Will Donald Trump Debate Kamala Harris? Here’s What We Know

A debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump once seemed impossible to schedule, but the two presidential candidates eventually settled on a date: Sept. 10. Now, they’ve finally also agreed on the rules for that face-off.

At first, both campaigns had disagreed about whether mics should be turned on when the other candidate is speaking. In the CNN debate between Trump and then-candidate Joe Biden, mics were turned off, but Harris’ campaign wanted them on for this next one, to be hosted by ABC.

“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,” Harris campaign spokesperson Brian Fallon said in a statement on Aug. 26. “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.”

The Trump campaign pushed back: “Enough with the games. We accepted the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate. The Harris camp, after having already agreed to the CNN rules, asked for a seated debate, with notes, and opening statements. We said no changes to the agreed upon rules,” said Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller in a statement the same day, and when asked by a reporter if he wanted the microphones muted, Trump said: “We agreed to the same rules, I don’t know, doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on, but the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time, in that case it was muted.”

After Trump’s comments, Fallon responded in a post on X, saying: “Always suspected it was something his staff wanted, not him personally. With this resolved, everything is now set for Sept 10th.”

But, in the end, ABC announced on Sept. 4 that the two campaigns have agreed to keep the mics off when the other candidate is speaking, though Fallon, Harris’ spokesperson, voiced his displeasure about it. “Vice President Harris, a former prosecutor, will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President. We suspect this is the primary reason for his campaign’s insistence on muted microphones,” Fallon said in a letter to the network, obtained by Politico and CNN. Fallon added: “We understand that Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether, as he has threatened to do previously, if we do not accede to his preferred format. We do not want to jeopardize the debate. For this reason, we accept the full set of rules proposed by ABC, including muted microphones.”

The Sept. 10 presidential debate is set to be moderated by ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis. There will be no opening statements in the 90-minute debate, no live audience, and candidates will not be allowed to ask questions of each other. According to ABC, Trump won a virtual coin toss on Tuesday, Sept. 3, and chose to give the last closing statement, while Harris selected the right podium position on screen.

Trump, in a taping of a town hall with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, said his strategy for the debate was to “let her talk,” seemingly hoping for a self-implosion similar to Biden’s in June. “You know when I had Biden, you and I had the same discussion, and I let him talk. I’m going to let her talk,” Trump said, though he left room for adapting in the moment. “Debates are interesting, you can go in with all the strategy you want, but you have to sort of feel it out,” he added. “Mike Tyson made the statement, ‘everyone has a plan until you’re punched in the face.’”

The back-and-forth over debate rules comes after weeks of uncertainty over whether Trump and Harris, who became the Democratic candidate after Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous debate performance on June 27, would appear at all on the same stage together.

The Trump campaign had previously insisted on setting the terms of future debates—calling for there to be live audiences and pushing for moderators it deems less tilted toward the Democratic Party. This election cycle’s debates are no longer handled by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, after the Republican National Committee in 2022 withdrew from participating in debates organized by the commission over alleged bias.

Doubts about whether Trump would debate Harris at all proliferated in late July, and in an interview on Fox News, the Republican candidate said he would “probably end up debating” Harris—though he added that he “can also make a case for not doing it.”

The Harris campaign painted Trump as running scared from a challenge he’d previously vowed to undertake when Biden was the Democratic candidate. “What happened to ‘any time, any place’?” Harris posted on X and campaign surrogates have repeated, referencing a Truth Social post from March, when Trump said he was prepared to debate Biden “ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYPLACE!”

Harris pledged to attend the Sept. 10 debate whether or not Trump would show up. “The Vice President will be there one way or the other to take the opportunity to speak to a prime time national audience,” Harris campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler told TIME in a statement on Aug. 3.

The Harris campaign shared a statement on Thursday, Aug. 15, saying “the debate about debates is over,” and that it would participate in two presidential debates—the one on Sept. 10 and another in October that has yet to be finalized—as well as one vice presidential debate.  

“Voters deserve to see the candidates for the highest office in the land share their competing visions for our future,” Tyler said in the statement. “The more they play games, the more insecure and unserious Trump and Vance reveal themselves to be to the American people. Those games end now.”