Dialing In to Fox News, Trump Offers a Rambling Rebuttal to Harris’s Speech

Former President Donald J. Trump was watching television on Thursday night and he did not like what he saw.

His newly minted Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, had just accused him of groveling to dictators, imperiling democracy, betraying American values and, to top it off, deemed him “an unserious man.”

So Mr. Trump picked up the telephone and called Fox News. The network quickly patched him in to its live coverage of the Democratic convention, and the former president proceeded to issue a meandering, stream-of-consciousness rebuttal.

Several times, the Fox anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum tried to interject to ask a question. Several times, Mr. Trump ignored them. “Mr. President, let me interrupt,” Mr. Baier pleaded at one point. Mr. Trump kept talking.

The impromptu call-in — which lasted for 10 minutes, until Fox News informed Mr. Trump that the network had run out of time — came shortly after he had taken to his social media platform, Truth Social, to provide real-time commentary on Ms. Harris’s speech.

His posts there, capitalized in a haphazard manner, were less directed at her specific remarks than at broader complaints about issues that Mr. Trump wants to keep the focus on: crime, immigration and the economy.