Regardless, someone provided Trump with open and obvious information about the scheduling of two debates on nights when the National Football League typically plays games: Sunday and Monday.
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In a statement, the Commission said, “It is impossible to avoid all sporting events, and there have been nights which debates and games occurred in most election cycles”. But as you can see below, it is almost impossible to hold a debate when there is no sporting event.
The nonpartisan, independent presidential debate commission said it never consulted with either political party in setting the dates, announced last September.
The debate commission noted that there are only four general election debates out of approximately 1,000 NFL Games.
“So we’re going to sit down with the commission in the next week or so and we’re going to start talking to them and we want to make sure we have a broad audience, understanding, watching the debates”, Manafort told CBS’s “Face the Nation”.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, shown during a May 5 rally in West Virginia, said refugees from Syria “could be the all-time great Trojan horse” following Sunday’s mass shooting at a Florida night club.
Trump said Saturday that the football league complained in a letter to him about the debate schedule. However, the National Football League issued a statement that it did not send a letter to Trump. “I don’t know how the debates were picked and I don’t know why those particular dates were picked”.
Hillary Clinton vowed to attend all the match-ups, telling reporters in OH on Sunday: Im going to be there, thats all I have to say..
Campaigns routinely haggle over the details of the debates, right down to the temperature of the studio, but every major party candidate in modern times has ultimately agreed to participate.
The Clinton campaign has not comment on Trump’s assertion. ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” last season averaged close to 13 million viewers while NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” has been the most-watched prime time program for several years and last season averaged more than 21 million viewers.
What gets to me this time is how making a fuss over debate scheduling insults the intelligence of Americans. Of the seventeen presidential debates since 1992, three rank among the top ten in viewership.
He’s claimed that the debate schedule was “rigged” to help his main opponent, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, by possibly depressing the audience for those two debates.
The Sept. 26 debate will clash with “Monday Night Football” on ESPN, while the October 9 one runs up against “Sunday Night Football” on NBC. When they communicate with the nominees and they have contract put together, and we choose the moderators and we choose the networks that are going to be in charge of these debates, that to me is the time when all of this gets set.
“I like three debates”, the real estate tycoon said. Fridays and Saturdays are effectively ruled out because TV viewing is lower on weekend evenings.
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There’s been some speculation that Trump doesn’t actually want to debate Clinton.
