By The Independent (World News) | Created at 2024-10-22 21:10:26 | Updated at 2024-10-22 23:28:11
2 hours ago
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Donald Trump reportedly canceled a planned Tuesday appearance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former congressmember Tulsi Gabbard for a health-focused virtual town hall, according to his team, citing “changes in Trump’s schedule.”
The switch-up is the latest in a series of canceled or rescheduled appearances in recent days, which fueled reports that the former president, 78, was becoming too “exhuasted” to fully campaign in the tight race against Kamala Harris.
The Republican has backed out of planned interviews with CNBC’s Squawk Box, the Shade Room podcast, and NBC.
The campaign has pushed back on this narrative, calling the exhuastion claim “unequivocally false.”
“President Trump is running laps around Kamala Harris on the campaign trail,” Trump national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week. “And has done media interviews every day this week. He has more energy and a harder work ethic than anyone in politics.”
Despite the denial, the subject of his fitness is clearly on the candidate’s mind.
He insisted at a rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday he has “no cognitive” and is “not that close to 80”, minutes after getting a news anchor’s name wrong. He will turn 80 on June 14, 2026.
Both Trump and Kamala Harris’s engagement — or lack thereof — with the media has been the subject of intense scrutiny.
After being faulted for giving relatively few interviews, Harris has been on a wide-ranging media blitz in recent weeks, including a highly adversarial sit-down with Fox News’s Bret Baier.
Another Harris appearance, in early October with 60 Minutes, has also generated continued headlines.
The mainstay news program has said Trump backed out of a planned, pre-election special because he didn’t want the interview to be fact-checked, which his campaign denies.
Trump, meanwhile, has said he’s owed an apology over disagreements on the questions about the Hunter Biden laptop story during a 2020 interview.
The beef has continued for weeks.
Trump recently accused the program of using “deceitful editing” on Harris’s interview, which 60 Minutes denies.
“Former President Donald Trump is accusing 60 Minutes of deceitful editing of our Oct. 7 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris,” the show said in a statement on Sunday. “That is false.”
It continued: “60 Minutes gave an excerpt of our interview to Face the Nation that used a longer section of her answer than that on 60 Minutes. Same question. Same answer.”
