After the 90-minute debate concluded, the consensus among political commentators – from MSNBC to Fox News – was Harris handily won the debate.
“She spanked that [expletive],” Michael Steele, the former RNC chairman, happily told an MSNBC panel.
“Look, make no mistake about it: Trump had a bad night,” Britt Hume, sounding much more professional, told a Fox News panel.
It didn’t take long, however, for political observers to move from the “Who won?” question to the “Why did she win?” question. The answer, according to many, is Trump debated not just a well-rehearsed Harris but her two accomplices from ABC News.
“The moderators were a complete, abject failure,” Curtis Houck, of the Media Research Center, tells AFN. “David Muir and Lindsey Davis, by our count, fact-checked Donald Trump six times,” he says, “and even then, on said fact checks, they were incorrect.”
Ryan Saavedra, a Daily Wire reporter, similarly analyzed the debate. He concluded Trump was fact-checked four times and pressed six times by the moderators for the claims he made. Harris was never fact-checked, nor pressed on her own claims, not even once by the moderators, he said.
In one example, Muir allowed Harris to slide on the issue of mandatory gun confiscation, which she supports, even though he challenged her about the same topic in the 2019 Democratic Party primary debate.
In his post-debate analysis on Fox News, Hume similarly pointed out Harris was never challenged by the moderators to explain her 180-degree political stances with just two months before Election Day.
“There were like two questions on the whole thing all evening,” Hume said. “She never had to account for her changes. Never.”
Houck says Trump was confronted with hostile and accusatory questions by the debate moderators, which forced him to defend himself, while Harris was coddled by them.
“Asking how she felt, what did she want to say, what were her thoughts,” Houck complains.
In her own heated reaction to the debate, Megyn Kelly said the ABC News moderators set up Trump by accusing him of being a terrible person and then asking him if he regretted it.
“‘Mr. Trump, you said something incredibly controversial and terrible. Let me remind you of what it was,’” Kelly said of their debate tactic.
Then the moderators would pivot from Trump to Harris and ask her, “How bad is Trump?”
Kelly, the former Fox News host who tangled with Trump in a 2016 debate, also suggested the two moderators were following orders from a boss who is close friends with Harris.
Kelly did not name that person, Dana Walden, who is a senior Disney executive. The close relationship between Harris and Walden was described by the liberal New York Times in a story published weeks ago that warns of the “potential for a conflict of interest” in the then-upcoming debate.
Reacting to the debate in an X post, “The First” show host Jesse Kelly said it is true Muir and Linsey embarrassed themselves on stage.
“But they did their duty,” he wrote. “They did everything they could to put Kamala over the top.”
