It's on, baby, like Donkey Kong. And perhaps Kamala Harris will have a moment to reflect on the wisdom of an old axiom -- be careful what you wish for, as you might get it.

That is, if this is in reference to the televised debate that Harris demanded two days ago in Atlanta. Did Trump mean this as an acceptance of that "challenge"?

“CHALLENGE ACCEPTED”: President Trump vows to compare his record with Kamala Harris’s “point by point” pic.twitter.com/xUaLVQmqGF

— Andy Schectman - Miles Franklin Precious Metals (@MilesFrankinCo) August 1, 2024

Former President Donald Trump said "challenge accepted" in response to Vice President Kamala Harris' invitation to compare records.

"This is one of the worst records anywhere," Trump told rallygoers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in a campaign rally speech that aired live and in its entirety on Newsmax and the free Newsmax2 streaming platform.

"Well, Kamala, let's go. Challenge accepted. Are you ready? Let's compare our records, point by point," he told the packed New Holland arena.

Presumably, that means in a debate. That's the real challenge that Harris laid down this week, although she did rather foolishly offer to defend the Biden record on the border by taking it as her own. That in itself seems very strange, given that Harris and the media have tried to distance Harris from any responsibility for the Biden border crisis by Winston Smithing history of any mention that Biden assigned Harris to deal with it in March 2021. 

Now, suddenly, it's "my record," Harris proclaimed yesterday, essentially confirming her status as border czar for the last three years. And what a record it is! The now-Harris record at the border is one long unchecked invasion by illegal aliens that have now flooded into cities around the country, and not just in the border states that Biden and Harris clearly didn't give a damn about between 2021 and 2023, when Southern states began putting the illegal aliens on buses and sending them to urban areas in blue states.

If Harris wants to debate that on stage with Trump, she'll play directly into his political strength, and from her own political weakness. Talented politicians can pull that off, and it's actually a fairly common strategy designed to negate an opponent's leverage by undercutting it. However, Harris is not a talented politician, and she's not even a talented speaker when working off of a script, as she has repeatedly demonstrated. In debates, Harris holds up poorly under fire, and gets lost in circular clichés and word salads when pressed. 

Harris knows that only too well, as she has already demonstrated. She has yet to hold a single press conference or even do a one-on-one interview with a major media outlet since The Anointing, preferring to make appearances with celebrities while sticking to a script. As I wrote yesterday, Harris is so skittish about media engagement that she passed on a golden opportunity to at least get her feet wet among what could have been the most sympathetic media environment possible:

She had a golden opportunity to get some practice in a friendly environment at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention this week. Trump will show up tomorrow to field questions in a Q&A, and then do a one-on-one with Fox's Harris Faulkner. But Harris, despite her bluster on the stump yesterday, decided to take a pass. Her allies are spinning this by claiming that the NABJ decided not to work with her on alternatives, but the NABJ convention has been scheduled for some time and invited Harris to come. 

Fortunately for her, Trump's apparent fumbles at the NABJ obscured her own pusillanimity, but that won't last for long. At some point, even the mainstream media will expect some quid pro quo for their advocacy, and Harris risks losing that support if she keeps stiffing them. Even Barack Obama couldn't get away with that for long in his 2012 re-election cycle; his local-only media strategy in that summer prompted an angry reaction from the White House press corps, and Obama finally had to toss them some bones to quiet the criticism. And Harris is far less embraced now than Obama was then. 

So far, it seems that history is repeating itself. Biden tried badgering Trump into a debate and succeeded, and then fell apart on national TV to the point that it ended his candidacy. For some strange reason, Harris is following Biden's playbook, and without Biden's track record of debate competency in the past. Be careful what you wish for may be replaced by here we go again for Democrats and their donors ... if Harris doesn't find some excuse to bail out of a debate she demanded. And that would look bad enough, even if it wouldn't be as politically fatal as showing up.