You know where I stand on Donald Trump’s performance at Tuesday night’s debate. It was defined by missed opportunities and his repeated tendency to fall for Kamala Harris’s bait. But that was hardly the most infuriating thing about the debate.
The most infuriating thing about the debate, of course, was the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis. We knew that Trump was in enemy territory, yet somehow they managed to defy expectation and be even worse than Candy Crowley, the previous standard-bearer for a terrible debate moderator.
Seriously, they made Jake Tapper and Dana Bash look like amazing moderators.
No moderator can be perfect, but their performance should be a mere footnote when it comes to the story of a presidential debate. However, Muir and Davis were so bad that anchors at liberal networks couldn’t deny their role in helping Kamala Harris throughout the debate by fact-checking Trump multiple times and letting Harris’s lies go unchallenged.
Like Candy Crowley’s infamous fact-checking of Mitt Romney’s comments about how long it took Barack Obama to declare the Benghazi attack a terrorist attack, the fact-checks of Trump from Muir and Davis were often wrong. The two moderators also held Donald Trump to a much higher standard when it came to answering questions, turning the debate into a three-on-one pile-on of Trump.
Candy Crowley would blush at the conduct of Muir and Davis, who didn't just wrongly fact-check Trump once, as she did with Mitt Romney, but multiple times. Muir and Davis seemed to think it was their job to debate Trump when Kamala's microphone was muted.
In contrast, Harris spewed lie after lie with little to no challenge from the moderators. They didn't call her out when she lied about Project 2025, when she repeated the long-debunked Charlottesville hoax, when she claimed that Trump would sign a national abortion ban, or when she remarked that Trump said he'd be a dictator. When she made those lies, and a slew of others, Muir and Davis remained silent.
Related: It Looks Like Trump May Have Helped Himself in the Debate
It's almost comical to think that Kamala Harris's campaign spent weeks refusing to agree to the debate over microphones. Whether or not a second debate happens remains to be seen, but Tuesday's showdown made one thing clear: the issue of muted vs. live microphones was irrelevant.
So, what's the real problem?
Republican candidates are consistently forced to debate on networks known for their bias with partisan moderators who always lean left.
It’s clear the debate lacked one critical rule: no fact-checking by moderators. If the American people can’t trust moderators to be impartial and fair, why should they be allowed to influence the conversation by inserting their opinions disguised as facts? The role of the moderator is to guide the debate, not to put their thumb on the scale. The responsibility of fact-checking candidates lies with the candidates themselves, not the moderators.
It's been twelve years since the infamous Candy Crowley debate, and the fact that we're still talking about it as an example of a low point in presidential debate history tells us that this is a problem that hasn't gone away. Banning moderators from live fact-checking is a rule that must be implemented for every presidential debate going forward.
