‘Angry’ Donald Trump rails at Kamala Harris amid claims debate ‘cost the election’
Donald Trump rejected another presidential debate as new polls show who is ahead after Taylor Swift backed Kamala Harris.
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Donald Trump has rejected a presidential debate “rematch” after his widely-panned performance against Kamala Harris.
The former president announced on Truth Social in an all-caps tirade “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE” after Ms Harris initially refused multiple showdowns.
He later doubled down telling The Post: “We just don’t think that there’s any need for it”.
“We’ve done two. You know, one against Biden [on June 27], one against Comrade Kamala. I did well. I did really well,” he said.
“The debate polls, every single poll, had us winning it.”
It comes as top Republican pollster Frank Luntz predicted Mr Trump’s “pessimistic, cynical, contemptuous” debate performance against Kamala Harris lost him the 2024 presidential election.
Mr Trump has continued to blast the debate broadcaster over the way it was run.
“I think she had the questions. And I think that the anchors … were a disgrace to American journalism,” the former US president told The Post.
“You saw the way that was done, that was ridiculous,” he added. “They didn’t challenge her on all of those things that they knew were false.”
Despite the public reaction to the debate, Mr Trump continued to claim polls “clearly” showed he defeated Ms Harris.
“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, “I WANT A REMATCH,” Mr Trump said.
“She immediately called for a Second Debate,” he added.
“She was a no-show at the Fox Debate, and refused to do NBC & CBS. KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD.”
Mr Luntz, who accurately predicted the outcome of the 2020 election against Joe Biden, said the debate against Ms Harris would prove to be the pivotal moment that Mr Trump lost his grip on the White House.
“It was a pretty negative performance. Pretty pessimistic, cynical, contemptuous,” Mr Luntz said during an Uncensored interview.
“And I think that this will cost him, yes,” he continued, before adding that Mr Trump “loses because of this debate performance.”
The dire prediction comes as Mr Trump defended his “angry” attitude on the debate stage, while still claiming that he easily beat Ms Harris despite the preponderance of polling suggesting otherwise.
“I won the Debate, but was criticised by the Radical Left Lunatics because I looked ‘angry and forceful.’ But think, why wouldn’t I be angry? I love the U.S.A., and it is being destroyed by grossly incompetent leadership,” Mr Trump said on Truth Social.
“Am I supposed to be smiling, like Comrade Kamala Harris, with her FAKE one-and-a-half hour smile and long practised facial expressions, despite all of the problems that she and Crooked Joe have caused. No, there’s nothing to smile about,” he added.
Three snap polls from CNN, YouGov and SoCal Strategies found Ms Harris won by an average of 57 per cent to Mr Trump’s 34 per cent.
Rasmussen Reports daily polling saw Mr Trump drop by three points the day after the clash and subsequent endorsement of Ms Harris by global pop star Taylor Swift, going from 51 to Ms Harris’ 46 the day of the debate to a tie at 48 to 48 the day after.
Trafalgar group, however, showed that support for Mr Trump and Ms Harris was tied at 47 per cent before the debate, but that Mr Trump was ahead on the day after at 55 per cent to Ms Harris’ 43 per cent.
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LEGAL WIN FOR TRUMP
A Georgia judge dismissed three of the counts in the indictment accusing Donald Trump and co-defendants of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the southern state.
Two of the three charges thrown out by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee involved Mr Trump, and he now faces a total of eight felony counts in Georgia.
McAfee declined, however, to quash the entire indictment, which accuses the Republican presidential candidate and his allies of racketeering and other offenses.
The three dismissed charges involved the filing of fake elector certificates with a federal court stating that Trump had won the election in Georgia, although he lost to Democrat Joe Biden by some 12,000 votes.
McAfee said that under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, state prosecutors cannot bring a case for federal crimes.
“The Supremacy Clause declares that state law must yield to federal law when the two conflict,” the judge said in his order.
Mr Trump had been charged with filing false documents and conspiring to file false documents.
TRUMP, HARRIS RETURN TO BATTLEGROUND STATES
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump headed back to the battleground states set to decide the knife-edge US election, with the Democrat hoping to ride the momentum from her dominant display in their first presidential debate.
The vice president held back-to-back rallies in North Carolina while Mr Trump went to Arizona, two days after the VP forced the Republican former president onto the defensive in their first on-screen clash.
The Harris campaign said the 59-year-old was entering a “more aggressive” phase of her White House bid and was “seeking to capitalise on her decisive debate victory and build on momentum.”
Ms Harris’s rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro, North Carolina, will “double down on her message that the country should turn the page from Trump,” the campaign said.
Mr Trumphit the tage in Tucson, Arizona, amid media reports of turmoil in his camp over the way Ms Harris succeeded in goading him into angry responses and challenging him on issues like abortion and foreign policy.
MOMENT BIDEN WEARS TRUMP HAT
Less than 12 hours after the former president and the Vice President squared off, they crossed paths again in New York City at a memorial service marking the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, where they politely shook hands alongside President Joe Biden.
Mr Trump and Mr Biden at one point appeared to “exchange words” in a photo shared by with The Washington Post’s Matt Viser, with the pair looking tense in the confrontation at ground zero.
President Biden arrives at Ground Zero, seeming to approach and exchange words with Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/XM5lgezWkX
— Matt Viser (@mviser) September 11, 2024
But in a “gesture” of unity, Mr Biden wore a red “Trump 2024” hat as part of his 9/11 memorial tour.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said the president wore the hat “briefly” during a visit to a fire station in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where one of the four hijacked planes crashed.
“[Biden] spoke about the country’s bipartisan unity after 9/11 and said we needed to get back to that,” Mr Bates said.
“As a gesture, he gave a hat to a Trump supporter who then said that in the same spirit, POTUS should put on his Trump cap. He briefly wore it,” Bates said.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO:
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) September 11, 2024
🚨 BIDEN WEARS RED TRUMP 2024 HAT 1 DAY AFTER PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE BETWEEN TRUMP & KAMALA🚨
Today in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, @JoeBiden visited the fire station with @KamalaHarris. Many of the people inside were wearing MAGA hats and Trump gear.
Attendees… pic.twitter.com/HRW9fI60yw
HARRIS A CLEAR WINNER, FINDS POLL
Kamala Harris was a clear winner in the first presidential debate against Donald Trump, a new poll commissioned for the New York Post found.
Half of respondents who took part in the Leger survey said Ms Harris was the winner, while 29 per cent favoured Mr Trump’s performance, and 13 per cent said neither candidate was a winner.
Notably, 60 per cent of respondents described the debate as “good,” compared to just 42 per cent who gave the same rating to the June 27 debate between Mr Trump and President Joe Biden.
Another 29 per cent of survey respondents gave the debate a “bad” grade, compared to 49 per cent who said the same of the Trump-Biden forum.
DEBATE ‘THREE ON ONE’: TRUMP
In an interview on Fox News, Mr Trump complained that the debate was “three on one” as the ABC News anchors “totally debunked” his attack lines, even suggesting Ms Harris “seemed awfully familiar with the questions”.
As some Republicans raised concerns about Mr Trump’s performance, the Vice President’s team claimed victory and pushed for a second debate in the race to November’s election, on the day voting officially began with absentee ballots being sent out in Alabama.
Mr Trump said it was his “best debate” – which was watched by 57 million Americans – even though he claimed it was a “rigged deal” overseen by a “corrupt” and “dishonest” news organisation.
“They were correcting everything and not correcting with her,” he said.
“So many things I said were debunked, totally debunked … and she could say anything she wanted.”
“ABC took a big hit last night … They ought to take away their licence for the way they did that.”
On his social media platform, Mr Trump also doubled down on his bizarre airing of outlandish conspiracies about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in the Ohio town of Springfield.
DEBATE A ‘MISSED OPPORTUNITY’ FOR TRUMP
Prominent Republican senator Lindsey Graham said the debate was a “missed opportunity”, while Marc Short – a top adviser to Mr Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence – said Ms Harris “clearly got under his skin”.
A veteran Republican operative told Politico: “It’s astonishing he has taken the bait over and over and over again when everyone knew that was going to be her strategy … But Trump is going to Trump.”
A snap CNN poll of voters watching the debate found 63 per cent thought Ms Harris won, with only 37 per cent giving the honours to Mr Trump.
But polling guru Nate Silver – whose model currently gives the Republican a better chance of victory in November – issued a warning for Ms Harris after “the debate she wanted”.
“If she isn’t able to move the needle in the polls at least a little bit, maybe that means the country just isn’t buying what she’s selling,” he said.
Ms Harris’s senior campaign adviser David Plouffe argued undecided voters were given “a lot of confidence that Kamala Harris would be the right choice”.
While her team pushed for another debate, Mr Trump said on Fox News: “If you won the debate, I sort of think maybe I shouldn’t do it. Why should I do another debate?”
TRUMP BLASTED OVER IMMIGRANT ATTACKS
During the debate, Mr Trump accused immigrants in Springfield of being criminals who were “destroying our country”, as he spread false claims about them eating the pets of their neighbours.
His running mate JD Vance had also earlier referred to a child who was “murdered by a Haitian migrant” in the Ohio town.
That prompted an angry response from Nathan Clark, the father of 11-year-old Aiden who was killed when an immigrant’s van crashed into a school bus.
He called the Republicans “morally bankrupt” and “hate-spewing” politicians and warned: “This needs to stop.”
“My son was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” he said.
ELECTION CAMPAIGN HEATS UP
After a series of ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the election campaign is set to intensify this week, with both candidates returning to the trail.
Ms Harris has rallies planned on Thursday (local time) in North Carolina, a key battleground state which Mr Trump won in 2020, while the Republican is scheduled to address his supporters in the swing state of Nevada on Friday (local time).
GERMANY WEIGHS IN
Mr Trump criticised Germany’s energy policies during the debate, saying the country had tried and failed to give up fossil fuels as he attacked Ms Harris’s plan to shift to more renewable power.
It prompted an unusual intervention from Germany’s foreign office, which posted on X – formerly known as Twitter – that its system was “fully operational with more than 50 per cent renewables”.
“And we are shutting down – not building – coal and nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest,” it said, before adding a terse dig at Mr Trump: “PS: We also don’t eat cats and dogs.”
INTEREST RATE CUT LOOMS
In further good news for Ms Harris, new data the morning after the debate confirmed inflation had slowed to the lowest rate in three and a half years.
The cost of living has been a major vulnerability for her campaign, and the Vice President acknowledged during the debate that prices remained too high and further action was needed.
But the inflation data all but cemented the US Federal Reserve’s plan to finally begin cutting interest rates next week for the first time in four years.
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