National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, on today’s edition of The Editors, pointed out that “literally every exchange” of last night’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump “was headlined as if it were some epic win for Kamala Harris” by the media.
Dougherty said that while the moderators may know when to fact-check Trump, “they don’t know when Kamala Harris is saying something that is false. I pointed out on the Corner this morning like one easy-to-check fact here: Kamala Harris bragged that not only had the U.S. withdrawn from Afghanistan and ended the cost of that war, but that for the first time this century no . . . active-duty personnel were in a war zone. . . . [But] the DoD has four war zone active war zones designated. We have thousands of troops in Iraq. We have hundreds in Syria.
“You could see clearly,” Dougherty said, “that people had calculated, when they set the debate rules, they thought closing the mics would help Biden. They think it doesn’t help Kamala Harris. So maybe they’ll open them again to hurt Trump again. But whatever it is, ABC has to come away having hurt Trump.”
Dougherty pointed out that many publications put up “headline after headline like ‘Trump on the defensive’ or ‘Kamala puts Trump in a corner on this.’” But he said that, “for a lot of viewers, this just feels alienating and faked, like a faked enthusiasm. And I think it’s part and parcel of a faked enthusiasm we’ve had since the Democratic convention itself.
“[Democrats] were much more pleased to have Kamala up there at the convention than Joe Biden. But I don’t think this is translating to other people outside of this bubble.”
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