ABC News is the big loser of the Trump-Harris debate

The main takeaway from the ABC News ambus— er, presidential debate last night? That someone should sue the network for creating a hostile workplace environment. 

The evening was supposed to offer Kamala Harris and Donald Trump an opportunity expose themselves to the public and explain their positions on various policy matters that are important to the public.  

In the event, it was an event in which the immoderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, repeatedly pecked at and corrected, or pretended to correct, one candidate, Donald Trump, while passing over lie after lie after lie emitted by Kamala Harris. 

Trump did not say “there were fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville. He did not “incite an insurrection” on January 6. He has not proposed instituting a nationwide ban on abortion. His tax cuts are not a “tax cut for billionaires.” He did not say that there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost the election. He has not threatened to weaponize the DoJ to go after his political opponents: on the contrary, he has suffered from that very process, overseen an egged on by the Biden-Harris administration. Here was a good round up of oft-repeated lies about Donald Trump, many of which were eagerly recycled by Kamala Harris last night. 

This morning, everyone is asking, “Who won?” but that is not really the relevant question. Harris came to the podium with four or five set strength-through-joy speeches that she inserted into her performance. Substituting a contemptuous rictus-cum-moue for her signature cackle, she attacked Trump but never made it over the hard place that has her firmly tied to the disastrous policies of the last four years.  

“We are not going back,” her campaign says, but it has been she who helped execute the vary things she says she doesn’t want to return to: the catastrophic border failure of the Biden administration, the humiliating Afghan withdrawal in which thirteen Marines were slaughtered and we instantly transformed the Taliban in top the best armed terrorist group in the world, the budget-busting inflation and cost of living increases, and on and on. 

Harris communicated the simulacrum of brittle cheeriness. Trump maintained a grim sobriety throughout the evening. I missed the wry humor he often brings to his rallies and interviews.  He might have been better served had he adopted a more light-hearted approach.  

But in the end he was right to be solemn. The country really does face an existential threat, or rather several existential threats: in the economy, in the crisis of mass migration, abroad in the threat of war. Harris represents the ostrich approach of burying one’s head in the sand. It is true that prophets tend not to be honored in their own countries. I am not sure how much of the public will be swayed by Harris’s hectoring, contentless promises. Her performance apparently impressed the pop singer Taylor Swift, who after the debate told the world she was was voting for Harris.  

Still, I am not sure that there was a clear winner last night. There was, however, a clear loser, and that was ABC News, which thanks to the performance of Miuir and (especially) Davis demonstrated once and for all that ABC is just a partisan propaganda machine in the pocket of the anti-Trump lobby. It was a shameful performance on the part of that cratering network.