Trump says he is ‘less inclined’ to go head to head with Harris again but claims he won debate ‘by a lot’ – live | US elections 2024

Donald Trump, speaking to Fox and Friends, said he didn’t know if he wanted to debate Kamala Harris again, claiming he “won the debate” last night.

Well, I’d be less inclined to because we had a great night. We won the debate.

Trump had previously agreed to participate in a debate hosted by Fox News, moderated by Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier. But this morning, he said:

I wouldn’t want to have Martha and Bret. I’d love to have somebody else other than Martha and Bret.

Donald Trump is currently being interviewed on Fox & Friends. We will have more detail on that interview soon. But he has told the show that it was his “best ever” debate, and that he won it by “a lot”.

He attacked the ABC news network and claimed “they kept correcting me”, saying that Kamala Harris told “outright lies” and was not corrected. In a familiar diatribe, he claimed the debate was “totally rigged”.

“So many things I said were debunked, like totally debunked,” he told the news programme. “But she could say anything she wanted. My stuff was right, but they would correct you.” He accused ABC, without evidence, of being the “most dishonest news organization” and that the debate was stacked against him.

Responding to Taylor Swift announcing she would vote for the Harris campaign, he said: “She’s a very liberal person, she always seems to endorse a Democrat and she will probably pay the price for that in the market.”

House Republicans have expressed dismay at former president Donald Trump’s debate performance against Kamala Harris, as snap polling suggested she was widely seen by the public to have won last night’s presidential election TV debate.

“It’s just sad,” one House Republican told website The Hill, adding “She knew exactly where to cut to get under his skin”. Trump allowed himself to get distracted from key talking points as Harris got him to talk about the size of the crowds at his rallies, or make false claims about abortion after birth.

“[It is] just overall disappointing that he isn’t being more composed like the first debate,” the anonymous House Republican told the Hill, adding “The road just got very narrow. This is not good.”

A CNN flash poll after the debate suggested that two-thirds of the watching public believed that Harris had out-performed Trump, with the news network reporting that “96% of Harris supporters who tuned in said that their chosen candidate had done a better job, while a smaller 69% majority of Trump’s supporters credited him with having a better night.”

Another House Republican source speaking anonymously told the Hill website “She talks to us like toddlers but is doing a good job provoking him. Many are disappointed he couldn’t stay focused or land a punch. Not sure much changes but it wasn’t a good performance,” while a third said “It’s not devastating – but it’s not good.”

The conservative Fox News political analyst Brit Hume also contended that Harris had won, telling viewers “She baited him, successfully. She came out ahead in this, in my opinion. No doubt.”

The CNN polling margin – 63% for Harris, 37% for Trump – marks a sharp reverse of the numbers Trump achieved when debating Joe Biden earlier in the year, which led to the sitting president pulling out of the race, and comes as megastar Taylor Swift announced she was endorsing Harris, signing her message as from a “childless cat lady”, a dig at Trump’s VP pick JD Vance.

According to a flash poll by CNN, registered voters who watched Tuesday’s presidential debate broadly agreed that Kamala Harris outperformed Donald Trump.

This is based on a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, that also found that Harris “outpaced both debate watchers’ expectations for her and Joe Biden’s onstage performance against the former president earlier this year”.

The CNN snap poll found:

• Watchers said, by 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia

• 96% of Harris supporters who watched said that their chosen candidate had done a better job

• A smaller 69% of Trump’s supporters thought he had done a better job

• Voters who watched the debate found their views of Harris were improved

• Trump was seen to have an advantage on the economy, immigration and being commander in chief. Harris was more trusted on abortion and protecting democracy

However, the vast majority who tuned in said the debate had no effect on who they were going to vote for in the November election.

Following the debate between Trump and Biden in June, watchers said, 67% to 33%, that Trump outperformed the president.

Archie Bland

And finally, the fifth key exchange of the night was on the Biden legacy, writes Bland:

Donald Trump: Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s a president.

Kamala Harris: You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.

This line from Harris, clearly scripted, was nonetheless a useful shorthand for the way she wants the race to be framed: as a chance to move on from the political division that has exhausted Americans for the last eight years, with her as a candidate who is not wedded to every aspect of the Biden record. In her closing statement, she said: “You’ve heard tonight two very different visions for our country: one that is focused on the future and the other that is focused on the past, and an attempt to take us backward. But we’re not going back.’”

In his own closing statement, Trump finally did what his team would have wanted him to do throughout – blame Harris relentlessly for everything voters dislike about Biden. “She’s been there for three and a half years,” he said. “They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it?”

But by then, it felt like the narrative of the night was irreversibly set. And when Trump rambled into the claim that “we’re going to end up in a third world war, and it will be a war like no other because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry,” it merely seemed like normal service had been resumed.

Archie Bland

The third key exchange, writes Bland, is on abortion. Namely, the last night’s factcheck on a wild claim that Democrats will execute babies after birth.

Donald Trump: Her vice-presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth … and that’s not OK with me.

Moderator Linsey Davis: There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.

While it’s not exactly a Woodward and Bernstein moment to observe that murdering babies is illegal in America, it was significant that Trump was much more thoroughly factchecked by the debate moderators than he was when he faced Biden. And it was part of a section on abortion rights, up there with the economy as one of the key issues driving this election, which did him few favours.

Meanwhile, if you had “baby killers” on your bingo card, you may nonetheless have been caught unawares by Trump’s other truly wild lie of the night: his reference to false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating their neighbours’ pets. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Harris turned to a visual shorthand she used repeatedly over the course of the debate (above) – cocking her head and looking at Trump with a bemused look on her face and her chin resting on her hand. You will certainly see this memed endlessly in the days ahead.

The Spingfield city manager said that there have been no such reports, moderator David Muir noted. “But the people on television say their dog was eaten,” Trump replied. After the debate, Trump and his supporters characterised this kind of exchange as evidence of a “three-on-one” debate, which you can make your own mind up about. Harris, for her part, responded by saying “talk about extreme” and immediately pivoting to her own attack lines – the inverse of Trump’s approach.

The fourth key exchange was on healthcare:

Linsey Davis: So just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan?

Donald Trump: I have concepts of a plan.

By coincidence, this is exactly what I told my editor when she asked how close I was to filing about an hour ago. It is also the kind of wafty answer on a matter of substance that is likely to be clipped up and used in Harris attack ads repeatedly over the next few weeks.

Trumps “concepts of a plan” refer to how he would replace the Affordable Care Act, the popular Obama era law that mandated the availability of health insurance to low-income families. There were other evasions, too, like his complicated language on abortion, and on whether he had any regrets about January 6. On Ukraine, Trump would not say that he wanted Kyiv to win, instead saying “I want the war to stop” and claiming that he would end it before even taking office by making Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy talk to each other.

Archie Bland

Archie Bland writes that there are five key exchanges that are likely to dominate the campaign in the days ahead. The first is on the economy, as Kamala Harris promised to lift up the middle class while Donald Trump blamed her for high inflation.

Moderator David Muir: When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?

Kamala Harris: So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America.

Donald Trump: We have inflation like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation’s history.

The debate kicked off with a section on the economy, arguably the toughest section of the night for Harris, who must contend with the fact that many voters blame the Biden administration for years of high inflation. While Harris set out more details of her own agenda, from a $6,000 child tax credit to a tax deduction for small businesses, her point that she and Biden were dealing with the Trump legacy of “the worst unemployment since the Great Depression” did not really make an affirmative case for the record of the last four years.

Trump did land his points about inflation and the dubious claim that he created “one of the greatest economies in the history of our country” in his first term. But he also got distracted: by Harris calling his plan to raise tariffs a “Trump sales tax”, and by his own digression into a claim that “millions of people [are] pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums”. That was a hint of what was to come.

Second, writes Bland, is Harris tempting Trump into going off topic:

Kamala Harris: You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about “windmills cause cancer”. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.

Donald Trump: People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back.

Can it really be this easy to wind him up? Again and again, Harris chose lines that keyed into Trump’s personal preoccupations – and managed to goad him into responding to them at length instead of focusing on the kinds of issues that matter to voters. This exchange about crowd sizes, during a section of the debate that was supposed to be about immigration, meant that he had less time to talk a subject that is one of the areas where voters have the most doubts about Harris.

Similarly, during a section about Harris’ changing position on fracking, he allowed himself to be sidetracked by her claim that he was given $400m by his father. Then there was the sales tax thing; the controversial conservative roadmap for a second Trump term, Project 2025; and the way he let a discussion about the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal turn into one about his invitation to Taliban leaders to come to Camp David for talks.

None of these subjects would have been on his campaign managers’ list of the talking points they would have wanted him to hit – and none of them mean very much to swing voters.

Archie Bland

After a period of undoubted momentum for Kamala Harris, the vice-president came into this debate having stalled somewhat. Recent polls suggest that the race is effectively tied, both nationally and in most of the battleground states that will likely decide the outcome. Because the way voters are distributed gives Republicans an advantage in the electoral college, and because you would usually expect to see Harris’ post-convention bump fade somewhat, polling experts like Nate Silver have recently seen Donald Trump as the favourite to prevail.

Many presidential candidates have “won” debates and ultimately lost the race – but there is little doubt that Harris had a good enough night to change those odds in her favour. Trump’s team wanted him to hang the Biden administration’s unpopular policies around her neck, but instead he repeatedly lapsed into rambling and extreme Maga talking points that seem likely to have left many voters nonplussed.

The problem is not so much that he revealed himself as an erratic character, which any swing voter surely already knows: the problem is that he gifted Harris, who appeared supremely well-prepared, the chance to present him as the exhausting candidate of the all-too-familiar past – and herself as the optimist with a vision for the future.

Archie Bland

In the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter, Archie Bland writes that even Fox News said Kamala Harris won last night’s presidential debate. Bland writes:

Democrats’ moods can only have been improved by the news, a few minutes after it ended, that Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris, and signed her post “childless cat lady”. And CNN’s snap poll suggested that voters thought Harris won by a margin of 63% to 37% – nearly as big a margin as Trump achieved over Biden last time around. Key to Harris’ success was baiting her opponent into rants on marginal topics, instead of talking about the issues that voters are interested in.

But while millions watched, Harris and Trump will reach millions more through the clips that will now be distributed through news and social media. For further reading on the debate, take a look at Gabrielle Canon’s key takeaways and this factcheck on both candidates.

US presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went head to head on Tuesday night in their first – and potentially only – debate before voters head to the polls on 5 November.

Democratic candidate Harris put her Republican rival Trump on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office, his support of abortion restrictions and his myriad legal woes.

A former prosecutor, Harris, 59, controlled the debate from the start, getting under her rival’s skin repeatedly and prompting a visibly angry Trump, 78, to deliver a series of falsehood-filled retorts.

At one point, she goaded the former president by saying that people often leave his campaign rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”

Trump, who has been frustrated by the size of Harris’ own crowds, said, “My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

He then pivoted to a false claim about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has circulated on social media and was amplified by Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance.

The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.

No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.

More on that in a moment, but first here are some other key updates: