ABC’s matter-of-fact moderators built factual guardrails around Trump

PHILADELPHIA — Fifteen minutes into Tuesday’s debate, former President Donald Trump was delivering a circuitous answer about his stance on abortion rights when he made a statement with no basis in reality: that a governor had condoned executing babies after birth.

Linsey Davis, one of the evening’s moderators from ABC News, did not let that one slide. “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said, matter-of-factly.

A little later, it happened again. When Trump made an outlandish claim about migrants in an Ohio town eating dogs and cats, the other moderator, David Muir, pointed out that ABC had called the city manager and learned there were no credible reports of pets being harmed.

“The people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food,’ ” Trump said.

“I’m not taking this from television,” Muir responded. “I’m taking it from the city manager.”

In the context of 105 minutes of fierce debate in Philadelphia, these exchanges were fleeting. But they signaled a shift — for an evening, at least — in the balance of power between Trump and the many journalists who have struggled, or stopped trying, to construct factual guardrails around the bombardment of baseless claims that he regularly unleashes on live TV.

Using calm and authoritative tones, Muir and Davis offered a model for real-time fact-checking that has been absent from many recent presidential debates. Trump’s apocalyptic portrait of an America besieged by migrant crime was met by Muir’s polite reply: “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

“They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime! It was a fraud!” Trump retorted.

“President Trump, thank you,” said Muir, before moving on.

There were almost no moments of tension between the moderators and the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the ABC anchors skipped several opportunities to follow up with her on tough topics like the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and Harris’ shifting positions on fracking and the southern border.

But Trump delivered, by one count, more than two dozen falsehoods over the course of the evening, while Harris’ factually questionable remarks were more misleading than flagrantly untrue.

That discrepancy did not stop Trump’s allies — even before the debate was finished — from accusing ABC of bias.

Donald Trump Jr., in a social media post, referred to the moderators as “hacks.” On Fox News, partisan host Laura Ingraham declared that “ABC’s goal tonight was to help Kamala Harris” and Sean Hannity called ABC News “the biggest loser in the debate.”

Whether those attacks can stick is an open question. Muir is, ratings-wise, the most popular TV news personality in the country. His newscast, “World News Tonight,” reaches far more Americans than shows hosted by partisan cable stars like Hannity and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.

He and Davis, who hosts the Sunday edition of “World News Tonight,” have taken pains to present themselves as nonpartisan figures. Trump even chose Muir to conduct his first major TV interview after taking office in 2017.

In the buildup to Tuesday, Trump had assailed ABC News as “the worst” and “the nastiest,” and brought up his pending lawsuit that claims one of the network’s anchors, George Stephanopoulos, harmed his reputation. But Trump and his campaign also accepted ABC’s ground rules for the debate and were satisfied with the choice of moderators.

Onstage Tuesday, the moderators’ pushback seemed to compound Trump’s frustrations with how the evening was unfolding. After the broadcast ended, Trump himself touted a slogan that had quickly picked up steam on the political right. “THREE ON ONE!” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

His ire seemed to augur a larger conflict between ABC News and Trump supporters in the days ahead.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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