A Desperate Donald Trump May Debate Kamala Harris After All

After President Biden backed out of the 2024 presidential election and was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump attempted to weasel out of a previously agreed on debate on ABC News scheduled for September 10. Now Trump wants back in. 

The Washington Post reports that Trump is expected to propose a new debate in the next few days to Harris moderated by ABC News or NBC News with Univision, citing anonymous sources. The move comes after Trump had proposed a September 4 debate moderated by Fox News but was rebuffed by the Harris campaign and criticized by his own supporters. 

Only on Wednesday, the Trump campaign was dodging questions about how the former president and convicted felon ducked out of the previously scheduled debate. This followed a litany of excuses Trump has made since Harris entered the race. He claimed that he couldn’t go on ABC because of ongoing litigation against the network and that he didn’t need to debate because he was already leading in the polls (he wasn’t). His team said that he couldn’t debate someone who wasn’t officially the Democratic nominee and didn’t have former President Barack Obama’s endorsement. Hours later, Obama endorsed Harris. 

The real reason Trump has been hesitant to debate Harris is probably because he’s worried. Trump reportedly thinks it’s unfair that he has to run against Harris, complaining to confidants about the media coverage Harris is getting and about being overtaken in polls. He and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have been struggling to come up with any effective attacks against Harris and Tim Walz, trying out accusations of antisemitism and attacks on Walz’s military record that so far haven’t picked up any traction. 

But in a debate, Trump will have the opportunity to come up with new soundbites and insults, albeit against an opponent sharper than Biden, and he probably wants to do it on a bigger stage than Fox News, even though they would give him a home-field advantage. As Trump would say, the ratings will probably be sky-high.  

Donald Trump is losing in more ways than one. According to a Marquette Law School Poll national survey published Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee is trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by four percentage points.

Americans have identified Trump as the old man in the race since President Joe Biden dropped out last month, and key swing states that had previously identified as red are now considered toss-ups, according to the Cook Political Report.

Yet one issue above everything else is really gnawing at the bloviating populist: his dwindling crowd size.

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was—And she pays for her ‘Crowd,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

Photographic evidence proves otherwise. Pictures of Trump’s Philadelphia rally in late June—which was held at the same arena as Harris’s event on Tuesday—stand in stark contrast to images of the Democrat’s packed crowds. Photos of Trump onstage include backgrounds loaded with empty seats and even entirely empty sections.

Meanwhile, Harris’s explosion onto the campaign trail just a handful of weeks ago has brought scores of crowds lining up to see her speak, with some queues (like the one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin) trailing for more than half a mile to enter the arena, reported AFP.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Harris’s ability to meet and exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. On Thursday, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”

Other top stories on the site hinted at more chaos inside Team Trump, including concerns that Trump is “panicking” and that a short-notice afternoon press conference at Mar-a-Lago, which is reportedly only permitting the attendance of reporters hand-selected by Trump’s team, is evidence of Trump losing faith with his campaign.

“Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking,” wrote former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham on X (formerly Twitter.) “I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/’save’ his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.”

Ready or not, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has more dead animal stories up his sleeve.

The independent presidential candidate has doubled down on his side-of-the-road hunting strategies, telling reporters outside an Albany courthouse on Wednesday that he had picked up roadkill his “whole life” and has a “freezer full of it.”

Journalists reportedly took the anecdote for a joke until Kennedy’s campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear clarified that he had been serious and that Kennedy uses the meat to feed his ravens, according to the Associated Press. Spear also added that the presumptive Kennedy heir no longer had the “21 cubic foot (0.59 cubic meter) refrigerator” used for storing the meat at his Westchester County residence.

While salvaging roadkill for meat isn’t unheard of in more rural areas of the country, it’s also a strange topic for any presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Kennedy’s bizarre story of picking a dead bear cub off the road, posing with its slashed carcass, driving it down to Manhattan, and staging it in Central Park a decade ago has been met with national shock, with some critics accusing Kennedy of animal abuse.

The disturbing tale—which was originally reported on by Kennedy’s relative for The New York Times in 2014—was tied to Kennedy in a New Yorker exposé on Monday. In response, Kennedy quipped that “maybe that’s where [he] got [his] brain worm,” referring to a 2010 incident in which he suffered from “brain frog” and short-term memory loss that he chalked up to a parasitic worm in his head.

Kennedy had hoped to stave off any buzz created by the New Yorker article. Before the story was published, Kennedy posted a video to his X account in which he made light of the whole event, bizarrely telling actress Roseanne Barr (of all people) that he had originally thought to skin the cub before telling friends at a dinner that it would instead be funnier to leave it in the heavily trafficked park.

“I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of, and I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,’” Kennedy said in the video. “Everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea.’ So we did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”

Donald Trump has been throwing a prolonged tantrum, as he struggles to accept that he is no longer running against President Joe Biden.

The former president and convicted felon has become increasingly distressed at the state of his campaign, according to a Washington Post report published Thursday.

As Vice President Kamala Harris has relaunched the Democratic Party’s campaign, Trump saw his fundraising edge dissipate under the shadow of her $310 million influx in July. At the same time, his campaign has struggled to find its footing in the new matchup, leaving some close to the campaign wondering how it was possible they were so ill prepared, according to the Post.

After flying so high at the Republican National Convention in July, it seems that Trump has had a hard time adjusting to the fact that his fight is not over.

“It’s unfair that I beat him and now I have to beat her too,” Trump told an ally in a phone call last weekend, according to the Post.

Trump has reportedly been complaining nonstop about Harris’s surging media coverage and positive polling, which has since seen her rise above Trump in crucial national polls. Trump has also been anxiously asking his friends how they feel about his campaign, according to five people close to the campaign who spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity.

The Republican nominee has also reportedly been getting flack from friends and allies over his performance at recent events. Last month, Trump made a disastrous appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, which quickly devolved into a hostile performance rife with racist responses and caused his team to pull him offstage early, sending Republicans spiraling over what to do next.

People familiar with the inner workings of the campaign have said there has, surprisingly, been little chaos as a result of the other team’s sudden upheaval. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told the Post that any allies or advisers who were questioning the campaign were “unnamed sources who have no idea what they are talking about and are doing nothing but helping Democrats.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s nostalgia for his low-energy run against Biden is tangible. The former president took to Truth Social Tuesday night to fantasize about the Democratic National Convention, inventing a version in which Biden swoops in and steals the nomination back from Harris.

Now Trump’s race is very different. It requires a much more sophisticated ground game, which his campaign has yet to put together—and even his allies are noticing.

Conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X Thursday, “Forget the money and ads, the Democrats’ ground game is far surpassing the GOP ground game. They’ve been registering new voters and farming for absentee ballots with paid operatives, some of whom are making up to $40 an hour. The GOP has nothing at that level.”

Trump is much more used to doing one major event a week. This week, as his running mate J.D. Vance hit the road, Trump stayed home in Florida to fundraise and do interviews. After months of campaigning, it’s unclear whether Trump has the stamina to carry his campaign to November.

Hints of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline have been seen for the past several months, perhaps even years, as he campaigns to return to the White House, and experts are noticing.

The health and science publication STAT spoke to several experts in memory, psychology, and linguistics about patterns in Trump’s speech, which seems to growing more incoherent. Comparing his speeches from this year to those from 2017, researchers discovered that Trump uses shorter sentences, confuses his word order more often, repeats words and topics, and frequently goes on tangents.  

These changes in Trump’s speech could be due to something as benign as mood changes or as serious as the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease, the experts said. One academic, social psychologist James Pennebaker, performed a statistical analysis of transcripts from Trump speeches between 2015 and 2024, and found telling differences in how the former president and convicted felon speaks.  

Pennebaker, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, found that Trump has increased his “all-or-nothing thinking,” using words such as “always,” “never,” and “completely.” This, along with his decrease in the use of positive words and increased references to negative emotions, could be a sign of depression, Pennebaker said.

A sharp increase in all-or-nothing thinking is linked to cognitive decline, Pennebaker added. “Another person [whose] all-or–nothing thinking has gone up is Biden,” he said. 

Pennebaker also found that Trump has spoken more about the past since 2020, with less time speaking about the future, and uses simpler words and sentence structures now compared to before he was elected president. Pennebaker citied a metric for analytic thinking where Trump measures quite low on complexity of thought: Most presidents score in a 60 to 70 range in their speeches, but Trump’s speeches land him between 10 and 24.

“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” Pennebaker told STAT. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”  

During the 2024 campaign, Trump has made many gaffes, including mixing up Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, seemingly forgetting events right after they happen, and fumbling during speeches. There have been so many incidents that his opponents have even made video supercuts of his missteps. Even while he was president, former White House staffers and people like Representative Nancy Pelosi say there were clear signs of cognitive decline. With President Biden withdrawing from the 2024 election in part due to concerns over his mental acuity, perhaps Trump ought to consider whether his own mental state makes him unfit for leadership.  

J.D. Vance is begging people to stop calling him and Donald Trump weird.

During a campaign stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, Vance was asked to respond to the whole “weird thing,” which was popularized by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz before he was tapped to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. 

The Republican vice presidential nominee attempted to dispel rumors of his weirdness. 

“I think that what makes Donald Trump and I good candidates and a good team is that we’re normal guys who wanna make this country great again, and we want Americans to be able to live the American dream,” he said.

Vance quickly pivoted into slinging some dirt of his own. He called Walz “pretty weird” for not kissing his wife onstage during his rally in Atlanta, which drew a crowd of more than 12,000 people. At Vance’s rally across town, the Ohio senator attracted a group of just over 200 people, according to local news outlet WHYY.  

Throughout Vance’s appearance Wednesday at Wollard International, an airplane part manufacturer, Vance made his best case for just how normal the Republican ticket is. But for Vance, even softball questions elicited strangely hostile, awkward answers. 

At one point, Vance was asked why people in Wisconsin would want to get a beer with him. 

“I guess, I guess they’d wanna have a beer with me because I actually do like to drink beer,” he said, signaling his apparent normalcy. “I probably like to drink beer a little bit too much, but that’s OK, I’m sure the media won’t give me too much crap over that.”

Vance proceeded to gush about his running mate, saying he’d never met someone “who likes normal people more than Trump.”

This week, Vance has been traveling solo, stopping in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, never far from the Harris-Walz campaign. On Friday, he will be rejoined in Montana by former President Donald Trump, who hasn’t campaigned all week. 

Donald Trump has spent weeks trying to disavow Project 2025 since it became clear just how deeply unpopular the christo-nationalist agenda is among American voters. He even went as far as to claim that he knew “nothing about Project 2025” after the leader of the group organizing it, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, called for a “bloodless” revolution. But new evidence shows that Trump did know about the plan—and Roberts—as early as April 2022, when the two were photographed on a private flight together, smiling.

“I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025,” Roberts told The Washington Post that month, “because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.”

Trump and Roberts took that flight, which the Heritage Foundation had chartered, from Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, to the annual Heritage Foundation conference on the state coast. Trump was the conference’s keynote speaker.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in his speech.

Project 2025 reflects Trump’s core political philosophy, and was designed to be a transition playbook to expedite the first 180 days of a potential second Trump presidency. But the 920-page Christian-nationalist manifesto boasts what would otherwise be considered outrageous policy positions, including dismantling staples of the executive branch such as the Department of Education.

It also proposes revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, a national ban on pornography, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and repealing policies that help LGBTQ+ people and single mothers, on the basis that these laws threaten “Americans’ fundamental liberties.”

Trump’s campaign has grown increasingly frustrated by reporting on the affiliation between the campaign and Project 2025’s agenda, despite their apparent linkage and the program’s intention of enacting the former president’s wish list.

The two share political philosophies and key allies, including former Trump advisers Stephen Miller and John McEntee. In fact, at least 140 Trump staffers currently work for Project 2025. And as much as Trump wants to distance himself from the apparatus, Project 2025 has been thoroughly involved in staffing a future Trump presidency: Roberts has claimed the project has already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees should the presumptive GOP presidential candidate win in November. But they may have more on the way—in November, Trump allies claimed they were looking to install as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via a “Schedule F” executive order.

“Never before has the entire movement … banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state,” Project 2025’s former director, Paul Dans, told Axios at the time.

Another architect of Project 2025, Russel Vought—whose simmering extremism has been fueled by year-long partnerships with renowned Christian nationalists—“is likely” to be appointed to a high-ranking position in a second Trump administration, the Associated Press reported Monday.

Regardless, senior Trump advisers have warned news outlets against reporting on the connections, repeatedly insisting that Project 2025 has no affiliation or involvement with the Trump campaign, and have instead pointed to Agenda47 as Trump’s official platform. They do not offer an explanation as to why Agenda47 is almost identical to Project 2025.

It turns out that Donald Trump had something nice to say about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during the protests over George Floyd’s death in 2020.

At the time, ABC News reported Wednesday, Trump praised the now-Democratic vice presidential nominee, telling a group of state governors that Walz “dominated” and saying he was an example for other governors to follow.

“I know Governor Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said on the June 1, 2020, phone call, a recording of which was obtained by ABC.

“I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim,” Trump added. “You called up big numbers, and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”

Trump also claimed on the call that it was his suggestion that Walz call in the National Guard to help manage the protests, which the Harris campaign categorically denied. The Trump campaign said Wednesday that Trump only praised Walz for listening to him.

“Governor Walz allowed Minneapolis to burn for days, despite President Trump’s offer to deploy soldiers and cries for help from the liberal Mayor of Minneapolis,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ABC News.

“In this daily briefing phone call with Governors on June 1, days after the riots began, President Trump acknowledged Governor Walz for FINALLY taking action to deploy the National Guard to end the violence in the city,” Leavitt added.

The audio puts a serious damper on the Trump campaign’s claim that Walz was supposedly soft on crime and mishandled the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Since Harris announced Walz as her running mate, both Trump and J.D. Vance have accused Democrats of antisemitism, Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Walz far left and was trolled for her efforts, and Vance has taken hollow shots at Walz’s two decades of military service. While it’s too early to tell if any of those attacks will stick, right now it seems like Trump, Vance, and the rest of the GOP are struggling for a rhetorical win, and Democrats hope that will translate to an electoral win for Harris and Walz.

J.D. Vance was not seen as the popular choice when Donald Trump selected him as his number two—and the Ohio senator has proven even less popular since joining the ticket.

Several polls have indicated that Vance has overwhelmingly underperformed among American voters, making him the least popular nonincumbent veep candidate since 1980. Vance’s popularity has sunk by 8.8 percentage points since his vice presidential candidacy was announced at the Republican National Convention, according to a polling average aggregated by FiveThirtyEight.

One poll conducted by Public Policy Polling on July 31 found that 47 percent of polled Americans found Vance to be unfavorable, while just 30 percent considered him favorable. An ABC News-Ipsos poll conducted between July 20 and July 27 found that Vance’s favorability had dropped by nine points, and an AP-NORC poll conducted between July 15 and July 29 saw Vance’s favorably drop by eight points.

That’s in stark contrast to other recent vice presidential nominees, who all managed to keep their heads above water in the weeks following their nominations.

Voting blocs that have turned away en masse from Vance include women, independents, and Black voters. His favorability with those groups has tanked by double digits, according to The Washington Post. Vance’s reputation has also collapsed with college-educated voters, with whom his image has declined by 28 percent, according to an August Marist poll.

But confusingly, Trump has continued to send Vance out to campaign events all week, while the Republican presidential nominee has remained largely out of the public eye. Given Vance’s low appeal, it’s unclear how this strategy helps the campaign.

Utah has become the first state to institute a statewide book ban, prohibiting 13 books by authors including Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, and Rupi Kaur in public school classrooms and libraries. 

The move comes after the state passed a bill on July 1 that allowed for books with “pornographic or indecent” material to be banned. Utah has a Republican governor and GOP supermajorities in both its state House and Senate. 

Six of the 13 banned books were written by fantasy romance author Sarah J. Mass. Twelve of the 13 have women authors. School districts as well as charter schools must now “legally” dispose of these books, which “may not be sold or distributed.”

The nonprofit free expression organization PEN America called the ban “a dark day for the freedom to read in Utah.”

The state’s ban “will impose a dystopian censorship regime across public schools and, in many cases, will directly contravene local preferences,” the organization’s Freedom to Read program director, Kasey Meehan, told The Guardian. “Allowing just a handful of districts to make decisions for the whole state is anti-democratic.”

Banning books is a theme across a lot of  dystopian fiction, for instance in Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-Four, titles that ironically could be banned next under Utah’s new law. In real life, book bans commonly occur in repressive and authoritarian societies. That fits into a pattern with Utah Republicans, who have also proposed monitoring which public restrooms people use. Utah’s extremism isn’t unique among red states, though: In Oklahoma, the state is requiring that the Bible be taught in schools.

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, the full list of banned books in Utah is:

• Blankets by Craig Thompson
• A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas
• Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas
• Fallout by Ellen Hopkins
• Forever by Judy Blume
• Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
• Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Tilt by Ellen Hopkins
• What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arno