This is the third of the #transitzone USA 2024 presidential election campaign updates, recorded Friday 9 August. It has been 18 days since Joe Biden withdrew from the race. 25 days since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

Margo Kingston and Peter Clarke have been tracking some of the key events and developments in this extraordinary fast forward campaign.

The Republican candidate, former president, Donald Trump, has just held a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Disciplined, focussed, rational, it was not. It was the typical Trump ranty mix of lies, self-infatuated claims and vitriolic invective. He is still fixated on his rally crowd sizes even claiming his January 6 2021 Washington, Ellipsis address was bigger than that for Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1963.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris and her VP running mate pick, Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz, are on a multi swing state rally blitz attaining a huge amount of “earned media” coverage from the networks, cable news outfits and online entities.

Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance is shadowing them city by city.

The Democrats’ national convention starts in Chicago on 19 th of August.

And THE NEWS is apparently Trump and Harris have come to some kind of agreement to meet for a nationally televised debate hosted, as was originally planned with Joe Biden, by the ABC network on 10th of September.

Margo and Peter discuss Kamala Harris's VP pick, the latest unhinged speech from Trump, his apparent self-sobataging in the state of Georgia by attacking its popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp and the looming national televised debates.

RESOURCES

First combined Kamala Harris - Tim Walz rally in Philadelphia:

https://youtu.be/eBRFGMw38zI?si=VGLfgB1zoBXwYVVn

Trump press conference, 8 August, Mar-a-Lago:

https://www.youtube.com/live/McXjpQFFN90?si=1Z8szclourbZwCu2