With Democrats having decided on a presidential nominee and the conventions now out of the way, the next big date on the election calendar—aside from Vice President Kamala Harris’ first interview—is the Sept. 10 debate on ABC News. It is, at this moment, the only proposed debate that both candidates have agreed to. It may be the last.

Or it may not happen at all. As with everything else this election cycle, we’ll take it one day at a time.

This particular Sept. 10 ABC News debate has an unusually detailed history for a television special conceived only a few months ago.

As the general election took shape this spring as a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden (wink, wink), Trump’s campaign was eager to debate the aging, inarticulate incumbent, promising to debate “anytime, anyplace, anywhere.” For a while, the Biden campaign wouldn’t even commit to debating. The stated reason of those in the Biden camp was that they still had a foul taste in their mouth over how the 2020 debates had been conducted. (More likely, they just didn’t want to put Biden out there.)

In mid-May, though, the Biden team—needing some way to shake up a race it had always been losing—made its move: It rejected the traditional three-debates-per-fall schedule from the Commission on Presidential Debates and independently accepted two invitations from CNN and ABC News for June 27 and Sept. 10, respectively. The Trump campaign agreed.

Agreeing to an early debate, before Biden had been renominated by the Democratic Party, proved to be an all-time strategic screwup for both Biden and Trump. Biden did so badly that he was pressured out of the race, and Trump lost the opportunity to run against Biden.

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Shortly after Harris jumped to the top of the ticket, she said she would participate in the Sept. 10 debate to which the candidates had already agreed. Trump, however, said at the beginning of August that the ABC News debate had been “terminated” because “Biden will no longer be a participant.” As a counteroffer, Trump challenged Harris to accept a Fox News debate on Sept. 4. She declined.

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But Trump was just screwing around, as he sometimes does, and he later came back around to agreeing to the ABC News throwdown on Sept. 10.

Good. Agreed! Or not?

At issue this week are certain conditions—well, one condition, at least—that had been stipulated when Biden and Trump first agreed to debate. In the original contract, candidates’ microphones would be shut off when it wasn’t their time to speak. While this proposal came from the Biden camp, it was a win-win: In the June CNN debate, Biden wouldn’t be caught in a loop with Trump speaking all over him, and Trump would come across as less overbearing.

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The Harris campaign wants to change this, and to keep those mics hot throughout the Sept. 10 program. Although the Harris campaign may not say so directly, it is trying to engineer the precise conditions for Trump to rudely talk over the first Black woman presidential nominee, and to give her the space for a searing retort. And there’s only one condition it needs to engineer this: leaving Trump’s mic on without interruption.

Members of the Trump campaign note, correctly, that they agreed to this debate under the same terms they did the CNN debate. They are not the ones trying to change the rules a couple of weeks ahead of time.

What the Harris campaign has cleverly done, though, is force a wedge between the Trump campaignand Trump the candidate, who don’t always want the same thing. The Trump campaign doesn’t want to flip the mics back on, but Trump personally enjoys a consistently functioning microphone.

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“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Harris campaign spokesperson Brian Fallon said.

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Sure enough, Trump on Monday said that “it doesn’t matter to me” whether the mics were hot and that “I’d rather have it probably on.”

Trump’s debate nitpicking has been firing elsewhere anyway. He’s well underway in his usual efforts to work the refs by bashing ABC News as out to get him. On social media on Sunday, he went after “lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s(K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton,” “Donna Brazil,” “Kamala’s best friend, who heads up ABC,” and “Liddle’ George Slopadopolus.” (The Sept. 10 debate would be moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis.)

“When I looked at the hostility of that,” Trump said of ABC News on Monday, “I said, ‘Why am I doing it? Let’s do it with another network.’ ”

In short: After an unusually exhausting summer of bullets, conventions, and presidential dropouts, the news is returning—just for this last week before Labor Day!—to its typical August lull, an annual season in which political spokespeople snipe at one another over the logistics of big events to come.

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• Donald Trump
• TV
• Kamala Harris
• 2024 Campaign