This week’s first and possibly only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was not nearly as consequential as the June debate, which ended President Joe Biden’s political career. It also differed in another key way: The moderation was incredibly one-sided and unfair.
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This was not true of the previous debate, between Biden and Trump. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash asked questions but did not interrupt or attempt to fact-check the candidates—they left that to Trump and Biden. Such an approach is preferable; politicians make so many incorrect statements that if the moderators really felt the need to intervene every single time, debates would devolve into showdowns between the moderators and each candidate, which isn’t the point. There are also frequent examples of moderators asserting that a given claim is abjectly false when it may be complicated, ambiguous, or a case where reasonable minds disagree.
ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis thrice followed a remark by Trump with an attempt to fact-check him. These fact-checks introduced valid, conflicting information; Trump said violence in the U.S. was out of control and the moderators pointed to FBI data that contradicts this, and Trump said that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—a completely erroneous claim.
But when Harris made statements that could have been fact-checked, the moderators declined to do so.
Harris said that Trump had threatened there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost the election, and Harris implied that this was a threat of actual political violence; the moderators could have pointed out that Trump was describing the state of the economy under prospective progressive governance. Harris also said there were currently no U.S. military service members in active combat zones; this is flatly untrue, as American troops are currently serving in informal war zones in places like Iraq and Syria.
Then there was bias reflected in the kinds of questions the candidates were asked. Trump was deservedly grilled on his appalling conduct surrounding the 2020–2021 presidential transition, and comments he made about Harris’ race. Meanwhile, Harris fielded zero questions about her complicity in the vast cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline and infirmity. When she declined to give specific reasons for her flip-flopping on fracking—or even concede that she has flip-flopped—the moderators did not follow up.
Trump largely failed to elucidate his vision for making the country a better place, and for that he has no one to blame but himself. Still, this debate was often a three-on-one affair, and there’s no reason for that. Future debates should stick to the CNN model.
During the debate, Trump gestured at a viral claim on X and asserted that Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating pet dogs and cats.
Springfield police have said there are no reports of stolen pets. Just because the police are not paying attention to an issue doesn’t mean it’s made up, but it should also be emphasized that there are no credible claims of pet-eating being made on social media. The one cited instance of a person accused of eating a neighbor’s pet cat did not involve a Haitain migrant and did not take place in Springfield.
Springfield residents have claimed that the migrants hunted wild ducks and geese, killing and perhaps eating them. If people are not respecting the rules of the commons, local authorities should do something about it. But this is obviously a far milder problem. Killing people’s pets is wrong; killing wild birds is not. Duck-hunting isn’t even some specifically Haitian custom, as conservatives well know.
AI-generated memes of Trump protecting ducks and kittens have gone very viral on social media lately. It’s fine to laugh at these. But anyone who truly believes that pets are routinely abducted in small-town America by gangs of migrants has fallen for a hoax.
On the other side, some commentators who correctly identified Trump’s citation of the Haitian pet-eaters as fake news nevertheless failed to note that a second wild-seeming claim—about Harris’ support for gender-affirming care for detained illegal immigrants—was actually true.
“Trump made history last night for sure,” wrote The New Yorker‘s Susan Glasser on X. “Who will ever forget him ranting on stage about immigrants eating people’s dogs? Or insisting that the Vice President ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in jail’?”
But as CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported earlier this week, Harris did in fact support this policy. In 2019, she answered a questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union indicating that she would support paying for detained migrants to undergo gender transition surgery.
TIME magazine must have missed the CNN story. In a write-up of the debate, TIME knocked Trump for accusing Harris of supporting such a policy. Finally, the magazine had to add a correction, making clear that their own fact-check needed a fact-check.
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) September 11, 2024
Amber Duke joins me to discuss Harris’ policies, the war on Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders admitting that Kamala has flip-flopped, and the Democratic Party welcoming the Cheney family into the fold.
I neglected to mention last week that I saw Wolverine and Deadpool… and it was great! While the MCU has gone totally off the rails since Avengers: Endgame, this film succeeded in making me excited for whatever comes next. The movie did a particularly good job incorporating aspects of the Loki series on Disney+, including the Time Variance Authority—enforcers of peace throughout the multiverse—and the Void, where time-displaced variant heroes live out their days.
