Megyn Kelly criticized the CBS moderators of the vice presidential debate on Tuesday night, mocking the appearance of one and calling them both “disgusting.”
The former Fox News host expressed her displeasure during the showdown between Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance and Kamala Harris’ VP pick Tim Walz. “F you CBS - how DARE you” she raged in one post on X, later clarifying she was furious the moderators tried “to fact check” Vance.
But it wasn’t until she got on her SiriusXM show that Kelly really let loose—first by lavishing Vance with praise. “JD Vance put on a masterclass in how to handle biased moderators and a lying opponent, and it was a thing of beauty,” Kelly gushed. “It was beautiful.”
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She said every Trump supporter would share her feeling of blessed relief that they’re hearing from a guy who “knows how to raise the right points in response to the right questions, to not take the moderators’ bulls—t.”
“It was really cleansing,” Kelly said. “It was just—you never see it! It’s just so great to see.”
Switching gears to attack the moderators directly, Kelly went on: “The moderators are gross. Margaret Brennan, not only do you desperately need some bronzer, you need to understand how to moderate a fair debate when you have half the country who’s rooting for the other guy. She didn’t even attempt to be fair.”
“I mean, I’m gonna utter words I never thought I would utter: I preferred Norah O’Donnell,” Kelly continued, referring to the other debate moderator. She also bemoaned that Brennan had once “flirted with the Catholic right, the Christian right,” but had now “gone totally native over there at CBS News.”
“The moderators were disgusting,” Kelly said. “But JD Vance was a vision. And Tim Walz really did indeed look like the bumbling knucklehead he said he was.”
The CBS moderators are apparently just the latest to trigger Kelly’s well-developed disgust response. After the ABC News debate between Trump and Harris earlier this month, she opened her show saying she was “disgusted”—twice—and “ashamed” of that network’s moderators.
Kelly’s moderator-bashing sentiments are an extreme departure from those she once expressed as a moderator herself in election debates gone by.
In 2015, during the first Republican primary debate of the 2016 election, Kelly famously questioned Trump about whether he had the temperament to be president given the “disparaging comments about women’s looks” that he’d made, which she said included calling them “disgusting animals.”
Kelly’s erstwhile distaste for Trump has more recently been replaced by an urge to doggedly defend him from detractors, including by describing Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris as “disgusting” and thundering: “F you, Taylor Swift” on her show.
It’s not clear how much Trump reciprocates Kelly’s admiration. At a rally in Georgia in March, he even used her name to get laughs from his supporters while mocking her recent shift to the right. “Megyn Kelly, may she rest in peace,” Trump said. “She’s sort of making a career by pretending she likes me.”
