Before Trump’s debate with Kamala Harris on Tuesday, Loomer made racist comments about Harris, who is of Indian descent, saying that if she won the 5 November election, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center”.
“It is repugnant, these types of comments, it is un-American to say these types of things, exactly the kind of hateful and divisive rhetoric that we should denounce,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House spokesperson, said on Thursday, according to Reuters.
“No leader should ever associate with someone who spreads this kind of ugliness, this kind of racist poison,” Jean-Pierre said.
At the Tucson rally, Trump also promised to eliminate taxes on overtime pay.
But it is unclear how such a policy would work. It is also worth noting that Project 2025, the platform devised for a second Trump term, seeks to make overtime – also known as time-and-a-half pay – more confusing for workers to navigate and would likely reduce the number of workers eligible for overtime.
From PolitiFact:
The plan doesn’t call for banning overtime wages. It recommends changes to some Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulations and to overtime rules. Some changes, if enacted, could result in some people losing overtime protections, experts told us.
The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).” This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Robert Reich, the former US labor secretary, responded to Trump’s incendiary claims about immigrants by noting that immigrants make up about a fifth of the country’s essential workforce.
A 2020 report from the bipartisan immigration and criminal justice reform group Fwd.us estimated that one in five essential workers were immigrants, including in the medical, agriculture and food service industries. The group also estimated that “more than two-thirds of all undocumented immigrant workers serve in frontline jobs in essential industries”.
America is prosperous largely BECAUSE of immigrants.
Nearly 23 million immigrants are considered essential workers — that's 1 in 5 individuals in the total U.S. essential workforce.
They should be lauded for their importance and commitment to our country, not demonized. https://t.co/Fog9ip5ytx
At his event in Tucson, Donald Trump is repeating many of his rote lines about the US-Mexico border, accusing arrivals at the southern border of “stealing” jobs and falsely accusing immigrants overall of driving up crime rates.
In a city that is not far from the border, Trump doubled down on his racist denigration of immigrants and asylum seekers.
He also repeated misinformation about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, “walking off” with geese in the town’s public parks and with residents’ pets. The hoax can be traced back to a Facebook post that has been debunked. Trump’s assertion during the debate that immigrants “are eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” has been widely ridiculed.
Markwayne Mullin, the US senator from Oklahoma, would not say whether he would accept a peaceful transfer of power if Trump were to lose and every state certified the result.
In an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown, Mullin repeated election misinformation and made vague references to “irregularities”.
I asked Sen. Markwayne Mullin if he would vote to certify November's election results once every state has certified them.
Donald Trump is now in Tucson, Arizona, for a rally – his first since his debate with Kamala Harris.
Arizona is a key swing state that both candidates will want to secure. Tucson, however, leans heavily Democratic. Second gentleman Doug Emhoff also scheduled a visit to the city today on behalf of the Harris-Walz campaign.
The former president, who is widely judged as having fumbled his debate against Harris, began by airing his frustrations on stage.
“Polls clearly show that I won the debate against Comrade Kamala,” Trump said. Early or flash polls after the debate found that, in fact, viewers largely thought that Harris had won the debate. Trump also called moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis “lowlives” for fact-checking him during the debate.
Donald Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow has released a statement on the ruling.
“President Trump and his legal team in Georgia have prevailed once again. The trial court has decided that counts 15 and 27 in the indictment must be quashed/dismissed,” he said.
Two of the charges brought against Trump by Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, for allegedly trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 elections were dropped.
The dropped charges dealt with filing false documents in federal court. But the judge in the case allowed eight other allegations against the former president to stand.
Correction: A previous version of this post quoted Sadow saying that counts 15 and 17 were dismissed. Sadow corrected the quote and we updated this post to reflect that the counts were actually 15 and 27.
“It is important that the vice-president continues to define and expose Trump,” Bernie Sanders wrote in an op-ed for the Guardian. “But it may not be enough to secure a victory. Voters are hungry for a candidate that will deliver meaningful, material change to their lives.”
The Vermont senator writes:
I applaud Harris for laying out the fundamentals of her economic vision: she promised to cap the cost of prescription drugs for all Americans at $2,000, address the severe housing crisis we face by building 3m units of affordable housing, eliminate medical debt, and take on corporate price gouging that has made it impossible for working families to afford groceries and other basic necessities.
The American people want change, and that’s what Harris must deliver
These are valuable policies. I believe, however, that her chances of winning improve if she expands that agenda to include popular solutions to the most important economic and political realities facing this country.
The American people want change, and that’s what she must deliver.
During the debate this week, moderator Linsey Davis asked Trump to detail his new approach to healthcare – which he had repeatedly promised to deliver in his previous two presidential runs.
When Trump equivocated, Davis doubled down: “So just a yes or no,” she said. “You still do not have a plan?”
“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump replied.
The fumble was especially unfortunate given that surrogates and advisers talked up the president’s dedication to talk policy.
