Donald Trump Isn’t Preparing for Kamala Harris Debate

Former President Donald Trump told reporters in Virginia on Monday that he is not preparing for his September 10 debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump, appearing at the Eden Center, the largest Vietnamese commercial center on the East Coast, was asked by a reporter, “How are you specifically preparing to debate Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee?”

The Republican nominee responded, “I’m not, really, I’m not. I’m not spending a lot of time on it. I think my whole life, I’ve been preparing for a debate…Basically, you have to be real. You can’t cram 30 years of knowledge in your head in one week. There’s a little debate prep, but I’ve always done it more or less the same way. You have to know your subject. And I think I know it better than anybody.”

Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns Monday morning for comment.

As he talked about his lack of debate preparation on Monday morning, he also seemed to infer that 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was overly prepared for his debates against Democratic incumbent Barack Obama.

“You can have all sorts of sessions. I watched Mitt Romney go in…he worked so hard. He locked himself in a log cabin for four weeks, and he developed lock jaw. He couldn’t speak,” Trump said.

Romney prepared for the debates in September 2012 in Vermont’s Green Mountains. It was widely accepted that Romney performed better than Obama in their first debate in October 2012, while Obama was stronger in the last two debates between the candidates.

Harris’s campaign team recently said they do not want muted microphones at the September 10 ABC News-hosted debate.

Brian Fallon, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, told Newsweek that there is a dispute between the two campaigns over whether microphones should be live because Trump could not remain disciplined for 90 minutes.

“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Fallon said.

“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”

On Monday morning, Trump was asked about the debate format and rules, specifically the muted mics rule. Muted microphones were used in the first presidential debate of 2024, a CNN-hosted clash between President Joe Biden and Trump.

Trump responded, “We agreed to the same rules. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have it probably on. But the agreement was that it would be the same as last time. In that case, it was muted. I didn’t like it the last time, but it worked out fine. Ask Biden how it worked out. It was fine. And I think it should be the same.

“We agreed to the same rules. The same rules and same specifications. And I think that’s probably what it should be,” he said.

Trump continued to question whether he should debate Harris on ABC News, a network he considers “FAKE NEWS.”

He told reporters Monday morning that he would rather debate Harris on another network and listed NBC, CBS, CNN and Fox News.

Harris declined Trump’s earlier proposal for a debate on Fox News on September 4. The vice president’s campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, said in a statement that the vice president’s team plans to participate in three debates this election season, including a second debate against Trump sometime in October.

Update 8/26/24, 1:16 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.