It didn’t take long at all for some of Fox News’ most-watched hosts to frame next month’s debate between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which was announced Wednesday morning, as unfair to the presumptive GOP nominee.
On The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime and Hannity, each host made a point to depict the moderators of the CNN debate, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, in a negative light.
Laura Ingraham began by claiming the Biden campaign was in need of a “game changer,” and they “hope they will get it with the help of” Tapper and Bash, two hard news anchors whose approach to broadcasting differs entirely from the Fox News model.
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Ingraham then played a November 2023 clip of Tapper talking about how Trump, who has called the media “the enemy of the people,” has “demonized us.” Tapper would go on to say in the clip that the indicted former president has a “disdain for democracy.”
Ingraham then rolled a few comments from Bash in reference to how Trump has defended his supporters who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“You can decide what she believes,” Ingraham said.
In the next hour, Jesse Watters took a similar route.
He too showed a clip of Tapper, this time saying that some of Trump’s comments—like how immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”—are reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s. Watters then showed Bash describing Trump’s use of an antisemitic trope when criticizing Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats.
“Both moderators say Trump’s Hitler, so the debate will be fair and balanced,” Watters said sarcastically. “Is Tapper going to cut the cameras away from Trump to fact-check him? We’ll have to see.”
Watters also primed his audience to reject the arrangement for the ABC News debate in September. Apparently unable to show anything from moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis that would get his viewers concerned, he instead said that the pair would surely be “taking orders from” George Stephanopoulos.
After showing a few clips of the network’s chief political correspondent, Watters snarked: “Stephanopoulos praised the deep state and said Trump’s a threat to democracy. I’m sure they’ll be calling balls and strikes.”
Later, Sean Hannity was equally outraged.
Tapper “is disqualified” from co-moderating the debate, he declared, showing his own clips of the anchor of The Lead.
Hannity fumed that Tapper is a “radical left-wing partisan talk show host masquerading as a journalist,” and that his employer “is filled with left-wing hacks who we know hate” Trump.
Because of that, the Fox News host and Trump rally goer concluded, Biden’s predecessor shouldn’t expect next month’s engagement to be “a walk in the park.”
The way Hannity and company are framing it, Trump may not even want to find out.
