He relished the limelight in 2016 and 2020. Now he’s refusing to debate and ducking interviews.
Donald Trump speaks during a rally at Dodge County Airport on October 06, 2024 in Juneau, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Donald Trump has been running for president for nearly a decade. He has never won the popular vote because his policies are out of touch with most American voters. But throughout his permanent campaign, the scandal-plagued former president has displayed sufficient energy and aplomb to secure the Republican nomination three times in a row and to flip enough battleground states to win the Electoral College in 2016. He came close to doing so again in 2020. And he is back at it this year.
But something is very different about Trump’s 2024 campaign. The perennial candidate, who once seized every significant opportunity to promote himself, is running scared this year.
Make no mistake: Trump is still in the news, as major media outlets continue to contort themselves to present the Republican’s reelection bid as something akin to a normal campaign. He makes authoritarian pronouncements on his failing Truth Social media platform. He appears at stage-managed campaign events, even though, as Vice President Kamala Harris has noted, “people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” And he still participates in what he expects will be friendly interviews with MAGA allies.
But this week, Trump canceled what would have been his premier interview appearance of the fall campaign—a half-hour segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes that promised to afford him equal billing with Harris, the Democratic nominee who showed up for a tough but fair round of questioning. Trump’s absence was duly noted at the opening of the special edition of 60 Minutes, which aired Monday night. Correspondent Scott Pelley began the program by explaining that the back-to-back appearance by the candidates on what remains this country’s top TV news program has been a “tradition for more than half a century,” and that Trump—who spoke enthusiastically, if somewhat weirdly, with 60 Minutes in 2016, and a good deal more combatively in 2020—had initially agreed to an extended conversation with Pelley this year.
“But, unfortunately, last week, Trump canceled,” Pelley revealed. Why? “The campaign offered shifting explanations,” said Pelley. “First, it complained that we would fact-check the interview. We fact-check every story. Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020” with veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, in which she interrupted one of the candidate’s more outrageous attempts to spread misinformation on national television.
So, in the end, viewers watched Harris doing exactly what we expect of a presidential candidate—and a president. She sat down for a serious interview with a journalist who asked probing questions and demanded frank answers. Meanwhile, Trump hid out after he got caught lying about crowd sizes at a Sunday rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, where he was swarmed by flies.
The former president was still under cover on Tuesday, as Harris took more questions on The View, The Howard Stern Show, and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. The Republican candidate’s only planned appearance was a stage-managed “town hall” event with “Trump Transition Team” members Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
Trump will be back on the road late in the week for more rallies—including a genuinely unexplainable event at Calhoun Ranch in Coachella, California, a state that gave him only 34 percent of the vote in 2020 and where he is not expected to do any better this year. (Lest anyone imagine that the former president might be targeting a base of supporters in California’s Riverside County, a Desert Sun headline from 2020 puts that fantasy to rest: “Biden carried every Coachella Valley city in the 2020 election.” In the city of Coachella itself, the vote was Biden 7,948, Trump 2,008, a 4-to-1 margin for the Democrat.)
While Trump is preparing to maroon himself in the desert, Harris has continued to agitate for a second debate with her Republican rival—a traditional fall event for candidates of the two major parties since 1976.
But Trump has been refusing the invitation. Why? That’s not hard to figure out. The universal assessment from the first televised clash between Trump and Harris in September was that she cleaned his clock. “Harris won the debate—and it wasn’t close,” declared Politico, while USA Today explained, “Who won the debate? Harris’ forceful performance rattles a defensive Trump.”
After trouncing Trump on stage in Philadelphia, Harris immediately asked for more debates. Trump immediately declined.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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Since then, Harris has consistently led in polling averages. She now has a national advantage in the Real Clear Politics survey of recent polls that’s roughly twice the size of what she had on debate night.
With that said, the race remains close in a number of battleground states. So Harris is ramping up her policy-focused campaigning—with the launch of a plan for the most significant expansion of Medicare since the program was launched six decades ago. In addition to covering home healthcare costs, Harris wants to extend Medicare to cover hearing and vision expenses, along lines previously proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). An enthusiastic Sanders, who will be campaigning for Harris in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Michigan in the coming days says, “Kamala Harris’s plan to expand Medicare to cover home health care is an important step forward. Let’s get it done.” For her part, Harris will be explaining the ambitious plan at rallies across the country—including a major event Friday in the senior-rich swing state of Arizona.
And Trump? He’ll be in Coachella, where the forecast calls for temperatures in excess of 100 and heavy Democratic voting.
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is the executive editor of The Nation. He previously served as the magazine’s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. Nichols has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.