US elections live updates: Trump and Harris campaigns argue over rules for first debate

It is not the first time that Donald Trump, who trails Kamala Harris by seven points nationally in a new Fairleigh Dickinson University poll published at the weekend, has sowed doubt over his debate appearance.

“Right now I say, why should I do a debate? I’m leading in the polls. And, everybody knows her, everybody knows me,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network earlier this month after Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

He stated he had pledged instead to take part in a 4 September debate on Fox News, to which the Harris campaign did not agree, saying he would see Harris there “or not at all”, before changing his mind again.

Harris, meanwhile, seized on Trump’s wavering commitment before a lively crowd at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, last month. “If you got something to say, say it to my face,” she said.

Donald Trump threw into question last night his intended participation in the presidential debate with Kamala Harris on September 10, to be hosted by the ABC News TV network.

The former US president and now, once again, the Republican nominee for the White House, has kicked off a fresh fuss, beginning last night when he posted on his social media platform that he thinks the network is biased against him.

He asked in a Truth Social post just after 10pm on the US east coast: “Why would I do the debate against Kamala Harris on that network?”

In a classic, Trumpian post he called ABC, one of the three largest mainstream terrestrial TV networks, “fake news”, said its chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl (deliberately misspelled), conducted a “ridiculous and biased” interview with a Republican congressman, Tom Cotton, and a “so-called panel of Trump haters”.

He called out Democratic strategist Donna Brazile (also misspelled) and called veteran ABC anchor and political operator George Stephanopoulos “Liddle George Slopodopolus”. Politico was first to report the news, also saying that, according to sources “the two campaigns hit an impasse over the rules of the debate.” More on that next.

Good morning, US politics blog readers, there’s no slowing down after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, where Kamala Harris was officially anointed as the party’s presidential nominee, with Tim Walz as her running mate. This week, they and their Republican opponents, Donald Trump and JD Vance are on a campaign blitz: Democrats heading south, GOP heading north. And, kicking off Monday morning, there’s a loud argument under way about a different matter.

Here’s what’s in store:

• Donald Trump is now protesting about the first debate with his Democratic opponent for the White House, Kamala Harris, being on ABC News, according to fresh reports. He’s arguing that the TV news network is too biased against him and he’s questioning whether he will go ahead with it.

• Kamala Harris’s election campaign team, meanwhile, is now asking that the debate rules allow “hot mics” – ie that each candidate’s microphone is on all the time, and therefore that interjections will be audible, rather than the rules agreed prior to her replacing Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, that if it’s not your turn to speak your mic will be muted.

• The Harris campaign is waiting to see if their nominee and her running mate, Tim Walz, will have a post-convention bump in the polls. Meanwhile, Team Harris announced a post-DNC fundraising bump, saying that straight after Harris’s convention speech on Thursday, Harris-Walz saw its best hour of fundraising since it launched just a few weeks ago, with $540m raised in total since Biden announced he was dropping out of his re-election race on 21 July.

• Campaign swing state blitzes are in store this week from both parties’ candidates. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, between them are planning three stops in Michigan and, at current billing, one in Wisconsin and one in Pennsylvania; Harris and Walz are embarking on a bus tour of southern Georgia.

• In just 11 days the first mail-in ballots will be sent to voters to begin defining their choices for president, Congress and measures up and down the ballot, including abortion rights in some states, in this pivotal 2024 election. In-person voting begins in less than a month, on September 20.

• Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s campaign remains jittery about the prospect of a power struggle inside the inner circle that could become a major distraction just months until the 2024 election, even if​ the jockeying for influence by top officials has ended with a truce, according to people familiar with the matter.