The Trump-Vance campaign is seemingly operating under the assumption that President Joe Biden will quit the race soon and let his Vice President Kamala Harris run for president.
The GOP campaign recently declined to schedule a vice-presidential debate with Harris, saying they don’t know who “her running mate” is yet.
“We don’t know who the Democrat nominee for Vice President is going to be, so we can’t lock in a date before their convention,” former President Donald Trump’s senior campaign advisor Brian Hughes said in a statement on July 17.
“To do so would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate,” Hughes added.
He referred to the Democratic National Convention, set to take place in Chicago from August 19 to 22. Biden and Harris are the presumptive Democratic nominees.
Harris had already agreed to a CBS News VP debate invitation. Although Trump just picked Vance as his running mate on Monday, he had accepted Fox News’ invitation on behalf of his future VP two months ago, per Newsweek.
Biden-Harris communications director Brian Fallon told Business Insider that the Trump-Vance campaign was trying to back down from having to debate Harris live.
“Donald Trump is the one whose campaign said he would debate ‘anytime, anyplace’ and who picked JD Vance specifically for his debating skills,” Fallon said.
He added: “Now suddenly, right after a damning new leak showing his support for a nationwide abortion ban, Vance is backing off a debate against Vice President Harris, who has spent the last two years prosecuting the case on behalf of reproductive freedom.”
The communications director referenced Vance’s hard stance on abortion. In 2022, Vance said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”
“This debate has been discussed for two months now. If JD Vance is unwilling to defend the Trump-Vance record on the debate stage, he should just say so,” Fallon continued.
Representatives for the Trump-Vance campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
This is not the first time Trump’s campaign has acknowledged that it might be up against Harris for the presidency.
Following Biden’s disastrous CNN debate performance in June, Trump posted a video on his Truth Social account on July 3. In the clip, he discussed the possibility of running against Harris rather than Biden.
“I got him out the race, and that means we have Kamala,” Trump said in the clip.
In anticipation of a switch of candidates, Trump has already come up with nasty nicknames for Harris, including “Laffin’ Kamala Harris” and “Cackling Copilot Kamala Harris.”
Biden is hanging on, saying on Friday that he plans to quit only if he is “hit by a train.”
However, he faces mounting pressure from within his own party to step aside.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told Biden in private on Saturday to withdraw from the race, according to ABC News.
On Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff of California became the highest-profile Democrat to publicly call on Biden to drop his bid.
And later on Wednesday, CNN reported that Rep. Nancy Pelosi spoke to Biden last week, telling him that polls showed him losing to Trump.
At least 20 House Democrats and one Democratic senator have asked Biden to step aside.
While Biden has not said if he’d be willing to make way for his vice president, he heaped praise on her at a Tuesday NAACP event, saying she “could be president of the United States.”
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