Trump Versus the Debate Moderators

It’s almost here... the first presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump will take place tomorrow night on CNN. It is quite early in the election cycle, which is by design to account for the fact that many voters now cast their ballots via mail or in an early voting period.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Biden agreed to debate this early, which could signal his campaign’s uneasiness with polls showing the president trailing in most swing states, losing by double digits on the issues that matter most to voters and hemorrhaging support among various key voting blocs, despite what they may say in public (When First Lady Jill Biden was asked about polls showing Biden losing battleground states, she sharply replied, “No, he’s not!”)

While it would be easy to straightforwardly classify the debate as Biden versus Trump, these fights promise to be more impactful: Biden versus himself and Trump versus the moderators.

Biden’s perceived success in the debate almost entirely depends on his ability to make it through the ninety-minute-plus-two-commercial-breaks live event. There have been multiple viral videos of Biden in the past few weeks during a D-Day commemoration in Normandy, a Juneteenth event at the White House and a campaign event in LA that show him looking stiff and confused. The White House has rejected these clips as “cheap fakes,” a term coined by a former Harvard disinformation researcher that hasn’t landed well with the public. Of course, low expectations work in the president’s favor — and the Trump campaign has warned that Biden may be on performance-enhancing drugs. There will be no drug test, of course, but we also know that the president has taken a full week off of presidential duties in order to debate prep in private.

Some conservatives have speculated that the week out of the public eye is being used to adjust Biden’s sleep schedule so that he is at his most alert during the debate. We don’t have any way of verifying that theory, but we do know that Trump did not take a seven-day break ahead of the first 2020 debate; just three days prior, he held a Rose Garden event to announce that he was nominating then-judge Amy Coney Barrett to serve on the Supreme Court.

While Biden battles himself, Trump is going to war with the CNN moderators, particularly anchor Jake Tapper. Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, described CNN as a “hostile” environment and the moderators as “biased” during an interview on the network. Leavitt urged viewers to “Google ‘Jake Tapper Donald Trump,’” prompting anchor Kasie Hunt to cut her mic and end the segment. “Ma’am, I’m going to stop this interview if you continue to attack my colleagues,” Hunt said before making good on her promise.

The moment sparked social media threads and articles about Tapper’s bias against the former president, including a compilation video of Tapper comparing Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler and clips of Tapper elevating the Russian collusion conspiracy theory and referring to the Trump presidency as a “time of cruelty” and “utterly avoidable failures.” Bash, meanwhile, described it as “[unfortunate] for America” that the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not be removed from the ballot by state-level actors. With microphones being cut off between answers, the questions these moderators choose to ask of the candidates will play a larger than usual role in determining the tenor of the debate.

Leavitt urged viewers to “Google ‘Jake Tapper Donald Trump,’” prompting anchor Kasie Hunt to cut her mic and end the segment. “Ma’am, I’m going to stop this interview if you continue to attack my colleagues,” Hunt said before making good on her promise.

That's why I've been posting this all week:

The best way to stop this debate network ego bias is to go back to the way debates were moderated prior to 1996. Prior to the 1996 debates, the network broadcasting the debate had the host limited to moderating the debate, that is, timekeeping and enforcing the rules. A separate panel of questioners were from mixed media, including the competing networks and print journalists. Beginning with the 1996 debates, the only people questioning the candidates were from the network hosting the debates.
By going back to past practices, perhaps the other talent at the hosting network won't be so defensive when guests come on the air to talk about the debates? It's too much for one (or two) to do: moderate the timekeeping and rules, ask the questions, listen to the answers, follow up with other questions.
It's better to let the moderate focus on moderating while the panelists focus on the questions and answers.
Case in point: Chris Wallace moderating the third debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
With time running out, Wallace asked Trump if he'd accept the results of the election.
Wallace: Mr. Trump, I want to ask you about one last question in this topic. You’ve been warning at rallies recently that this election is rigged and that Hillary Clinton is in the process of trying to steal it from you. Your running mate Governor Pence pledged on Sunday that he and you, his words, will absolutely accept the result of this election. Today your daughter Ivanka said the same thing. I want to ask you here on the stage tonight, do you make the same commitment that you’ll absolutely accept the result of the election.
Trump: I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time. What I’ve seen, what I’ve seen, is so bad. First of all, the media is so dishonest and so corrupt and the pile on is so amazing. “The New York Times” actually wrote an article about it, but they don’t even care. It is so dishonest, and they have poisoned the minds of the voters. But unfortunately for them, I think the voters are seeing through it. I think they’re going to see through it, we’ll find out on November 8th, but I think they’re going to see through it. If you look --
Wallace: But, but --
Trump: Excuse me, Chris. If you look at your voter rolls, you will see millions of people that are registered to vote. Millions. This isn’t coming from me. This is coming from Pew report and other places. Millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn’t be registered to vote. So let me just give you one other thing. I talk about the corrupt media. I talk about the millions of people. I’ll tell you one other thing. She shouldn’t be allowed to run. It’s -- She’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run, and just in that respect I say it’s rigged because she should never --
Wallace: But, but --
Trump: Chris. She should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.
Wallace: But, sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?
Trump: What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?
Clinton: Well Chris, let me respond to that because that’s horrifying. You know, every time Donald thinks things aren’t going in his direction, he claims whatever it is, is rigged against him. The FBI conducted a yearlong investigation into my e-mails. They concluded there was no case. He said the FBI was rigged. He lost the Iowa caucus, he lost the Wisconsin primary, he said the Republican primary was rigged against him. Then, Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering. He claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him.
Trump: Should have gotten it.
(Laughter)
Clinton: This is a mind-set. This is how Donald thinks, and it’s funny, but it’s also really troubling. That is not the way our democracy works. We’ve been around for 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections. We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election. You know, President Obama said the other day when you’re whining before the game is even finished--
(Applause)
Wallace: Hold on, folks.
Clinton:-- It just shows you’re not up to doing the job. And let’s be clear about what he’s saying and what that means. He’s denigrating, he is talking down our democracy. And I, for one, am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.
Trump: I think what the FBI did and what the Department of Justice did, including meeting with her husband, the Attorney General, in the back of an airplane on the tarmac in Arizona, I think it’s disgraceful. I think it’s a disgrace.
Wallace: All right.
Trump: I think we’ve never had a situation so bad
(Applause)
Wallace: Hold on, folks. This doesn’t do any good for anyone. Let’s please continue the debate and let’s move onto the subject of foreign hotspots...
The next day Wallace said that he lost track and "forgot" to ask Clinton the same question.
To this day, President Trump is still being hounded over accepting the results of elections while Clinton is still acting as if she were the true winner in 2016.
This is what happens when debates are not conducted with separation of responsibilities. Moderating debates has become an exercise in ego management, not debate management. It's time to go back to the old ways of having a dedicated panel of questioners separate from the moderation of the debate.

-PJ

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