Former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said ABC News should fire its entire staff after he turned in a stumbling performance at Tuesday night’s presidential debate on the network.
Trump made the assertion in a post on his social network, Truth Social, in which—just as he did during the debate—he got a bunch of things wrong.
“People are just starting to give me credit for having a GREAT DEBATE,” he wrote. “The Voters and Voter Polls showed it, but the Fake News Media wasn’t giving the credit that was due.”
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In fact, early polls, including one Republican-sponsored survey, show most voters who watched Trump debate Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris think he was the loser.
In a CNN/SSRS poll of 605 registered voters, 63 percent said Harris won to Trump’s 37 percent, giving Harris a 26-point favorable margin. In a YouGov poll of 2,166 registered voters, 54 percent said they thought Harris won to 31 percent for Trump, a 23-point margin in the vice president’s favor. In a Republican-sponsored SoCal Strategies/On Point Politics/Red Eagle Politics poll of 572 likely voters, Harris beat Trump with 53 percent to his 34 percent, a 19-point margin.
“Remember, I wasn’t debating one person, I was debating three,” Trump added, baselessly accusing debate moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir of partisanship—the two politely flagged during the debate that some of Trump’s careening rants, such as his claim of babies being executed, were false. “They should fire everybody at ABC Fake News, whose two lightweight ‘anchors’ have brought disgrace onto the company!”
Slate’s Justin Peters praised Muir and Davis’ work, calling the debate “the best-moderated presidential debate of the Trump era”: “Their questions were sharp, their research was on point, their approach was calm, and they even managed to pull off some real-time fact-checking without coming across as excessively partisan.”
TIME TV critic Judy Berman wrote that the moderators’ “efforts went a long way toward keeping the proceedings honest. Davis and Muir’s fact-checks were sporadic but effective, tamping down Trump’s most egregious inventions.”
“Using calm and authoritative tones, Mr. Muir and Ms. Davis offered a model for real-time fact-checking that has been absent from many recent presidential debates,” wrote New York Times media reporter Michael Grynbaum.
Media critic Brian Lowry wrote on MSNBC of Muir and Davis, “While not intrusive, the pair provided a more aggressive check on the former president’s more outlandish falsehoods.”
Fox News Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz took the opposite view, saying, “ABC gets a D-, and that’s being generous. In fact the network’s moderators were so blatantly biased against Donald Trump that it vindicated his pregame criticism of ABC as dishonest.”
Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, tumbled 10 percent by the market’s close on Wednesday, the day after Trump’s flailing debate performance. Shares of Trump Media are now at their lowest since the money-hemorrhaging firm went public in March. Maybe someone ought to be fired for that.
