The Moderators of the Debate Were a Disgrace, and Trump’s Ill Discipline Doesn’t Change That

I agree with Rich and Andy and Noah and Jim that Donald Trump was terrible in last night’s debate. I also agree with the contention that, with a performance such as that, Trump would have lost the contest irrespective of any of the other variables. But I want to complain about the moderators nevertheless, because I don’t think that “Trump would have lost anyway” does anything to let them off the hook. ABC’s management of the debate last night was a disgrace. It was a scandal. It had no place in a free republic. As others have observed, Trump was fact-checked in a way that Harris was not, he was pushed for answers in a way Harris was not, and he was cast as the problem in a way that Harris was not. The cover of today’s New York Post suggests that the debate was not one-one-one, but three-on-one. This is true, and it’s unacceptable.

Andy writes:

If you’re obsessing over how bad, how in the tank for Kamala Harris, the two ABC news moderators were, it’s because you don’t want to come to grips with the brute fact that Donald Trump was a disaster last night. He was unhinged, often incoherent, incapable of completing thoughts and sentences when he had points to make, and led into self-absorbed rabbit-holes — claims that he won the 2020 election, the size of his rallies, whether “migrants” are eating stolen pets — that diverted him from opportunity after opportunity to expose Harris as a radical leftist now pretending to be a pragmatic centrist who suddenly loves her some guns.

This is likely true of many people within the conservative world. But it’s not true of me. I agree that Trump was a “disaster”; that he was “unhinged, often incoherent, incapable of completing thoughts and sentences when he had points to make”; that he missed “opportunity after opportunity to expose Harris as a radical leftist”; and the rest. Stipulated. Stipulated. Stipulated. But I’m outraged by the moderation nevertheless, because it existed independently of Donald Trump’s flaws, and because, in a republic such as ours, it should not have. I am, in other words, outraged by the moderation per se — not because it was aimed at Donald Trump (whom I dislike and for whom I do not intend to vote) or because I think it materially altered the outcome of the debate (which it did not), but because the press should not be doing what it did in presidential debates, and because it will not always be Donald Trump who is the target.

As I noted on a recent episode of The Editors, I have grown increasingly irritated with the way in which many political observers have come to describe extreme media bias as something that we all just “know” exists. As a factual matter, they’re correct to observe that this is a longstanding, rather than a new, problem. They are correct, too, when they insist that any conservative who is operating right now must take it as a given. But they err when they impotently cast the media’s conduct as if it were an immutable law of the universe rather than a political problem to be solved. The two things are not identical, I concede, but we ought to expect broadly the same sort of behavior from our debate moderators as we do from our poll workers. By rights, it ought to be an absolute scandal to see bias or double-standards from those who have been tasked with mere mediation. When covering a court, one wouldn’t say “well, the judge was corrupt but the defendant was unlikeable and ill disciplined, and his case was pretty weak anyway, so it doesn’t matter.” So why here? If this trend is a problem, it’s a problem.

If Republicans wish to fix it — and they ought to — they need to start now. You don’t ignore the cracks in a bridge because you happen to dislike the person who is currently driving over it. You get on the case immediately. Trump or no Trump, the GOP needs to start informing the media that it will no longer play ball unless massive reforms are made. No more Candy Crowleys. No more David Muirs. No more selective fact-checking, absurd framing, or glaring double-standards. If the press can manage that, it gets to play dress-up again. Until then, though, the game ought to be over.