The first time the moderators countered his obvious dog-whistle lies I was absolutely blown away. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Then I started laughing and didn't stop.
The correction was really well done and completely natural by both moderators, I almost didn't register what happened. Love to see it.
My favorite moment from the whole thing was when Harris offhandedly mentioned that his rallies were bad, and he spent a full minute of his rebuttal time insisting that his rallies were awesome, then started arguing with the moderators when they fact checked him. You could see that that, above everything else that went on, rankled him. It really highlighted the narcissism.
The highlight for me for the whole debate was not Trump's pet-eating outburst but the perfect setup and execution Harris did to bait him into that unhinged rant instead of talking about immigration.
She "invites" people to go to Trump rallies. She follows up the point about people leaving rallies early with a note along the lines of: you're about to watch Trump not talk about you. Sure enough, he fell into the trap, and Trump talked about what he cared about most at that moment.
It still blows me away that he managed to take over the term “fake news”.
It was introduced as a way to explain how social media was leading gullible people into MAGA, but he turned it into a term for persecution of MAGA by conventional media.
It was actually an incredible move. I can’t think of anything he’s spun that well since 2016.
Too bad they let him continue to lie about the thing they just fact checked, let him talk beyond his allotted time, reapond when it wasn't his turn, and shut down Harris the one time she tried to respond out of turn.
The moderators crossed an extremely low bar on fact checking last night, but did everything else the same way they always have.
All his talking didn't help him at all. I don't think the Harris side cared about him self-destroying his image and giving lots for the talk shows later to make fun of.
This works for some things, but it's like the parable of the boiled toad: you need to push on the edges of truth, not come out guns blazing with "post-birth abortions", "Immigrants eating family pets", and "Democrats wanted Roe v Wade overturned also"
It's complicated, since the Harris campaign wanted him to have more opportunities to ramble, interrupt and get mad. They were very much counting on him being himself and comparing that to someone who can speak in coherent sentences without getting mad.
My thoughts as well. Trump did himself no favours with undecideds and independents with his inane rambling rants. For the most part, Harris just seemed content to use her time to press him and let him make a fool out of himself, with only a couple of instances popping up when she seemed to want to interject but couldn't.
He shut her down twice. The one time was really over the line. But I loved the moderator saying there is no place in the USA that executing babies is legal. Wtf, 9 month abortions? Lol
I support it. They have a job to let viewers know that the radical information is not true, and they should not take it as valid information to get worked up over.
It's the difference between Trump sounding like a maniac vs exposing a controversy. They don't need to stop him from sounding like a maniac. They just need to clarify that he is, in fact, a maniac.
That really showed what a shitbag outfit CNN has become under it’s new conservative ownership group. They are a wolf in sheep’s clothing now.
“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” he said. Then he suggested a model: “Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.”
Malone’s comments didn’t resonate much beyond a couple of places: At Fox News, which responded with glee, and inside CNN, where they sounded alarm bells.
—New board member and billionaire John Malone, a legend in the cable TV business and one who has deep and longstanding ties with David Zaslav