Things you never thought you'd hear in 2024: The Earth is cooling. Who is Taylor Swift? Former President Trump would like to have his microphone muted.
The third incident occurred this week, when Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign called for candidates' microphones to be muted during the upcoming presidential debate, while the Republican camp argued that candidates' microphones should be muted when it is not their turn to speak, as was the case during Trump's June debate with President Biden.
(The June silencing was prompted by Trump's incessant interruptions during his debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020; his rude behavior led an exasperated Biden to say, “Will you just shut up, man?”)
According to the Associated Press, the topic of the upcoming debate was decided Thursday: Microphones will be muted during the live, 90-minute debate on Sept. 10. But if recent history is any indicator, Trump is expected to threaten to walk out of the debate and re-enter several more times before the big day.
The former president took to his Truth Social platform early Sunday morning and suggested he might not show up for the debate hosted by ABC News, saying he had watched the network's Sunday show with a “so-called Trump Haters Panel” and reasoned, “Why would I do the Kamala Harris Debate on that network?” He then urged people to “stay tuned!!”
Harris' team responded: “We understand that Trump's advisers prefer the microphone to be muted because they do not believe their nominee can act as president for 90 minutes on his own,” senior adviser Brian Fallon said in a statement.
But let's be real, when you're Trump, every day is open mic day.
President Biden with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the CNN debate in June.
(Gerald Herbert/Associated Press)
Truth Social is a permanently live and open forum of unsupervised and unchecked Trump proclamations. For example, his recent post praising the Border Patrol Union reads like a Riddler communiqué with typos before abruptly stopping mid-sentence: “These are great patriots who work their hearts out to have a strong and powerful border, only to be harassed by Border Czar Kamala Harris who wants the border to be strong and powerful.”
How fun… if this election were a low-stakes game of Mad Libs.
On Tuesday, he released an embarrassing ad for a new set of Trump trading cards via Truth Social, a commercial that is so defiantly weird it should be silenced.
On Wednesday, reports emerged that the Trump campaign possibly violated a federal law prohibiting political activities on cemetery grounds when he visited Arlington National Cemetery. Invited by the families of fallen troops, he posed in Section 60, the burial site of military personnel killed while fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. The video and photos of Trump smiling and giving a thumbs-up sign at the cemetery caused outrage, adding insult to a litany of disparaging comments he has made about war veterans like John McCain. If only his campaign had the ability to silence him on such occasions.
Last week, Trump’s unofficial media wing, Fox News, probably wished it had a mute button when the former reality show host called in to trash Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. He rambled on for 10 minutes, his tirade punctuated by the beeps of someone (Trump) accidentally pressing buttons on the phone. Hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum tried several times to interrupt him — “Mr. President, let me interrupt” — to no avail. Eventually, Baier cut Trump off mid-sentence (“We appreciate that live feedback”) and moved on to the next show.
It’s no secret that Trump says outlandish, offensive, damaging and untrue things that erode public trust in American leadership, its foundations and democracy itself. Rudeness and bullying are a feature, not a flaw. The idea that he opposes authority is a plus for many Americans who feel abandoned by the institutions he criticizes. So why would his campaign take steps to reduce that part of his appeal before his first debate with Harris?
Vice President Kamala Harris accepts the party's nomination at the 2024 Democratic National Convention this month in Chicago.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The answer may be quite simple: ABC’s audience is not that of Fox, OAN or other right-wing outlets that have pledged allegiance to Trump. While much of the MAGA crowd overlooks his nonsense in favor of his bravado, the rest of the country increasingly needs a mute button to view him as president, especially since Harris entered the race.
Harris unnerves Trump in a way that Biden and Hillary Clinton did not. Her campaign has turned the tables and attacked the bully, for example, attacking his fear of debating her, painting Trump as someone who fears the vice president. Her own articles in Truth Social belie a paranoia about her opponent. “IS HE TALKING ABOUT ME?” she posted during her speech at the Democratic National Convention. And there are growing signs that Harris is chipping away at Trump’s appeal. Ratings for the Democratic National Convention were higher than those for the Republican National Convention, and multiple polls show her catching up to or, in some cases, surpassing Trump in key states.
As for the upcoming debate, ABC News confirmed that there will be no live audience, the candidates will not make opening statements and they will not be allowed to bring notes to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where David Muir and Linsey Davis will be moderators. At the request of the Trump campaign, microphones will be muted when it is not the candidates' turn to speak.
And what happens after the debate? The world is an open microphone.
