While right-wing commentators spent their time griping about the ABC News moderators in Tuesday’s presidential debate fact-checking Donald Trump, the reviews on cable news were critical of the former president’s performance against Vice President Kamala Harris.
CNN host Chris Wallace called the debate “just as devastating” for Trump as June’s encounter was for President Joe Biden.
“I think that Kamala Harris pitched a shutout on almost every subject I can think of,” Wallace said.
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“She shut Trump down on abortion. She shut Trump down on January 6 and democracy. She shut him down on national security, and turned to the former president and said the military leaders who served with you think that you‘re a disgrace,” Wallace said. “Very powerfully at the end, [she] made the point that she is the candidate of change, and we need to turn the page from a decade of division and polarization.”
“On substance I think she pitched a shutout, and I think she did on style as well,” continued Wallace, who moderated one debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and another between Trump and Biden four years later. “The image of the debate to me is she’s there happy, smiling, expressive, shaking her head and dismay at things Trump was saying.
Trump, on the other hand, came off quite differently, Wallace commented.
While the former president “looked angry” and was “scowling,” Harris “was looking directly at the audience.”
Trump “was looking at the moderators and arguing with them,” Wallace said, adding, “He looked old tonight.”
Wallace’s colleague, Laura Coates, similarly praised Harris, a former prosecutor, for “prosecuting the debate with surgical precision.”
“She was aware, as she must have been as a prosecutor, that the second you are inside of a courtroom, the jury is looking at everything you’re doing—muted microphones? Doesn’t matter,” Coates said. “Her nonverbal cues, her body language, her incredulous expressions, at one point putting her hand under her chin to demonstrate that she was completely baffled by his line of defense.”
Over on Fox News, even some commentators there couldn’t give Trump a good review.
“Make no mistake about it: Trump had a bad night,” Brit Hume, the network’s chief political analyst, said, adding that Trump “rose to the bait repeatedly.”
“We heard so many of the old grievances that we had long thought Trump had learned were not winners, politically—and there they all were, talking about how he didn’t lose the election, and all that,” Hume said. “So my sense is that she came out of this in pretty good shape. How long this will last is anybody’s guess, but for tonight, at least, this was pretty much her night.”
