3 on 1: Trump Clashes With Harris—and the Debate ‘Moderators’
ABC’s debate moderators’ performance in Tuesday night’s presidential debate made CNN’s performance in June look like a master class in fairness, objectivity, and balance.
It was exactly the kind of debate moderation left-wing commentators on X have been demanding for months—years, really.
They don’t want anything approaching objectivity. They wanted moderators to “fact-check” former President Donald Trump every step of the way while allowing his opponent to pontificate on questions they think will be beneficial to Democratic Party fortunes.
And that’s essentially what happened.
ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis continually “fact-checked” Trump in real time, arguing with him after nearly every answer. That makes for a horrible debate format.
Were the Lincoln-Douglas debates fact-checked by interjecting moderators? Of course not. The debate was between the two men and their ideas.
But in Tuesday night’s debate, the moderators didn’t even bother to create the mirage of objectivity. They hounded Trump every step of the way while stepping aside to allow Harris to make her points. They weren’t fact-checking on behalf of the American people, they were interjecting on behalf of their partisan interest.
The fact-checks weren’t even particularly accurate, not that that really seemed to matter to the moderators. For instance, when Trump said that Democrats in some states support after-birth abortion, Davis interjected that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after birth.”
As The Daily Signal has reported, there are many states—including Minnesota, the home state of Harris’ running mate Gov. Tim Walz—that allow babies who survive abortions to die.
Harris didn’t get this treatment at all. Moderators politely allowed Harris to say whatever she wanted.
Even in the most obvious case of Harris going with the tired fabrication about Trump calling white supremacists “very fine people” in Charlottesville, Va.—fact-checked as false by even the reliably left-wing Snopes—Muir and Davis said nothing.
The fix was in.
To a certain extent, left-wing journalists demanding this kind of rigging is understandable. They know that the ABCs and the CNNs of the world are in the tank for their candidates. Why not use their power of control over these debates to direct it in a way that benefits Democrats, who are so clearly on the right side of history?
That mentality won out on Tuesday night and lefty commentators were giddy on social media.
“I will say it ABC moderators have exceeded expectations. They are fact-checking and confronting, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin posted on X. “Shows how abysmal CNN was.”
That mirrors how the Left generally thinks all our society’s institutions should work. Alternatives to the narratives the Left peddles should be carefully managed and massaged so the people are led to only one point of view.
That’s why the Left had a full-blown meltdown when entrepreneur Elon Musk bought the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. It meant that they would no longer have the power to put the finger on the lever of amplifying the messages they like while suppressing the ones they don’t.
But this sort of bias comes at a cost. Institutions that ply on their objectivity as their main selling point risk surrendering the power of that credibility when they blatantly put their finger on the scale for a particular ideology.
The public’s attitude toward ABC and their cohorts and the media has followed the same course as public health institutions in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns. When after months of telling everyone to lock down for everyone else’s safety, they largely came out in favor of Black Lives Matter protests because “racism is the real pandemic,” they lost an enormous number of American who will never trust them again.
ABC’s moderators’ performance Tuesday night is a perfect example of why we have “populism.”
Did Trump fall into the traps ABC and the Harris campaign set in this 3-on-1 debate? Yes, probably. They will now pat themselves on the back and think of it as a job well done until Election Day.
With some Americans, that’s all good and well. Trump is too dangerous to be given a fair shake. With a fair debate, the people may choose poorly.
But the stacked deck highlighted the theme that Trump has always used to great success with his supporters since he became the Republican presidential nominee the first time way back in 2015. The system is rigged against you. The system hates Trump because it hates his supporters. The system hates Trump because it hates his supporters.
That message was driven home on Tuesday night. Maybe this was mission accomplished for ABC, but Muir and Davis did a disservice to the American people and certainly discredited themselves.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/11/trump-takes-harris-moderators/
*****************************************************Harris fails to make her case on inflation, real wages and fundamental freedoms
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement commenting on tonight’s presidential debate:
“America finally got to hear Kamala Harris as she once again failed to address the critical issues facing our nation, providing no answers to the continued high costs of food and housing and the decline in America’s real wages. The Harris-Biden inflation has destroyed many Americans’ hope to achieve the American dream. Continuing the Harris economic policy for another four years will result in higher taxes and bigger deficits that already have us on the brink of recession. Continuing with open borders endangers public safety, our schools and communities. And an expansion of the weaponized administrative state threatens our fundamental constitutional freedoms. Americans who care about their children’s future will vote to return Donald Trump to the Oval Office, after all, weak and stupid is no way to run a country.”
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‘Kamala Harris Is Running a Giveaway Campaign’: Economist
Ben Johnson
As presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris approach their first debate on Tuesday, their campaigns have unveiled economic policies that seem in some ways diametrically opposed — and only one could stimulate “robust economic growth,” a leading economist has warned.
Harris has proposed imposing price controls on food, undoing the Trump tax cuts of 2017 by raising the top tax rate to 39.6%, hiking corporate taxes and capital gains taxes to 28%, giving first-time homebuyers $25,000, and doubling down on Obamacare by raising taxpayer-funded subsidies for those who buy their plans from the exchange.
She also proposed one tax cut to benefit small businesses. “I want to see 25 million new small business applications by the end of my first term,” said Harris last week. “So, part of my plan is we will expand the tax deduction for startups to $50,000.”
In a speech at the Economic Club of New York last Thursday, former President Trump proposed unleashing the power of the free market by maintaining the 2017 tax cuts and further slashing the corporate tax from 21% to 15%, cutting red tape, protecting U.S. manufacturing by raising tariffs on imported goods, clawing back all unspent funds from the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, and making more jobs available to U.S. citizens by deporting illegal immigrants who lower wages and compete for jobs.
Both candidates agree on ending federal taxation on tips, a policy first proposed this presidential race by Trump and parroted by Harris.
“Kamala Harris is running a giveaway campaign,” Paul Mueller, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm last Thursday. “Of course, the Biden administration has been trying to cancel various forms of student debt for years now. And her approach, I think, to stimulating the economy is more of what we’ve seen over the past four years, which is extensive government involvement, huge amounts of spending. It’s not really an organic growth within the economy.”
Artificial stimulus raises prices, a major problem over the course of the Biden-Harris administration. “When you subsidize people’s ability to buy things — whether that’s higher education or health care — and we give people money in the form of loans or grants or scholarships to do that, what it does is boosts demand. And so what we see over time in both of those areas is rising costs. The cost of higher education has grown much faster than everything else in the economy. The rate of increase for health care has increased very rapidly,” Mueller stated. “And so this $25,000 credit for first-time home buyers, while it sounds nice, it’s actually going to continue to put upward pressure on the price of housing overall.”
The entire amount of the subsidy is “actually going to be eaten up by rising prices,” Mueller noted.
Even a putatively pro-business tax policy like a small business tax credit could backfire. “There are a lot of small business owners who maybe will close down their existing business and start a new one just to get the tax credit,” Mueller warned.
On the other hand, “President Trump’s agenda” has the potential to spur “robust economic growth” in an organic way, said Mueller. “He has talked about wanting to roll back regulations.”
Mueller noted he opposed Trump’s tariff policy, “and, then, he hasn’t really addressed runaway government spending. And the more money that is spent by the federal government, the less money there is for people in the private sector to spend on their businesses, their houses, their projects.”
Backholm suggested the greatest vacuum in economic dialogue involves America’s $35 trillion national debt. “So far, we are not seeing a lot of politicians raise their hand and say, ‘I’m the guy that’s going to give you less so we can save the future.’ I think that might be what we need. We’re not getting that from anybody at this point.”
https://washingtonstand.com/news/kamala-harris-is-running-a-giveaway-campaign-economist
*************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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