Surging Harris, Trump spar over debate dates

 

Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Haris with her Republican rival Donald Trump. [AFP]

Kamala Harris's campaign branded Donald Trump "scared" Saturday after he proposed changing the debate schedule, as the Republican rallied in Georgia seeking to blunt the vice president's surging momentum in her bid to become America's first woman president.

Trump said he was willing to debate Harris on the conservative-leaning Fox News network on September 4, while declining to participate in a previously scheduled debate on ABC.

Trump pitched the idea on his Truth Social media platform before flying to Atlanta and gathering supporters in the same arena where his White House rival had addressed an energized crowd of some 10,000 Tuesday.

The former president repeatedly attacked Harris and unleashed his extreme scaremongering on illegal immigration, falsely claiming there is a flood of murderers from around the world -- he singled out "Congo" -- being let into the United States by Harris, who he said has "destroyed our country."

The rambling, 92-minute speech also included Trump's oft-repeated lie that the 2020 election was "rigged" by Democrats.

As for debating Harris, Trump said he had "agreed" to the plan with Fox. And he said it would occur in Pennsylvania -- a crucial battleground in the presidential electoral system -- before a live audience.

"We're doing one with Fox, if she shows up," Trump told his Atlanta rally. "I don't think she's going to show up. She can't talk."

The Harris campaign dismissed Trump's idea as "games."

"Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out," Harris's campaign communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement. "He needs to... show up to the debate he already committed to on Sept 10."

Trump's proposal to confront Harris on Fox, a network that has long supported him, was his latest effort to recapture momentum in a campaign that had been focused on a rematch against Joe Biden, until the 81-year-old dramatically dropped his reelection bid last month.

Since then Harris, 59, has reenergized the Democratic base.

She has raked in donations, reassembled the team behind Barack Obama's two historic election victories, and neutralized the solid lead that Trump, 78, had built against Biden in opinion polls.

On Friday, she secured the official Democratic nomination, backed by near unanimous party support.

Harris is due imminently to announce her vice presidential pick, with the popular governor of key state Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, a frontrunner. On Tuesday, she launches a countrywide tour with her running mate.

Struggle to 'define her'

Facing a new rival, Trump was racing to define her to voters as he delivered a stream of personal attacks, calling her "crazy," a "Marxist prosecutor," and a "radical left freak" who would cause a "Kamala economic crash" if she were elected.

"We have to work hard to define her," Trump told supporters. "She's a horror show."

Trump however stopped short of openly questioning the racial identity of Harris, who has Black and Indian heritage.

He drew gasps this week at a Black journalists' convention by falsely claiming Harris, who has identified closely with her Black roots all her life, recently "became a Black person" for political convenience.

'Unhinged, angry'

Geoff Duncan, Georgia's former Republican lieutenant governor who turned on Trump after 2020, said in a statement released by team Harris that the ex-president spewed "incoherence and vindictiveness" in his speech.

"Tonight we heard a particularly unhinged, angry version of the same Donald Trump that Georgia rejected in 2020," Duncan said.

On Saturday Trump was joined by his running mate J.D. Vance in Georgia -- one of the battlegrounds that will help decide who wins on November 5.

Vance seized on the theory popularized by Republicans that Harris participated in a "massive cover-up of the president's mental incapacity" over several months.

"Anybody who is too blind to see Biden's incompetence or, let's be honest, too dishonest to admit it -- doesn't deserve to be commander in chief," he told the crowd.

Trump lost narrowly to Biden in Georgia in 2020 and the state was at the center of his unprecedented attempts to overturn the election results.

The size of Harris's Tuesday rally was a warning sign to Trump, who has long touted his ability to draw thousands of passionate supporters, in contrast to Biden's usually meagre crowds.

It is a remarkable turnaround in a campaign where Trump had been gathering force while Biden -- hurt by a disastrous debate performance in June and mounting voter concerns over his mental acuity -- was steadily slipping.

Harris's rapid entry has left Trump's campaign scrambling -- and Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in US history.