Donald Trump may be standing across from Joe Biden during Thursday‘s presidential debate on CNN—but it’ll be Jake Tapper who will be his true enemy.
The moderator will likely be the target of repeated jabs from Trump which one network executive who organized previous debates involving the ex-president told the Beast would be impossible for Tapper and his co-moderator Dana Bash to stop.
Trump and his allies have spent weeks signaling that they will go after CNN and particularly Jake Tapper, long a target of MAGA vituperation–and stepped up the rhetoric in the last few days.
ADVERTISEMENT
He made the point clear to influencer and boxer Logan Paul in a June 13 interview, chiding Tapper as “Fake Tapper” with a caveat: “I used to get along with Jake Tapper.”
“Look, CNN is the enemy,” Trump added. “They thought I was gonna turn CNN and Tapper [down.]”
He told a rally in Philadelphia on Saturday that the debate was being moderated by “Fake Tapper, who really hates Trump.” Tapper was brought up in the city.
And again, in an interview with the Washington Examiner, Trump repeatedly referred to the CNN anchor as “Fake Tapper” throughout the conversation.
The breadcrumbs left extend to his family and closest retainers. Eric Trump complained to Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that “Tapper has compared my father to Hitler before” on Sunday. A day later, CNN host Kasie Hunt shut down an interview with Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt after she claimed Tapper was a biased anchor.
“Well, first of all, it would take someone five minutes to Google ‘Jake Tapper Donald Trump’ to see Jake Tapper has consistently…” Leavitt began saying, prompting an intervention from Hunt.
“Ma’am, we’re going to stop this interview if you’re going to keep attacking my colleagues,” Hunt said before abruptly ending the interview.
CNN will have spent weeks preparing Tapper for an onslaught from Trump. The network has more power on its side than previous debates. There is no audience for Trump to interact with. The presence of a loudly pro-Trump crowd was blamed in part for the disastrous “town hall” the network held with the candidate in New Hampshire in May last year. And when Trump and Biden meet, the rules tonight will allow Tapper and Bash to mute their microphones if they try to speak over each other.
But the former network executive who’s produced some of Trump’s 16 previous debates said all that might not matter.
“You can control a candidate via production mechanisms and try to enforce the rules that way,” the executive said.
“The far trickier piece is: How do you try to corral the conversation when candidates are not complying with the rules? And honestly, there's really no silver bullet for that, and there's no preparation really that can account for it. You just have to get the moderator used to those kinds of confrontations and those kinds of interactions.”
The expected onslaught against “Fake” Tapper is the latest example of Trump working the refs, the network executive said–and it works for his base.
“Criticizing an institution like the mainstream media has been a plank of the MAGA movement from the beginning,” the executive said. “It obviously appeals to those voters, and so there's no reason not to repeat a winning attack line. I also think that, you know, spinning the outcome of the debate has always been part of that process.”
Trump’s last debate moderated by the CNN anchor was in March 2016, a debate Tapper said he was surprised was much more civil than he expected. “We were preparing for a much more feisty and more interrupting crowd,” Tapper told the Los Angeles Times. “Instead we got to ask every question we wanted to ask.”
Trump acolytes have used Tapper as a figurehead for their CNN ire. Axios reported as far back 2017 that GOP operatives tried to get a conservative-friendly site to write a hit piece on Tapper after a contentious interview between him and Kellyanne Conway, and MAGA media outlets have tried to frame Thursday’s debate as a three-on-one attack on Trump.
“CNN owes you an apology today,” Steve Bannon told Leavitt in a War Room episode on Monday. And if we don’t get that apology to Karoline Leavitt and to the Trump campaign and to MAGA today, President Trump should cancel this.”
Trump’s attacks toward debate moderators isn’t new. He sparred with Fox’s Chris Wallace during the first presidential debate in 2020, lamenting that he was “debating you, not [Biden],” and he complained on Twitter about NBC’s Kristen Welker prior to the second debate, claiming she had “always been terrible and unfair.” (Trump did not chastise her directly during the debate, and he eventually did a one-on-one interview with Welker to launch her run as Meet the Press moderator.)
Tapper hasn’t responded directly to Trump’s pre-debate comments, though CNN released a statement praising him and Bash, saying there are “no two people better equipped to co-moderate a substantial and fact-based discussion.”
