When will Trump and Harris debate? The presidential campaigns argue over ABC News rules.

Now that the Democrats have agreed on a presidential candidate and the party conventions are over, the next big date on the election calendar – apart from the first interview with Vice President Kamala Harris – is the debate on September 10th on ABC News. It is currently the only scheduled debate that both candidates have agreed to. It could be the last.

Or it may not happen at all. Like everything else in this election cycle, we’ll take it day by day.

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

When this spring’s general election emerged as a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden (wink, wink), Trump’s campaign was eager to debate the aging, taciturn incumbent, promising to debate “anytime, any place, anywhere.” For a while, the Biden camp wouldn’t even commit to a debate, citing the fact that it still had a bad taste in its mouth about the way the 2020 debates were conducted. (More likely, they just didn’t want to put Biden on the stage.)

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

Agreeing to an early debate before Biden was re-nominated by the Democratic Party proved to be a strategic blunder for both Biden and Trump. Biden performed so poorly that he was forced out of the race, and Trump lost the chance to run against Biden.

Shortly after Harris jumped to the top of the list of candidates, she said she would participate in the Sept. 10 debate, which the candidates had already agreed to participate in. However, Trump said in early August that the ABC News debate was “canceled” because “Biden will no longer participate.” As a counteroffer, Trump asked Harris to accept a Sept. 4 Fox News debate. She declined.

But Trump was just joking around, as he sometimes does, and later came clean about his approval of the exchange with ABC News on September 10.

Good. Agreed! Or not?

This week’s debate is about certain terms – or at least one term – that were set when Biden and Trump first agreed to debate. The original deal called for candidates’ microphones to be turned off when it was not their turn to speak. Although this proposal came from the Biden camp, it was a win-win: At the CNN debate in June, Biden would not be caught in an endless loop while Trump stormed into him, and Trump would appear less presumptuous.

The Harris team wants to change that and keep the microphones hot throughout the program on September 10. Even if the Harris team doesn’t say it directly, they are trying to create the exact conditions under which Trump can rudely interrupt the first black presidential candidate and give her the space to deliver a scathing retort. And to make that happen, they need just one condition: Trump’s microphone must remain on without interruption.

The Trump team rightly points out that it agreed to this debate under the same conditions as the CNN debate. It is not the team that tries to change the rules a few weeks in advance.

What the Harris campaign has done cleverly, however, is drive a wedge between the Trump campaign. and Trump the candidatewho don’t always want the same thing. While the Trump campaign team doesn’t want to turn the microphones back on, Trump personally enjoys having a constantly working microphone.

“Our understanding is that Trump’s advisers prefer the silent microphone because they do not believe their candidate can act as president alone for 90 minutes,” said Harris campaign spokesman Brian Fallon.

Indeed, Trump said on Monday that he “didn’t care” whether the microphones were hot or not and that he “probably would have preferred it turned on.”

Trump’s hair-splitting in the debate has flared up elsewhere, anyway. He’s in full swing in his usual efforts to influence the umpires, criticizing ABC News as having it out for him. On social media on Sunday, he lashed out at “superficial reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview with Tom Cotton,” “Donna Brazil,” “Kamala’s best friend who runs ABC” and “Liddle’ George Slopadopolus.” (The Sept. 10 debate will be moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis.)

“When I saw the hostility,” Trump told ABC News on Monday, “I thought, ‘Why am I doing this? Let’s do it with another network.'”

In short, after an unusually busy summer of bullets, party conventions, and presidential failures, the news is returning—and that’s just for this last week before Labor Day!—to its typical August lull, an annual season when political spokespeople berate each other about the logistics of big events in order to come.