Donald Trump’s refusal to join Kamala Harris for a second debate is a lot like how introverts feel about going to parties, MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez pointed out Sunday. She explained, “I’m an introvert. I want to be invited to your party,” she told Eugene Daniels. “I don’t want to go to your party… and that sounds a lot like what I have to say when I’m trying to find a way out.”
“‘I have to wash my hair,’ ‘it’s complicated,’ ‘I just don’t know,’ ‘I’ve got to get a babysitter’ — he does not want to do this!” Menendez elaborated. The MSNBC panel burst into laughter at Menendez’s analogy.
Journalist Eugene Daniels agreed, comparing the idea to JOMO — joy of missing out — and noting that it’s something he feels deeply at times.
Harris invited Trump on Saturday to a second debate. “Vice President Harris is ready for another opportunity to share a stage with Donald Trump, and she has accepted CNN’s invitation to a debate on Oct. 23,” Harris’ spokesperson Jen O’Malley Dillion said in a statement.
“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate. It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules, and ratings,” Dillion added.
While speaking to a crowd of supporters in North Carolina hours later, Trump said, “The problem with another debate is that it’s just too late. Voting has already started, she had her chance to do it with Fox. Fox invited us on, I waited and waited, they turned it down.”
There’s still a chance that Trump could change his mind, journalist Eugene Daniels told Menendez. “The thing that’s really interesting about Donald Trump is that you also have to watch him working through things in real time, and you can hear the kind of conversations he’s had with folks around him whether he or someone else probably said, ‘Well, it’s too late.’”
“But let’s be clear: October. 22nd, if I remember correctly, is when the second debate that Kristen Welker, our colleague here, at [NBC News] did between Joe Biden and Donald Trump… we always have later debates, debates always happen in later October, in mid-to-late October,” he continued.
“But his campaign people around him know that he did not do well in this debate,” Daniels added. “He himself, he’s very good at pulling out the things that are good, that happened that he feels really good about, that maybe Vice President Harris didn’t do, because he’s very online.”
The people who surround Trump, Daniels said, “don’t push back” on things he doesn’t do well, and “so he has a different view of it, he doesn’t feel like he has to do it.” But poor polling could change his mind. “As we get closer to that date, if things change, if it’s looking worse and worse for him, I wouldn’t be surprised if he changes his mind.”
You can watch the exchange between Menendez and Daniels in the video above.
