Game on! For now anyway. Late yesterday, after a week of attempting to change the rules that Joe Biden demanded, Team Kamala finally announced they would abide by them. 

The campaign sent a letter to ABC News accepting the muting of microphones during the other candidate's time, although they certainly weren't gracious about it:

In a letter to the network, Harris’ senior adviser for communications Brian Fallon wrote that he believed the format “fundamentally disadvantaged” the vice president, denying the former prosecutor the opportunity to fully cross-examine the GOP nominee, according to a person familiar with the missive.

The muted mic, Fallon wrote, “will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President. We suspect this is the primary reason for his campaign's insistence on muted microphones.”

He continued: “We understand that Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether, as he has threatened to do previously, if we do not accede to his preferred format. We do not want to jeopardize the debate. For this reason, we accept the full set of rules proposed by ABC, including muted microphones.”

Jeopardize the debate? The only candidate who seemed to have an issue with the rules that the Democrats demanded in June is the Democrat anointed nominee. Trump has not just agreed to this debate but planned to do a debate last night on Fox News moderated by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, but Kamala Harris refused to show up. Trump held a town hall last night with Sean Hannity instead. Harris still hasn't shown up for any media engagement since being nominated, except for an 18-minute flop-sweat interview with CNN's Dana Bash.

That brings us to the concessions that Fallon did get from ABC, which are ironically amusing:

Those agreed-to stipulations enable the moderators to admonish any candidate who interrupts and urge them to convey anything said into a muted mic to the broader audience. Additionally, the network will have the ability to keep both microphones open during crosstalk or any heated back-and-forth. And, unlike in the June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, the small pool of journalists traveling with Harris should be in the debate hall and close enough to the stage to be able to hear any remarks that are muted for the wider television audience.

Well, that's more access to Kamala on the record than they've had since July 21! Harris has been on the record with the media for a staggering 26 minutes over the last 45 days, and eight minutes or so of that time got absorbed by her equally reticent running mate Tim Walz. In contrast, Trump and J.D. Vance have spent hours and hours taking questions in interviews and pressers, holding such events almost at a one-a-day pace since Harris got nominated. 

Of course, we all know why Harris wanted the mics unmuted for this debate. She wanted to bait Trump into interrupting her and speaking over her, so that she could do what she did to Mike Pence -- embarrass him by scolding over interruptions. Harris got some mileage out of that four years ago, mainly because Pence is a genuinely courtly Midwestern man who wanted to avoid looking overbearing. 

Trump really doesn't have that problem. If Team Kamala thinks that will work against Trump, they're about to be sorely disillusioned, especially because Trump (like everyone else) will see it coming a mile away. "If Kamala can't deal with an interruption," he'll likely proclaim, "then how can you trust her to deal with America's enemies?" And so on.

Nevertheless, Team Kamala is persisting in this type of victimization-attack spin. The Daily Beast reports that Harris and her team are now accusing Trump of trying to "muzzle" her with the muted mics. "Let me speak!" is their subhead, and although that's not a quote from the candidate or her campaign, that's clearly the subtext of their spin. That ignores the 45 days or so that Harris had already had to speak to the country via the media, and her choice to avoid it except for that brief 26-minute window on CNN.

Trump told Hannity last night that letting her speak is in fact his strategy:

Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would treat Harris the same as he did Joe Biden, whose disastrous debate performance ultimately led to him dropping out of the race in favor of his vice president.

“I let him talk—I’m going to let her talk,” Trump told Hannity. “There are those that say that Biden is smarter than she is. If that’s the case, we have a problem.”

Bash let her speak on CNN too, and that didn't work out so well for Harris. She spoke in circles about her wholesale flip-flops on policies from the border to bacon, telling Bash that "my values haven't changed" without any explanation of why all her policy positions have flopped to their diametric opposite over the last 45 days. 

It's not just the conservatives noticing that either. I had this in the Headlines yesterday, but in case you missed it, Robby Soave and Amber Duke analyzed both Harris and the media for Reason TV. Their conclusions are devastating about both, and I doubt that debate will improve anything for either.