Trump Finds a New Media Foe in ABC News

For years, as Donald Trump railed against the news media, CNN was often his favorite target. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports ABC News is finding out what it is like to be the former president’s punching bag.  

Trump seized on his growing list of grievances with the network in a Truth Social posting on Sunday, suggesting he might not attend a Sept. 10 presidential debate that ABC is hosting because he was concerned he wouldn’t be treated fairly. On Tuesday, Trump said he reached an agreement on terms for the debate with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

Trump’s tensions with ABC have been on display for months. He sued anchor George Stephanopoulos for defamation and lashed out at an ABC reporter interviewing him at a convention of Black journalists, calling her question “nasty” and the network “terrible.” In his post Sunday, he took aim at another anchor, a political contributor and a top executive at ABC parent Disney.

“News organizations don’t want to be in the news,” said Frank Sesno, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and a former Washington bureau chief for CNN. “At the end of the day, all this does is to raise the profile of the event.”

As of Monday, the Trump and Harris campaigns had failed to agree on whether microphones should be muted during the debate. The Harris campaign had said both microphones should be live, while the Trump campaign had pushed to keep the microphones muted as they were during a June debate on CNN between Trump and President Biden.

In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, Trump said that the rules would be the same as in the CNN debate and that candidates wouldn’t be allowed to bring notes.

An ABC spokeswoman had no comment on the terms of the debate. A Harris campaign representative didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Television interviews are another way for voters to get a sense of how Harris operates in an unscripted setting. CNN said it would air a joint interview with Harris and running mate Tim Walz on Thursday, her first one since becoming the nominee. Dana Bash will conduct the interview.