Harris opted not to attend, marking the first time a major presidential candidate has snubbed the dinner in 40 years. She instead addressed the dinner with a pre-recorded video and comedy skit alongside actress Molly Shannon reprising her Saturday Night Live character Mary Katherine Gallagher, a quirky Catholic student.
Trump, meanwhile, was the keynote speaker, making a rare joint appearance with his wife, Melania. His jokes not only took aim at Harris, however – he also mocked her husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, who had an extramarital affair with his first wife (“The only piece of advice I would have for her in the event that she wins is not to let her husband Doug anywhere near the nannies,” Trump said); Joe Biden (“President Biden couldn’t be here tonight. The DNC made sure of that,“) and Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, who Trump said was “looking very glum.” (“But look on the bright side Chuck,” he added. “Considering how woke your party has become, if Kamala loses, you still have a chance to become the first woman president.“)
Donald Trump says he will talk to Rupert Murdcoh and ask him to stop airing attack ads against him on Fox News.Credit: Emily Najera/The New York Times
Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doucey praised Trump for his material, and asked the former president: “Who helped you with it?”
Trump replied: “I had a lot of people helping, a lot of people, a couple of people from Fox – actually, I shouldn’t say that, but they wrote some jokes.”
“For the most part, I didn’t like any of them,” he added.
Trump’s appearance on Fox is the latest stage in his volatile relationship with the network and its Australian-born owner, whose outlets propped up the former president for years – even to the point of deluding its audience about the 2020 election being stolen, as revealed through a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.
Donald Trump speaks as Senator Chuck Schumer listens.Credit: AP
The pair fell out after that election when Fox declared early during the vote count that Biden had won the state of Arizona. Things soured again in the 2022 midterm elections, when a much-anticipated red wave failed to materialise, blamed in part on Trump’s coterie of extremist candidates.
Soon after, Murdoch’s New York Post ran a front cover depicting the former president as “Trumpy Dumpty” with an accompanying story referring to him as “perhaps the most profound vote repellent in modern American history”.
The Fox & Friends interview was a lighthearted affair, in stark contrast to Harris’ earlier combative interview with Fox presenter Bret Baier.
The vice president has leaned into the interview in recent days, and sought to paint a contrast with Trump by suggesting he is too old and unfit to be president.
Amid reports suggesting Trump, 78, was cancelling interviews because he was “exhausted”, Harris said in Michigan: “Being President of the United States is probably one of the hardest jobs in the world, and so we really do need to ask if he’s exhausted being on the campaign trail, is he fit to do the job?”
Both candidates have descended on Michigan amid polls showing the candidates are statistically tied. Harris spent her day speaking at a union hall before holding rally in Oakland County, northwest of Detroit that went from being Republican to Democrat over the past 10 years. Trump – who won the state in 2016 against Hillary Clinton but lost it to Joe Biden four years later – visited a campaign office in Hamtramck, the only Muslim-majority city in the US, and will also hold an evening rally in Detroit.
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