Moderating A Trump Debate Is A No-Win Situation

Tuesday night’s presidential debate was a study in contrasts. Unlike their CNN counterparts in June, ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis came prepared to push back on former President Donald Trump’s lies.

On five occasions, they fact-checked Trump in real time, according to a HuffPost analysis of the debate transcript. It began when Davis challenged Trump after he repeated his lie that Democrats support “abortion in the ninth month” and “execution after birth.”

Davis stepped in. “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” she said.

At first, it seemed like a welcome shift from prior debates, when moderators would often let Trump ramble on and on, spewing lie after lie.

But there’s only so much someone can do to stop him. As we’ve often witnessed since 2015, moderating a debate or conducting a live TV interview with Trump is regularly a no-win situation. It often ends up resulting in more free airtime for Trump. For every fact-check in the moment, there are plenty more of Trump’s spurious claims that go unchallenged. Plus, the former president’s penchant for distraction, deflection and obfuscation often derails any attempts by the interviewer to keep the discussion on track. Trying to pull out every rotting piece of lettuce from Trump’s word salad and parse each one is a fool’s errand. It would take hours — days, even.

On Tuesday night, ABC’s moderators had to decide which battles to pick and how exactly to sift through Trump’s chaos. Muir and Davis seemed to target discrete and concrete nuggets that they could efficiently fact-check. or times they could step in to correct the record. For instance, when Trump went on his usual bogus rant about how immigrants are contributing to a rise in violent crime, Muir pointed out that overall violent crime in the U.S. has decreased, according to the FBI.

When Muir referred to Trump’s recent racist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, including his suggestion that Harris, who has always identified as both Black and Asian, “happened to turn Black,” Trump lashed out, telling Muir: “You make a big deal out of something.”

“But those were your words,” Muir responded.

Among Trump’s most infamous and dangerous lies is his insistence, repeatedly debunked, that he did not lose the 2020 election and was denied the White House due to widespread voter fraud.

But during a podcast interview last week, Trump changed his tune, acknowledging he lost in 2020.

On Tuesday, Muir quoted Trump’s words back at him: “In the past couple of weeks leading up to this debate, you have said you ‘lost by a whisker,’ that you ‘didn’t quite make it,’ that you ‘came up a little bit short.’”

“I said that?” Trump said.

“Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?” Muir asked.

“No, I don’t acknowledge that at all,” Trump said.

“But you did say that,” Muir said.

Trump went on to claim his remarks were sarcastic.

“I did watch all of these pieces of video. I didn’t detect the sarcasm,” Muir responded matter-of-factly, noting that “there was no widespread fraud” in the 2020 election.

The bar for our nation’s political discourse is so low that five fact-checks during a live televised debate is far better than zero. But is it really sufficient?

Later in the night, Trump’s frequent interruptions undermined the moderators’ live fact-checking. Both candidates agreed to have their mics muted when it was not their turn to speak, but that rule seemed to loosen as the night went on. Trump (and to a lesser extent, Harris) would butt in to squeeze in another rebuttal, and the debate producers would unmute the mics in order to hear them. In Trump’s case, that meant he got to slip in more lies, most of which went unchallenged. When it was all said and done, Trump talked for about five minutes longer than Harris, according to analyses from The New York Times and CNN.

For her part, Harris also pushed back on some of Trump’s lies. But one of the most effective approaches she employed was to let Trump speak for himself. At several points, when asked to respond to him, she pointed out how his nonsensical and incoherent responses illustrated exactly how he was unfit to lead.

“World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump. I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you,” she said, turning to her opponent, one of several times she addressed him directly. “And they say you’re a disgrace. And when you then talk in this way in a presidential debate and deny what over and over again are court cases you have lost, because you did in fact lose that election, it leads one to believe that perhaps we do not have in the candidate to my right the temperament, or the ability, to not be confused about fact. That’s deeply troubling.”

The moderators’ most notable fact-check came when Trump dug in on the vile smear that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio city have been eating pets. Muir noted that local officials have denied there’s any truth to the rumor, which began in right-wing social media circles and spread when Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, seized upon it. Despite Muir’s pushback, Trump continued to insist he saw evidence of the claim on TV.

After Trump was done ranting, Harris argued that the moment was instructive, calling him “extreme.”

“If you want to really know the inside track on who the former president is, if he didn’t make it clear already, just ask people who have worked with him,” she added.

“His former chief of staff, a four-star general, has said he has contempt for the constitution of the United States. His former national security adviser has said he is dangerous and unfit. His former secretary of defense has said the nation, the republic, would never survive another Trump term. And when we listen to this kind of rhetoric, when the issues that affect the American people are not being addressed, I think the choice is clear in this election.”

When it wasn’t Harris’ turn to speak, her facial expressions did the talking. She often looked on with a mixture of exasperation, bemusement, pity and bafflement, somewhere between “Can you believe this guy?” and “There he goes again.”

It made for some striking split-screen moments. As Trump went on and on about “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats,” Harris shook her head and laughed.

A picture is worth a thousand words — and perhaps, a thousand fact-checks.