The ABC News hosts were great. No, actually, they were “embarrassing blunders.” They interrupted Kamala Harris too much. No, actually, they unfairly corrected Donald Trump.
That’s the way the contentious 2024 election season is playing out. And that’s how the first, and likely only, debate between Trump and Harris played out on Tuesday night.
In an example of how difficult it can be to conduct a presidential debate in a divided country, ABC News hosts David Muir and Lindsey Davis fact-checked and corrected Trump’s comments four times on Tuesday, only to be met with angry attacks from the former president and his supporters. The hosts asked questions about economic policy, the Ukraine war, abortion, the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and how Harris’ positions have changed since the 2020 election.
Fox News Channel has proposed another debate, which was the only scheduled one between the candidates. Trump said after Tuesday’s debate, “It was a great night, and I don’t really want to do it again.” On social media, Trump joined many of his supporters in criticizing ABC, saying the debate was essentially 3-1.
In the end, Trump spoke for 43 minutes and 3 seconds, while Harris spoke for 37 minutes and 41 seconds, according to a New York Times tally.
The debate was significant to begin with, not just because of the upcoming election, but because the last presidential debate in June (between Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden, whose performance was panned) set in motion a chain of events that led to Biden dropping out of the race a few weeks later and Harris running in his place.
Opinion on ABC’s handling of the latest debate on Tuesday was, in a broader sense, a Rorschach test of how supporters on both sides felt about the debate’s proceedings. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent the message that ABC’s hosts were doing a “great” job in X, to which conservative commentator Ben Shapiro responded, “This just goes to show you they’re complete assholes.”
While CNN chose not to correct any incorrect statements made by the candidates during the Trump-Biden debate in June, ABC instead took issue with comments Trump made about abortion, immigration, the 2020 election and violent crime.
In the debate over abortion, Trump repeated his oft-repeated claim that Democrats support killing babies after birth. Davis said, “There is no state in the United States where it is legal to kill a baby after birth.”
Muir noted that Trump had recently conceded three times after not publicly acknowledging his loss to Biden in the 2020 election for years. Trump responded that his recent comments were sarcastic.
“It didn’t strike me as ironic,” Muir said.
Muir sparked a spat with the former president after suggesting crime had increased under Biden, noting that violent crime had decreased during that period. And after Trump repeated a false report that immigrants were killing and eating pets in Ohio, ABC noted there was no evidence that this happened.
The ABC host did not correct any of Harris’ comments.
“Could they have done more? Surely they could,” Angie Drodnick Horan, director of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network, said in an interview. “Did they do enough? Surely they could. There just wasn’t anything else.”
Towards the end of the debate, CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale said on social media that “Trump has been shockingly dishonest and Harris has been overwhelmingly (if not entirely) factual.”
As is often the case in debates, the moderators often found themselves unable to answer certain questions. Harris, for example, was asked to respond to Trump’s criticism that the Department of Justice was being used as an avenue to attack him, but she did not answer. She also dodged questions about her past changes in positions on some issues. Muir twice asked Trump if he wanted Ukraine to win the war against Russia, to which he did not respond.
The split-screen images of the two candidates told different stories: Trump was often seen getting angry or laughing at Harris’ comments and avoiding eye contact with his opponent, while Harris repeatedly looked at her opponent, often with a confused look on her face, sometimes openly amused, sometimes shaking her head.
As the debate got underway, online outrage over ABC’s handling of the night began and quickly became a hot topic.
“These hosts are disgraceful failures and this is one of the most biased and unfair debates I’ve ever seen,” conservative commentator Megyn Kelly posted on X. “Shame on you ABC.”
Responding to online critics who complained that ABC had rigged the debate in Harris’s favor, Atlantic writer James Surowiecki wrote, “The way they ‘rigged’ the debate was to let[Trump]hang himself with his own stream-of-consciousness ramblings.”
“It was like a 4Chan post had come true,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said.
On Fox News Channel, host Martha MacCallum said after the debate that Harris “was never grilled,” and commentator Brit Hume agreed, but said there were other factors at play.
“Make no mistake,” Hume said, “Trump had a terrible night.”
___
David Bauder writes about media for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.
