Morning Joe crew defends Kamala Harris for rejecting ‘rigged’ Fox debate

The crew of MSNBC's Morning Joe defended Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday for not accepting former President Donald Trump's challenge to debate him on Fox News.

Trump had initially agreed to a rematch with President Joe Biden during a Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC News, but with a new challenger, the former president is now calling for Harris to meet him next month in a Fox News debate before a live audience.

"He obviously is now proposing something that is no more likely for Kamala Harris to attend than him attending something on MSNBC prime time," Joe Scarborough said. "It's just not going to happen. He's trying to figure out a way to get out of this debate gracefully, and he's just not going to be able to do it."

The 45th president alleges that the Sept. 10 date with ABC cannot be valid because Biden is no longer the head of the ticket, according to MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire, who rebutted Trump's point by stating the former president agreed to debate the Democratic nominee.

"Joe Biden's name is not in there," he said. "It's simply the Republican nominee versus the Democratic nominee."

Trump has also alleged he would confront inherent bias with the ABC News team, but according to Morning Joe, the real threat of bias comes if Harris were to stand before a team of Fox News anchors.

Fox News was forced to pay $787 million due to a "2020 Big Lie-related settlement," Lemire said.

"Not only that, and this is serious, they all deliberately mispronounce her name, Kamala, repeatedly," Scarborough interjected while mimicking all the alleged Fox News pronunciations of the vice president's first name.

"Some of them don't do it on purpose, but there's definitely like a kind of thing they're doing there to make even her name seem different," Mika Brzezinski added.

To bring the point home, Scarborough dished out multiple interpretations of Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance's (R-OH) name.

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Lemire managed to bring the discussion back to the procedure of a would-be Fox News debate and highlighted Democratic fears that such an event would be unfavorable.

"The sense would be the setting would be rigged. The setting would be rigged," he said. "Why would she go to Fox, which is still putting forth these bad-faith arguments?"