“Our position on the debates is we want as many people, as many voters, to be participants in and to see the debates as possible”, Jason Miller, senior communications adviser with the Trump campaign, said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Sunday.
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Trump asserted to Stephanopoulos that although he doesn’t want the debates to conflict with professional football games, “Hillary Clinton wants to be against the NFL”, which he suggested was to avoid a larger audience.
Trump’s tweet also brought up Bernie Sanders, saying “same as last time w/ Bernie”, a veiled reference to the Democratic primary debate calendar.
The first problem with the debate-timing-conspiracy theory that Donald Trump offered over the weekend comes six words in.
Moreover, the Commission on Presidential Debates has released a report saying that they already started working more than 18 months ago.
“We did not write a letter, but we obviously prefer the debates on a different night than scheduled games”, an National Football League spokesman said in a statement.
The two debates that aired against National Football League games in 2012 were the vice presidential debate on Thursday, Oct. 11 and the final presidential face-off on Monday, Oct. 22.
The dates for the 2016 presidential debates were announced on September 23, 2015, when Trump was not seen as viable – and when the National Football League schedule for 2016 was not set. The commission, meanwhile, successfully predicted the NFL’s 2016 schedule, which was announced in April. He dismissed any question over whether Trump had actually gotten a letter from the National Football League as “semantics”.
We should note as well that Trump’s claim that he “got a letter from the NFL” calling the debate schedule “ridiculous” was denied by the NFL. On Oct. 9, the second debate will air opposite the Sunday night game featuring the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Carolina Panthers on NBC.
And Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman, said on “Face the Nation” that he planned to “sit down with the commission in the next week or so” to make sure the debates “have a broad audience”. Attack the debate schedule and laughably accuse the Democrats of trying to rig it.
It’s fair to expect that the debate scheduled for October 9, 2016, opposite NBC’s “Sunday Night Football”, will suffer some in the ratings vs. the others.
“You’ll have to ask the Trump campaign where they get their information from”.
But it turns out the debate schedule was set up last September by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a nonpartisan group with members of both parties. He had skipped one of the debates to do a fundraiser for veterans charities.
Trump did allow that three debates were “fine” and that he’d rather have three than one.
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Sadly, I think you are not. Maybe he was referring to complaints by one or more of them, or maybe he “misspoke” ( political code for “lied”, of course).
