Former President Donald J. Trump proposed three dates for debates in September with Vice President Kamala Harris, suggesting he was eager to face off with the new Democratic presidential nominee this fall.
Mr. Trump spoke at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, where he repeatedly mispronounced Ms. Harris’s first name, criticized her intelligence and resurrected a series of familiar attacks casting her as “a radical left person.” As he continued answering questions, ABC confirmed that the network would host the two candidates for a debate on Sept. 10.
The event was the former president’s first public appearance since Vice President Kamala Harris officially became the Democratic presidential nominee, transforming the contest into a more competitive race. Mr. Trump insisted that little had shifted in the contest, despite polling showing a tightening race and even as Democrats draw tens of thousands of supporters to rallies in swing states.
“I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s the same policies — open borders, weak on crime.”
Mr. Trump’s news conference marks an effort by the former president to recapture some political momentum. After years of Mr. Trump dominating news coverage, headlines about the new Democratic ticket have overtaken the focus on him in recent weeks. He accused Ms. Harris of lacking the competency to participate in a news conference or media interview, which she has not done since becoming her party’s nominee.
Mr. Trump appeared particularly vexed by the size of Ms. Harris’s crowds, which he insisted were far smaller than his — and then claimed that his were bigger than those who attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963.
As is typical for the former president, his remarks were littered with falsehoods. He falsely accused Democrats of violating the Constitution by replacing President Biden on the ticket. He said nobody was killed on the Jan. 6, 2021, siege on the Capitol, when in fact several people died, including one Trump supporter, who was shot dead by the Capitol Police.
Republicans have struggled to unify around a central line of attack against Ms. Harris and her new running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. At the same time, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has been damaged by a series of controversial statements.
Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz spoke in Michigan at an event with Shawn Fain, the president of the influential United Automobile Workers union, which endorsed Ms. Harris last week.
Here’s what else to know:
- Canceled campaigning: Efforts to define the Democratic ticket to voters are being diminished by severe weather from Tropical Storm Debby, leading both campaigns to postpone events on Thursday in North Carolina. The Harris campaign canceled a rally in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday and an event in Savannah, Ga., on Friday morning, while the Trump campaign canceled Thursday events led by Mr. Vance in Raleigh and Oakboro, N.C. Both campaigns will head west to resume events on Friday evening.
- Biden to Delaware: Mr. Biden, who ended his campaign last month, will surely show encouragement when he visits the Harris campaign headquarters — formerly the nerve center of his re-election operation — in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday evening.
- Antiwar protesters: Pro-Palestinian protesters heckled Ms. Harris during her rally in Detroit on Wednesday, resurfacing divisions over the war in Gaza that have roiled the Democratic Party for months. Members of the Uncommitted National Movement said they asked Ms. Harris before the rally for a meeting to discuss an arms embargo on Israel. Her reaction to the protesters on Wednesday showed how she can turn efforts to rattle her to her own advantage.
- Two running mates with military records: Mr. Vance, who served for four years in the Marines, attacked Mr. Walz, whose career in the National Guard spanned 24 years, on his military record, accusing him of retiring early to avoid being deployed to Iraq in 2005. The Harris-Walz campaign pointed to past comments from fellow guardsmen who said that Mr. Walz had been considering running for office for some time and that the decision to retire from the military had weighed heavily on him.
To hear former President Donald J. Trump tell it, he has just been heartsick over all that has happened to poor old President Biden these past few weeks.
“The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., on Thursday afternoon. “I’m not a fan of his, as you probably have noticed. He had a rough debate. But that doesn’t mean that you just take it away like that.”
It has been 18 days since the 46th president was shoved aside by his own party, and the 45th president has yet to get over it. He agonized on Mr. Biden’s behalf, telling a tale of treachery perpetrated against him by former President Barack Obama, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, most of all, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Recounting how Ms. Harris had attacked Mr. Biden in a Democratic primary debate in 2019 — “She was nasty with calling him a racist and the school bus and all of the different things” — Mr. Trump said Mr. Biden had made a grave mistake by choosing her as his running mate.
“For some reason, and I know he regrets it — you do, too — he picked her,” Mr. Trump said. “And she turned on him, too. She was working with the people that wanted him out.” (Mr. Biden endorsed Ms. Harris for president 27 minutes after he dropped out of the race.)
There was none of the usual, malicious glee in Mr. Trump’s voice as he rehashed all the drama. He told reporters that Mr. Biden was trying to “put up a good face” but that his exit from the race was “pretty severe” and “pretty horrible.”
“I hate to be defending him,” Mr. Trump said, “but he did not want to leave. He wanted to see if he could win.”
This sudden outpouring of sympathy for a man he recently called “a broken-down old pile of crap” was somewhat surprising.
Perhaps there was some projection at play: Was the dismay Mr. Trump expressed for his erstwhile opponent really just dismay at the predicament in which he now finds himself?
It was all going so well for him until Mr. Biden decided to drop out. Now, Mr. Trump is up against a more energetic challenger, one who has erased his fund-raising edge and who can compete with him in his most sacred metric: crowd size.
Really, it seemed like it was Mr. Trump who was trying to “put up a good face” when he said, “We were given Joe Biden, and now we’re given somebody else. And I think, frankly, I would rather be running against the somebody else.”
And yet, just two days ago, Mr. Trump was wondering aloud on social media if there might be any chance that Mr. Biden would crash the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this month to try to “take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE.”
What is curious about Mr. Trump’s seeming inability to adapt to his new political reality is that he and his supporters predicted earlier than anyone that Mr. Biden would be switched out for another Democrat at some point. “I cannot believe he’s going to be the nominee,” Mr. Trump said in an interview last year. His supporters hardly seemed surprised when the Democratic establishment began braying that Mr. Biden must exit the race.
At certain points on Thursday, Mr. Trump’s ruminating on how Mr. Biden felt forced to forfeit power seemed maybe like a window into Mr. Trump’s own thinking. The idea of the former president ever voluntarily giving up a powerful position seems alien.
Was he was speaking from experience when he said Mr. Biden was “not happy with any of the people that told him, ‘You’ve got to leave’”?
“He’s a very angry man right now,” Mr. Trump said. “I can tell you that.”
The independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has qualified to be on the ballot in Texas, according to the secretary of state there. The presence of Kennedy will be a wild card in the reliably red state, not only in the race for the White House but also in Senator Ted Cruz’s fight for re-election against a well-funded Democratic opponent, Colin Allred.
Trump said in his press conference that he and Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco and a long-ago boyfriend of Kamala Harris, once rode in a helicopter together and had to make an emergency landing. “We thought maybe this was the end,” Trump said. Brown countered in a interview with The Times that he has never ridden in a helicopter with Trump, and the story was completely made up. Brown, who loves to regale anyone who will listen with stories, said, “You know me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it.”
Trump also said that Brown told him in their apparently nonexistent helicopter ride that “he was not a fan” of Harris. Brown said that, too, was untrue. “Are you kidding me?” Brown said. “I’ve been a fan of Kamala’s for many years.” The two dated in 1994 and 1995 before Harris broke up with Brown. Brown said there are no hard feelings, and he has always supported her
Kamala Harris fielded a handful of questions from journalists after her rally in Wayne, Mich. Her answers were brief, but she defended Tim Walz from Republican criticism about his representation of his military service, saying, “I praise anyone who has presented themselves to serve our country and I think that we all should.”
Harris was also asked about the fact that she has not granted an interview since ascending to the top of the Democratic ticket nearly three weeks ago. Her answer suggested that she had no plans to do so soon: “I want us to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month,” she told reporters.
“If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech. And you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people. If not, we had more.”
— Former President Donald J. Trump
This lacks evidence.
Mr. Trump was talking about the crowds gathered for his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, and for the “I Have a Dream” speech the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered during the March on Washington in 1963. While it is difficult to gauge exact crowd sizes, estimates counter Mr. Trump’s claim that the numbers gathered were comparable. Dr. King’s speech drew an estimated 250,000 people. The House Select Committee responsible for investigating the events of Jan. 6 estimated that Mr. Trump’s speech drew 53,000 people.
The debate is on.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump will face off in a televised prime-time matchup on Sept. 10, ABC News said on Thursday, setting up the latest crucial moment in an already unpredictable presidential campaign.
The 90-minute debate is expected to be held in Philadelphia, according to two people with knowledge of the plans. The ABC anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis will serve as moderators. The debate will probably be held without a live audience, but the exact format and ground rules are still being determined, the people said.
In one sense, the announcement maintains the status quo: Mr. Trump agreed months ago to debate President Biden on ABC on that same date. But the Republican nominee wavered on that commitment after Mr. Biden withdrew from the race, arguing that he had not agreed to those terms with Ms. Harris.
This year’s previous debate, in June, was perhaps the most consequential in the 64-year history of televised presidential matchups. Mr. Biden’s shaky and diminished performance set off a panic among Democrats that ultimately led to the president ceding his spot atop his party’s ticket.
More than 51 million Americans watched that debate live, the sort of mass gathering that is vanishingly rare in a fractured media age. The coming ABC telecast could attract an even larger audience, given that it will be the first time that Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump meet face-to-face on a debate stage.
The extraordinary events of recent weeks, including Mr. Biden’s withdrawal and an assassination attempt on Mr. Trump, have prompted many Americans to refocus on a presidential election that, until June, was shaping up as a rerun of the 2020 race. The ABC debate will most likely be a post-Labor Day kickoff moment of sorts for the campaign’s final two-month stretch.
Mr. Trump said at a news conference on Thursday that he would debate Ms. Harris on two other occasions, at events hosted by NBC News and Fox News. But the Harris campaign has not agreed to those debates, which were not part of the original debate schedule that Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump had agreed upon in May.
NBC News is in active discussions with both campaigns about a potential debate, including one on Sept. 25, but Ms. Harris has not committed, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The Harris campaign has also not agreed to a debate hosted by Fox News.
Ms. Harris, after speaking at a campaign event in Michigan on Thursday, told reporters that she was “looking forward” to the debate on Sept. 10. “Hope he shows up,” she said of Mr. Trump.
She demurred when asked about the additional dates that Mr. Trump had mentioned, signaling that she was unlikely to consider another debate until after the ABC event. “I’m happy to have that conversation about an additional debate after Sept. 10,” she said. “For sure.”
The ABC debate was negotiated with the campaigns by John Santucci, the network’s executive editorial producer, and Rick Klein, its Washington bureau chief. Mr. Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita and Susan Wiles, negotiated terms with the network.
Brian Fallon, a senior adviser for communications, played a lead negotiating role for the Harris campaign, according to the people with knowledge of the conversations. When Mr. Biden was still a candidate, that role was primarily occupied by the advisers Ron Klain and Anita Dunn.
Vice President Kamala Harris makes her pitch for organized labor to the U.A.W.: “It’s about the collective,” she said. “It’s about understanding no one should ever be made to fight alone, that we are all in this together.”
Responding to Trump’s remark that his support from white males was “way up. White males have gone through the roof,” the recently formed group White Dudes for Harris posted on the social media platform X that “we know 350,000 white dudes who are rejecting MAGA and charting a path forward for future generations.” A virtual meeting hosted by the group last week attracted over 200,000 participants and raised more than $4 million; since then, the group has continued to sign up members.
Former President Donald J. Trump claimed at his news conference on Thursday that no one died during the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But, in fact, four of his own supporters in the crowd that day died of various causes — and others, including a Capitol Police officer, died within days.
Among those who were killed on Jan. 6 itself was Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran who was shot by the police while trying to force her way into the chambers of the House of Representatives. Ms. Babbitt, who came under the influence of the QAnon conspiracy group, was trying to push her way through a door of the Speaker’s Lobby when an officer fatally shot her.
The Justice Department ultimately decided not to pursue charges against the officer, Michael Byrd. But Ms. Babbitt’s family has sued the government on her behalf in a wrongful death lawsuit filed in Washington.
Three other Trump supporters died during the attack. Rosanne Boyland, a Georgia woman, suffered an amphetamine overdose, according to the Washington medical examiner’s office, and then was trampled in the crush of her fellow rioters who were pressing at police lines.
Kevin D. Greeson, 55, died of a heart attack, collapsing on the sidewalk west of the Capitol. And Benjamin Philips, the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo, died of a stroke.
One day after the attack, a Capitol Police officer, Brian M. Sicknick, died. The authorities initially said that Officer Sicknick, who had been sprayed with chemical spray while protecting the Capitol, had died “due to injuries sustained while on-duty.” The medical examiner later found that he had suffered two strokes and had died of natural causes, noting, however, that the stress of being in the riot had still played some role in his death.
At least four Capitol Police officers killed themselves in the weeks and months that followed Jan. 6. In response, Congress passed a bipartisan law extending a public benefits program for the families of public safety officers who were killed or severely injured in the line of duty so that it also covered those who died by suicide or suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Altogether, about 150 officers were injured in the Capitol attack, with some describing it in court and at other public hearings as a “medieval” battle with rioters who wielded hockey sticks, two-by-fours, batons and even flagpoles against them.
From Tips to TikTok, Trump Swaps Policies With Aim to Please Voters
At his convention speech last month, former President Donald J. Trump declared that his new economic agenda would be built around a plan to eliminate taxes on tips, claiming that the idea would uplift the middle class and provide relief to hospitality workers around the country.
“Everybody loves it,” Mr. Trump said to cheers. “Waitresses and caddies and drivers.”
While the cost and feasibility of the idea has been questioned by economists and tax analysts, labor experts have noted another irony: As president, Mr. Trump tried to take tips away from workers and give the money to their employers.
The reversal is one of many that Mr. Trump has made in his bid to return to the presidency and underscores his malleability in election-year policymaking. From TikTok to cryptocurrencies, the former president has been reinventing his platform on the fly as he aims to attract different swaths of voters. At times, Mr. Trump appears to be staking out new positions to differentiate himself from Vice President Kamala Harris or, perhaps, just to please crowds.
To close observers of the machinations of Mr. Trump’s first term, the shift on tips, a policy that has become a regular part of his stump speech, has been particularly striking.
“Trump is posing as a champion of tipped restaurant workers with his no-tax-on-tips proposal, but his actual record has been to slash protections for tipped workers at a time when they were struggling with a high cost of living,” said Paul Sonn, the director of National Employment Law Project Action, which promotes workers’ rights.
In 2017, Mr. Trump’s Labor Department proposed changing federal regulations to allow employers to collect tips that their workers receive and use them for essentially any purpose as long as the workers were paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. In theory, the flexibility would make it possible for restaurant owners to ensure that cooks and dishwashers received part of a pool of tip money, but in practice employers could pocket the tips and spend them at their discretion.
