Former President Donald Trump spoke passionately during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, while ABC's hosts fact-checked only one side of the stage.
Trump and Harris faced off for the first time in their political careers on the ABC News debate stage, which lasted 90 minutes with no audience, muted microphones and few moderators. Conservative Viewers I was annoyed.While ABC's David Muir and Lindsey Davis constantly corrected Trump and let Harris off the hook, the vice president lured the former president into a tirade by mocking him about rally turnout and his 2020 loss.
“I encourage you to go to a Donald Trump rally because it's really interesting to watch,” Harris said, pivoting from a question about immigration to riling up the former president.
“He'll talk about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He'll say windmills cause cancer. You'll also notice that people will start leaving his rallies early out of fatigue and boredom. And the one thing he won't talk about is you,” the vice president continued.
Harris wisely invited Trump to talk about her rallies, steering the conversation away from his least favorite subject: the border.
— AG (@AGHamilton29) September 11, 2024
Pressed to respond, Trump disputed whether people were attending his rallies.
“She said people are starting to leave. People are not coming to her rallies. So she can't talk about it. People are not leaving my rallies,” the ex-president said in an angry tone.
Harris then again criticized Trump, telling the former president that he was fired by 81 million Americans in the 2020 election.
“Donald Trump has been fired by 81 million people. Let's be clear about that. He's clearly having a very hard time accepting that,” Harris said, before adding that leaders around the world are “laughing at Donald Trump.”
Harris avoided questions about her policy churn and whether Americans would be happier under her administration than under Trump, but critics and media observers said she made herself look better than her opponent. In a CNN pre-release survey of debate viewers, 63% said Harris won the debate, while 37% said Trump won. Those surveyed said they were split 50-50 before the debate on who they thought would win.
Her campaign apparently thought so too, and within minutes of the forum ending, they began calling for a second debate in October.
It was fun and we'll do it again in October.
— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) September 11, 2024
Trump, meanwhile, was noticeably louder and more aggressive than he was in his debate with President Joe Biden, where the Republican nominee stood by largely silently while his opponent imploded.
“She was calm. Did she answer every question about the switch? No, but I knew he was going to ask it,” former Rep. Harold Ford said after the Fox News segment.
“She certainly had the advantage over him, in my opinion,” Fox News political analyst Brit Hume said in response to Ford. “She was calm and she was prepared.”
Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 11, 2024
Many Trump supporters felt that Trump was giving Muir and Davis an unfair fight, even as he debated Harris, who repeatedly fact-checked Trump during the debate but did not correct Harris when she made false claims.
Minutes into the debate, the former president video Former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said that if a mother chooses not to provide her baby with medical care after birth, “the baby will be kept in comfortable conditions.”
Davis mistakenly claimed that no state allows abortion after birth.
But Harris was allowed to repeat a previously debunked lie.
“In Charlottesville, mobs carrying tiki torches were spewing anti-Semitic hatred, but what did the president at the time say? There were fine people on both sides,” Harris said.
Snopes used to be evaluation The claim that Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people” is false. According to Snopes, the former president said after the Charlottesville rally that they are “totally condemnable.” Harris' claim was not fact-checked by the ABC host.
In another example, VP Harris claimed Trump would sign a nationwide abortion ban, even though the former president has repeatedly said he would not. The host did not fact-check Harris' statement, forcing Trump to fire back and denounce the lie himself.
Even the far-left publication Snopes agrees with Trump. pic.twitter.com/j9Lhw2uvWw
— Ian Miles Chong (@stillgray) September 11, 2024
Vice President Harris asserted tonight that “for the first time this century, we don't have a single military member serving on active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world.”
Meanwhile, CENTCOM just blew up some stuff in Yemen. https://t.co/DP12vM3RzR
— Elias Atienza (@AtienzaElias) September 11, 2024
hang on.
did David Muir and Lindsay Davis Why not fact check Kamala’s obvious and repeatedly disproven lies about “Charlottesville” and the “massacre”?
What the heck?!
cc: From ABC— J. Hogan Gidley (@JHoganGidley) September 11, 2024
Many viewers also expressed frustration with the moderator's questioning: Despite the economy being a top issue for Americans, Muir and Lindsay only mentioned it once in the first 45 minutes of the debate, with the moderator instead asking about the 2020 election results and abortion rights.
Oh my god, the Q to Harris was just a lob to piss her off
J6 2 minutes. This is a joke. ABC You are a joke.— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) September 11, 2024
“I think the tough questions to Trump were justified, but the hosts clearly didn't follow up when Harris dodged questions or made factually incorrect statements. I asked Harris how exactly she would end the Gaza war and she said she wanted to end it. What does this mean?” tweeted political commentator Zaid Jilani.
The ABC hosts' bias was evident when they asked each candidate about a topic on which they had previously changed course.
When Davis asked Trump about abortion, she provided a history of the former president's comments on the issue and highlighted his evolving positions, but when she asked Harris about her various stances, ABC briefly mentioned her shifting stances but with little follow-up.
“Vice President Harris, in your last presidential campaign you said you wanted to ban fracking. Not now. You wanted a mandatory government buyback program for assault weapons. Now your campaign says that's not the case. You supported decriminalizing border crossings. Now you're taking a harder stance,” Davis began.
“I know you say your values haven't changed, so why have many of your policy positions changed?” she asked.
Midway through the debate, Washington Examiner commentator Tim Carney, moderated by ABC, wondered aloud how Americans would react to a showdown between the two rivals.
“This moderation is pretty bad. I think the average voter is going to think, 'Kamala's not lying,' or, 'Why is ABC only checking one side?'”
