Don Lemon: Trump campaign unsure what to do with Harris

Former CNN host Don Lemon said former President Trump’s campaign is unsure how to take on Vice President Harris as the Democratic nominee rises in the polls.

Lemon told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki late Monday that the Harris campaign’s request to keep the microphones unmuted during the presidential debate next month is a “smart” idea. He also suggested that Trump will have trouble responding to Harris while on the debate stage.

“I think we should hear exactly what Donald Trump is saying and how he is treating a woman on stage as she is speaking, because he is perplexed now,” Lemon said. “I think he's found himself in a situation that he's not used to finding himself in, and that is answering to a very smart woman, and in this particular case, he is answering to a Black woman.”

“I think that he's on his heels now. He doesn't know how to respond to her. He was hoping that he would be going up against the president, Joe Biden, and now he's going up against this Black woman, and she's found all this popularity, and she's closing the polls, tightening the polls, and he doesn't know what to do. He's losing his mind,” he added.

Questions are mounting over whether Harris and Trump will debate due to a flare-up over the rules of the debate. The fight began when Harris’s team began pushing for the microphones to stay unmuted throughout the broadcast, which is a shift from the rules previously agreed upon when President Biden was the presumptive nominee.

Trump said Monday that he doesn’t care whether the microphones are muted, but took aim at ABC News, which is hosting the debate, and raised questions over whether he would participate.

Lemon suggested that the Harris campaign wants to keep microphones unmuted to catch Trump saying something he should not.

“And I think the Harris campaign knows on that stage he is prone to, you know, have a fit and say something that will get him in trouble,” Lemon said.

He said that there’s “a lot” about Harris that gets under Trump’s skin.

"But look, I think that anyone who calls him out on his BS, I think that anyone who doesn't back down to him, I think, is a problem. And I think that he understands that the world after this convention has many people in America, they have fallen in love with Kamala Harris,” he added.

"Don Limón is now uploading videos to YouTube that garner a whopping 1,000 viewers per video. He really needs to get treatment for his severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome," Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to The Hill.

"The fact is that President Trump beat the brakes off Joe Biden during their debate, and he will do the same with Comrade Kamala," Cheung added. "It's Team Kamala that's scared because they know they have a flawed candidate who short-circuits when she isn't scripted."

Updated at 10:47 a.m. EDT