Former President Trump’s inner circle is seething over how ABC’s moderators handled Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Trump and Vice President Harris.
“Weird how the hack moderators … are only ‘Fact checking’ Trump and allowing Kamala to lie nonstop,” Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, wrote in a post on the social platform X. “The Fake News is the enemy of the people.”
The moderators for the debate were ABC journalists David Muir and Linsey Davis.
“This debate is three vs one — the ABC moderators clearly shilling for Kamala Harris,” former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard wrote on X.
Trump himself used the “three against one” phrasing during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity about an hour after the debate. Hannity also repeatedly criticized ABC’s moderators, comparing them unfavorably to the moderators from CNN who handled the first debate between Trump and President Biden.
It is notable that Trump was widely seen as the winner of the CNN debate, and some Democrats were complaining that night about the moderators. On Tuesday night, many saw Harris as the winner, and the parties changed places on criticizing the moderators.
Minutes after he walked off the debate stage, Trump, who in the weeks leading up to the debate railed against ABC over its coverage of him and the rules for the debate, voiced his displeasure with the moderators on social media.
“I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE,” he wrote on Truth Social.
After the debate, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called Muir and Davis’s performance “an embarrassment to journalism.”
“Literally the question to Trump was, ‘Why did you do the horrible thing?'” Rubio said during an appearance on Fox News. “And the question to Harris is, ‘What do you think about the horrible thing Trump said?'”
During the debate, Muir and Davis fact-checked Trump on his false or misleading statements about internet conspiracies regarding migrants, and Democratic positions on abortion, among other topics.
The real-time pushback against the former president stood in contrast to what many observers decried as a lack of fact-checking from CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash during the Biden-Trump debate.
ABC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the criticism its anchors were facing late Thursday night.
“These are elite Manhattan debate questions – the American people are suffering and can’t pay for groceries and deserve answers how it will get better,” commented Meghan McCain, who once was a co-host of ABC’s popular table talk program “The View.
“I don’t know what the hell this is but these moderators are doing the American people a grave disservice.”