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Sept. 11, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:41:50
20240911_abcs-bias-how-trump-could-have-played-it-and-wheth
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Why Debate Moderators Failed 00:14:55
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Well, 12 hours after we signed off earlier this morning, and I'm still enraged about those debate moderators on ABC last night.
They should never host another presidential debate again.
If the Dems want to have their primary debates over there, that's up to them.
But if the GOP agrees to participate in any kind of a debate, primary or general election on ABC News, they deserve what they get and we will have zero sympathy for them.
We've learned more in the days and weeks.
We will learn more in the days and weeks ahead of what effect, if any, last night's presidential debate had on this race.
There are early indications that voters believe she won, but that it changed no votes.
It barely moved the needle, if at all, on who they will actually support in November.
Trafalgar joined another polling company to see actually how they felt beforehand and how they felt afterward.
And there was absolutely zero change.
We'll see more in the polling that comes in the next days and weeks.
Meantime, the media is basically climactic today about how she did and ABC and the praise for these two in the tank moderators is as over the top as the actual quote moderation was.
Joining me now to get into all of it.
Camille Foster, partner at Freethink, Michael Moynihan, contributor to the free press, and Matt Welsh, editor-at-large for Reason.
They are the hosts of the fifth column podcast.
Find all their content and support them at wethefifth.com.
I want to tell you about the Daily Wires documentary that's exposing the left's precious DEI industry.
It's called Am I Racist?
And it's hitting theaters nationwide on September 13th.
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Right on.
Matt Walsh goes deep undercover.
Well, you'll see how deep in the twisted world of diversity training.
And the results are as hilarious as they are shocking.
Here's the deal.
Let's pack these theaters for these guys.
This is not just entertainment.
It's a counterpunch to Hollywood's woke propaganda.
Every ticket sold is a blow to the left's narrative.
The more tickets sold, the more theaters will show it.
That's how it works.
Go to amiracist.com and get your tickets now.
Bring your friends, your family, even bring a liberal.
They might actually learn something about this nonsense.
Let's show conservatives can dominate the box office and make opening weekend a big success.
Don't sit this one out.
Head to amiracist.com and get your tickets now.
Guys, welcome back to the show.
You know, I wouldn't say I've calmed down.
I'm still really angry.
I just, I feel like it's a before and after moment for the profession.
For me, this debate is not even about Trump and Harris.
It's not about the presidential election.
It's about what happened last night with what used to be a respected news organization just completely jumping into the tank for one candidate.
I mean, not even show me a Fox News debate.
Show me one Fox News debate where the moderators have ever done that for the Republican candidate of choice, right?
Where they've, whatever, they've decided we want Mitt Romney to win and they sank everybody else.
You can't find that.
This is, this was a decision by ABC to get Trump.
And while he didn't help himself, you know, taking all of her bait and so on and so forth, ABC News emerged the most victorious in having done what they wanted to do and with the biggest loss in reputation.
That's my view on it.
How do you guys see it?
I think that this gave a lot of credence to my political tribe, which is that of the triple haters, the ones who don't like the presidential candidates from either party and also don't like the media.
I mean, seriously, there's lots more that you cannot like about Kamala Harris after this, about Donald Trump, who performed horribly, I thought, and definitely ABC.
The biggest problem with the ABC moderation, even thinking about it 12 hours later, is not even the asymmetrical fact checks.
Sir, this is what you said is not true.
Not even that, although that's what we noticed in the room at the time and couldn't believe because it was all going in one direction.
The biggest problem is that Kamala Harris hasn't given any interviews, right?
She's given one in 50 some odd days to CNN.
She hasn't had her views challenged.
So this is when you, as a moderator, follow up when she doesn't answer a question.
Repeatedly, they asked Donald Trump to, sir, could you please answer the question?
They almost didn't do that even once with Kamala Harris.
And this is someone who's a new candidate and who has changed her positions really violently on at least a half a dozen big issues.
And the way that she answers that is like, well, I've already answered that.
Of course, I've answered how I've changed my positions.
And then she doesn't actually answer.
They did not follow up.
That is the biggest bit of malpractice.
Not once.
Not once.
Let me just show you a little of the fact checking that was done of Donald Trump in short form watch.
There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born.
President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country.
But here you bring up Springfield, Ohio.
And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there.
He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community as clarification.
And you know this.
You and your allies, 60 cases in front of many judges.
Many of them are going to be able to do it.
They said we didn't have standing.
President Harris, you heard the president there tonight.
He said he didn't say that, that he lost by whisker.
So he still believes he did not lose the election that was won by President Biden and yourself.
And now I am going to play a quick shot of ABC News fact-checking Kamala.
Give it a second.
That didn't happen.
No, it's coming.
It's coming.
Because she only told the truth.
Yeah.
That's what happened.
You're right.
That's it.
I was going to say that David Muir is a real credit to the profession and absolute brilliant moderator.
I'm voting for David Muir.
I'm voting for David Muir.
He's thrown his head into the ring.
Exactly.
ABC won last night.
I tweeted out.
Why did they even need Kamala Harris there?
Why did ABC even invite her?
She wasn't.
Yes.
We recorded late last night, about midnight, after a couple hundred glasses of wine.
And I had a bed with you.
It made it much more bearable.
You have to take it drink.
Opportunity economy.
I actually spoke fentanyl every time I heard it.
The thing is that, Megan, you came up because I suggested to you for this.
I want to do this in the future in a very specific way.
And I was kind of joking, but then quite serious about it, is that I think that these should be just straight adversarial.
You're interviewing somebody for the job of the presidency of the United States, the most powerful job in the world.
These should be adversarial interviews.
There should be two people, as ABC had it.
One person should only ask questions of President Trump and one person should only ask questions of Vice President Harris.
And they should be their adversaries on both sides, challenging them on these issues.
Because as I said last night, and this is a what a great question for me would be bring up the tweet about the Minnesota bail fund.
We've had no, no one's had an opportunity to ask her this because of course she hasn't given an interview.
And if she does, it's certainly not going to be to somebody who's going to ask her about that.
Get an adversarial person and they're on both sides and have them fire questions at them and actually challenge them.
It solves the whole thing and it actually makes for entertaining television.
I said the same thing last night.
I said that if they have another debate, it should not be with any of these news operations.
It should be, I get to choose a moderator and you get to choose a moderator.
There's going to be two from the outside.
You know, we can each choose one.
But this farce of we're going to entrust the future of the country to organizations like ABC News must end.
It must end.
And shame on any Republican who ever agrees to this shit again.
Donald Trump cannot agree to another debate with one of these organizations again, or he gets what he deserves.
This is the organization in which it's run by Kamala Harris's best friend, ABC News is these days.
They hired Donna Brazil, debate cheater in chief.
And I'm not suggesting she gave the questions to Kamala Harris, but you wouldn't be surprised to learn she had.
You certainly after watching that wouldn't be like, I'm shocked, shocked that ABC worked to undermine Donald Trump in such a way.
And they would be in that position.
I said, I'd be surprised because she didn't answer any of them.
If she had them before, maybe she would have answered the questions that were asked of her, including the very first question.
Literally the first question.
No one comes to the bottom.
She's from the middle class.
Yeah, of course.
She's from the middle class.
Businesses.
Yes.
Here it is.
Here it is.
Wait, let's watch that.
It's not 12.
When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?
So I was raised as a middle class kid.
I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people.
And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy.
His plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations.
Okay, keep going.
Total dodge.
Because we're not.
That's obviously why we are not better off than we were four years ago.
And yet I didn't hear him press her on that.
Didn't hear the moderators press her on that.
I mean, the question's pretty simple.
Are we better off?
Are we not?
She didn't even address the question, not even a little bit.
And let's never leave Donald Trump off the hook on this.
She said at the end of that thing, his only plan is to cut taxes and do what he's normally doing.
Basically, his only plan in this whole debate was to cut taxes and to enact a tariff when it comes to the economy.
And he had other stuff about immigration, whatever.
But he didn't rise to the level.
You can take that opportunity as the opponent in a debate, and you should never walk away from a debate and blame it on the refs, even if the refs are loaded against you.
Conservatives and Republicans have for a long time used that to their advantage.
Just look at Newt Gingrich, look at other people who in moments of high stress turned it back on and pointed out the unfairness or the loadedness of the moderator.
He could have done that.
He didn't do any of it.
He took the bait over and over again from Kamala Harris and didn't take those opportunities when she was obviously flailing around as she did in her very first answer.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And especially during the debate, I was surprised.
I think when we were watching it, I might have even said this, that he didn't do, I mean, Newt Gingrich did it in such a like grand way, I mean, a memorable way.
I mean, you don't remember things from debates.
His response about that question, the kind of dirty question that was asked of him was terrific.
And I think he was maybe prepared for it.
But Donald Trump had a million points during this debate, could have said, I can't believe you guys are doing this.
This is the way you're going to work against me.
Do that.
And also, by the way, he has the opportunity to, the first thing that he says every time she doesn't answer a question is say, by the way, Americans, keep in mind she didn't answer the question and then answer your own question.
So I think it's absolutely right.
And, you know, look, a very good column for people to read this morning is Jim Garrity over at National Review because he did a great thing where he took every question, not the answers, every moderator question and strung them together.
It is really jarring to read them all together.
You're like, wow, this is actually what was asked.
But as Jim pointed out, as a number of other people, I can't, I mean, people I've been talking to this morning, Republicans, he did poorly.
He just objectively did not do well.
Can I say something on that?
Look, I agree with you that Trump took all of her bait.
He ran after her bait just like my Straderk runs after his liver snaps.
But and that he did not do a good job of staying on his message and fact checking her in all the places where he could have.
But I actually went back, I watched it, re-watched it again today, and then I read the transcript of it carefully, as you can see with my little post-its.
And Trump actually did a better job than I thought he did trying to bat down her attacks on him.
He was attempting because she would bring up a lot of stuff about him that was not true or that was potentially damaging.
And so I think he did feel the need to say, that's a lie.
Here's why that's a lie.
Don't be worried about, for example, my tariffs.
Here's why.
And then he would pivot back.
But she was given free reign.
She was doing what one should do during a debate, which is just deliver your message, not answer the question asked, make it into an attack on your opponent.
And then he felt the need to respond to her attacks and then would try to say something offensive or affirmative.
But I think we all walked away with the impression that he wasn't doing a good job because it was just constant.
Every single Q ⁇ A went this way.
He was never really given the opportunity to give up, to have a softball of his own, right?
Where he just had a great issue raised for him that he got to answer cleanly.
And he had no help from the moderators when she would lie.
And to the contrary, they bring up all of his controversies and then give it to her to double down on him.
So he was just placed in this washing machine where they just kept tumbling him around and tumbling and tumbling and tumbling.
But if you read the transcript, you'll see he did try on many issues to first respond to the lies about him and then go back to the actual issue at hand or raise his favorite issues.
It just, I agree when the debate was over, you just didn't feel like that had happened.
He's just been doing this for so long at this point.
And I mean, what you're describing, Megan, these are tactical failings on Donald Trump's part.
He was not disciplined.
They apparently have been working with him behind the scenes for weeks and weeks now to try to get him ready.
And you did not see that preparation yesterday.
You barely heard the message for the most part.
It's they're bad.
They're the worst.
They're terrible.
There's the hyperbole and the overstatement constantly throughout.
He sounded like a car salesman.
And I say that with affection.
My father was a car salesman.
He sold my mother a bum Toyota.
She had to keep coming back to the dealership.
And for him to get flagged for lying when he's doing this kind of hyperbole and everyone understands this is hyperbole.
I just use the word everyone as he does.
He doesn't actually mean everyone, but he means a lot of people.
Fine, we move along.
But he had so many opportunities to turn the page.
Trump Lacks Political Discipline 00:15:10
And I think his worst moments weren't on the redirects.
They weren't on the fact checks.
It was when they talked to him about January 6th.
It was when they talked to him about losing the election.
And they should have been prepared for those questions better.
And if you're going to play the game Kamala plays, you could say, that's old news.
We've been down this road before.
What we need to talk about is my record when I was president and her and her boss's record now.
And they are a disaster.
They are ruining this country.
And that is where we need to pay attention.
And if they follow up, you come back at hard again and say, I have addressed this so many times.
Those were the bad old days.
If you want to talk about 2020, let's talk about the disaster of the summer of 2020.
Let's talk about Walls and how he is perhaps one of the worst examples of Democratic leadership, quote unquote leadership in 2020.
I mean, he didn't do any of that yesterday.
What he did do was take a shot at his own vice president.
That is a self-owned.
I was, I'm, I'm not surprised by the ways he failed yesterday.
I am surprised by the extent to which he failed.
He looked.
But you know, on all those questions, Camille, you had David Muir following up.
So, so no regrets.
So, you know, so, okay.
Every time he, in there are a couple instances where he fought with Trump.
He actually fought with him over and over.
And yet, let me give you one of these.
We didn't cut this, but I'm just reading from the transcript.
David Muir, okay, turning now to immigration and border security, an important issue, blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
Uh, root causes.
You were the root causes person.
Kamala Harris.
Uh, we know illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration.
Um, in june president Biden imposed tough new asylum restrictions and then the numbers dropped.
Why did the administration wait six months before the election to act and would you have done anything differently?
That's a good question, right?
He asked that, Kamala Harris.
She goes on.
Very good question, she.
She goes on um with her.
First, she starts with her John Wayne imitation.
My audience knows what I mean.
I'm getting.
I get down to that border and I got those criminals.
I didn't let him.
That's my John Wayne impression.
That's me imitating Kamala, imitating John Wayne.
Um she, she wants us to believe she was like this border, like this tough on border crime person because she pro she, she prosecuted gun trafficking cases in California.
That that doesn't make her tough.
We're talking about criminal border crossings and how you're going to stop them.
Not prosecuting crime in California once they come and commit a bunch of murders.
Anyway, that's how she started.
Then she pivots, not to anything that's responsive, but to the border security bill that the that the Uh Republicans killed, and then she goes here.
I'm going to tell you something he's going to talk about immigration a lot tonight, even when it's not the subject that's being raised, and i'm going to actually do something really unusual and i'm going to do.
You remember where she went here?
Let's see, project 2025 is where.
No, this is where she went to the rallies to.
Why didn't you do anything earlier?
Where have you been on illegal immigration?
People forget that was the.
It was a good question by ABC to her and this is the answer on which she pivoted to his rallies.
What the f?
Does that have to do with their failures on immigration?
10.4 million under Biden, 2.3 million under Trump, that's it.
Those are the numbers somebody needed to say last night and she says, i'll tell you.
Uh, i'm gonna.
I'm gonna do something really unusual.
I'm gonna invite you to attend one of Donald Trump's rallies because it's really interesting thing to watch.
You'll see, during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter, he talks about windmills causing cancer, and what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.
This is such an obvious.
Look over here something shiny, don't look at the 10.4 million.
And you, as the, as the viewer, are saying, don't do it.
Trumpet no consent.
Don't do it like he's absolutely going to consider an amazing moment because he totally did it.
Wait, I need a moment here.
Here's the point I'm raising.
Here's the point I'm raising.
This is the point at which an honest moderator would have said the question was why now?
Why didn't you solve it earlier, right?
And maybe she would have said that.
You're the executive branch.
You know, it's not just the border bill line is a good one and it can be contested either way, but it's, you know, Donald Trump did intervene in that legislative process.
Okay, that's a thing to talk about.
But the executive branch has a lot of power to enforce immigration law in this country in ways that well, that's the right question.
That's the right question exactly right there.
You, on his first day in office, President Biden and you, by executive order, undid all of the border security measures that Trump put in place.
Aren't you the ones to blame for the 10.4?
That's the proper question.
It's the proper question.
And I mean, obviously, Donald Trump, if the moderators are not going to do this, and you know at this point they're not going to, you know, they're training their fire on you.
It's incumbent upon you as a skilled politician, and he might be a good politician.
He's a terrible debater, to actually make that point yourself.
You know, it's incredible thing is that I was this morning, I was getting coffee and I live in an area where there are actual Marxists, like everyone's an actual Marxist.
And I'm in line, surrounded, swaddled by dopes talking about the debate last night.
The person behind me is saying, oh, it was such a brilliant thing that she did by bringing up.
And it's like, no, it's a very obvious thing.
And he should have been prepared for it.
It's not that she's brilliant.
It's just that he can't control himself.
And, you know, look, it's a boring and obvious point, but so many times during that debate, you have two instincts and mine matches yours in one way, Megan, is that I can't believe I'm watching these moderators do this sort of thing.
And then the other one is, good Lord, he really cannot control himself on anything.
He's debating whether or not the Central Park Five were guilty.
Such a bad thing.
You know who thought they were guilty?
No, nobody knows.
Nobody cares.
Don't tell them.
Redirect it and say, why did you tweet about the bail fund?
Why are you doing price controls?
He did raise that.
He did raise that.
He's the only one who raised the bail fund.
They did not raise that against her at all.
They let her meander time and time again and lie time and time again.
And one time Trump did fact check her on the spot, but it was really, you know, kind of lost.
I can tell you're going to make a point.
Go ahead.
No, I just, I think it's right.
The thing, though, what he did one time is ask, just because the mics are off, ask a question of her.
He did once, and guess what?
She didn't answer.
Nope.
Abortion.
She was on the abortion.
Eight months?
Yeah.
Eight months, nine months, nothing.
She didn't know.
And that she looked terrible in that.
Do the same thing when it's the bail fund stuff.
Answer the question.
Why did you change your mind on that?
Do you support that sort of thing?
I think that's what makes it.
And where's the moderator?
Where's the moderator to make her answer that?
Kamala Harris, would you support abortion in that you say you'll support Roe?
Does that mean you would support abortion in the seventh, eighth, and ninth month?
But no, no follow.
Not one of those little like follow-ups you didn't actually answer, which they did to Trump all night.
Not one to her.
Go ahead, Camille.
Well, I was just going to say, that's what makes his performance last night so frustrating.
If you are someone who actually likes Donald Trump, it must be anyways.
He had that moment.
He had that moment and he could have done it again.
He could have simply redirected it, ask her another question, put the question directly to her.
He didn't do it.
There were breaks and stops in the action when he could have collected himself, perhaps calmed down a little bit, even had that moment where he turns to the moderators and say, look, I see what you guys are doing.
I get it.
I understand.
You're not big fans of mine.
There are plenty of people out there who aren't big fans.
Right there is a good line.
Yes.
Boom.
And these are small things that he could have worked on.
In fact, we've seen him do this kind of stuff in other contexts, which is what made, again, I'm not surprised by the ways in which he failed in the areas, but the degree to which he did it is another thing entirely.
He should have had his big media moment.
Here's the problem, though.
He couldn't have the Newt Gingrich moment because that was one question to Newt and it opened the CNN debate by John King.
One, that's easy.
I mean, it's not easy to be as great as Newt was on that answer.
No, that was spectacular.
But I'm just saying, even Trump could have understood, look what happened with me at that debate in 15 when we asked him that very tough.
That wasn't actually the opening question.
It was something from Brett about whether he'd support the eventual nominee.
But anyway, my point is he can do it when it's just one question or two questions.
This was an ambush.
It was a full, it was an all-in pile on with one guy in the foxhole and all these shooters all around him.
And Trump was trying.
He was trying to take care of this one and take care of this one and take care of that one, but it was ubiquitous around him.
There's only so much he felt he could do.
And I felt for him.
I mean, I recognized it too.
All semblance of fairness had gone out the window.
I mentioned this last night.
This was my least favorite tactic.
All right.
This was perhaps the most unfair thing ABC did.
We pulled a couple of examples.
We could have gone on, but here's just a couple of, this is the format.
You are fucking awful, Donald Trump.
Why are you so awful?
Vice President Harris, would you like to weigh in on how awful he is?
Watch it.
Watch, watch, watch it.
Mr. President, on January 6th, you told your supporters to march to the Capitol.
You said you would be right there with them.
Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day?
Very simple question as we move forward toward another election.
Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day?
But I do want Vice President Harris to respond here.
He said he didn't say that, that he lost by whisker.
So he still believes he did not lose the election.
But I do want to ask you about something that's come up in the last couple of days.
This was a post from President Trump about this upcoming election just weeks away.
He said, when I win, those people who cheated, and then he lists donors, voters, election officials, he says will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
One of your campaign's top lawyers responded saying, we won't let Donald Trump intimidate us.
We won't let him suppress the vote.
Is that what you believe he's trying to do here?
Mr. President, you recently said that I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black.
I want to ask a bigger picture question here tonight.
Why do you believe it's appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?
Vice President Harris, your thoughts on this?
By the way, asking someone as a debate moderator, do you believe it's appropriate to whatever you said is just like as a moderator question?
I think that the average American actually notices this.
And I was talking to somebody about this today, is that Donald Trump lost the debate.
I think there's no doubt about this.
I think he was terrible.
I know other people might disagree with me on that, but I think the one thing that saved him was the moderation.
I think that that pushed that, you know, more towards a, you know, not like a draw, but it's somewhere kind of in the closer to the middle because of how obvious it is to watch them do things like that.
100%.
I mean, imagine that you're like the follow-up here is like, you know, how much do you agree that he should feel bad about this?
Whereas there's an actual question that she was talking about near the top, right?
About tariffs.
She's calling tariffs taxes.
Okay.
He points out correctly that many of his tariffs, especially about Cheyenne, the Biden administration, the Biden-Harris administration had adopted.
So the natural moderator question is, so, Kamala Harris, those tariffs, are they not taxes?
Which ones are taxes?
Are the ones that you don't like, the one that Trump wants, or the ones that you do like?
And just tease that out in a way that's a little bit more elegant.
That's an actual important follow-up question about policy and about philosophy that is so much more important than like black Indian nomenclature.
And this is the second time because Dana Bash asked that.
Dana Bash asked 30 questions.
These guys asked about like 13 or 14, depending on how you do it with some follow-ups.
They thought that was one of the most important ones.
And also, here's one that maybe you didn't even highlight, Megan, but we've seen this in how many debates over the last 25 years?
This question.
You know, climate change is a really big issue.
And the young people especially really, really care about it.
What are you going to do about it?
That is no longer the question.
The question is, maybe say something like, okay, so you wanted to ban fracking in 2019.
Fracking has been the single biggest driver of reducing carbon footprint, which is good for greenhouse gases.
How do you square that circle, right?
Like talk about a policy or a trade-off, not just the young people really care about climate change.
What do you say?
It's been 20 years.
That was the question.
Where do you stand on climate change?
The fracking thing was one of the biggest fall downs of the night for all his stupid fact checking, David Muir's stupid fact-checking.
I listened to all those pieces of tape and I did not hear sarcasm.
Shut up.
Who died and made you king of what sarcasm is and what isn't?
That is opinion.
It's not a fact check.
He seems like someone who understands sarcasm.
David Muir.
He didn't fact check her on the fracking.
He didn't after Dana Bash fell down on the job in that CNN interview and let her get away with, I've made my position perfectly clear back in 2020 on the debate stage, perfectly clear that I do not support a ban on fracking.
When, of course, the Joe Biden, that was the Joe Biden, she was the vice presidential debate where she said Joe Biden won't ban fracking.
Joe Biden won't.
She had said she would have if she had been elected as president six months earlier.
So now if you're David Muir, you know this is coming.
You've written it into your questions.
Lindsay Davis has a question about fracking and the flip-flop.
And she says she hasn't flip-flopped.
And again, they let her get away with it.
No fact check.
But for Trump, that was a sarcasm.
What?
And also other stupid fact checks we just played.
It was so unfair and lopsided.
I can barely keep the stomach file where it belongs.
We were going to like send a drone with some Xanax over to compound Uber Eats full of Xanax and Clonop and I want ABC to be able to take Xanax.
Yeah, I have a couple in my bag.
I want to say one final thing.
I really, really want to be clear.
I love adversarial debate moderators.
The Case for Adversarial Moderation 00:14:52
Totally fine if you want to do it in an even-handed way.
So we were talking about this last night.
I think like, why just you have a list of questions, right?
You write these out and they kind of send them around to ABC.
You know, be a little more off the cuff at certain times.
So for instance, it is a perfect time for a moderator who's been paying attention to this race when she says in the question about Afghanistan, well, Joe Biden, it's like, wait, wait, Joe Biden.
And then, you know, she says, you know, well, I didn't ban fracking in the past.
As a moderator, as somebody who is an interviewer, Megan, you know this, you see these things, you make those connections.
It's the beautiful mind.
And you say, wait, hold on.
Madam Vice President, when are you in charge and when are you not in charge?
What can you take credit for and what can you not take credit for?
Because the disaster in Afghanistan was Joe Biden's.
You not banning fracking was you.
So explain to the American people what you do as a vice president in which decisions you're responsible for.
That is a completely reasonable question.
But they're just reading up.
Here's the other thing on the fracking, because here's what a responsible journalist does.
They go back and they look at all her recent statements and all of his recent statements on these issues that you know you're going to raise and you make sure you know where they normally go and you get ready for a potential fact check if you have to do it.
You know, what's she going to say in response to this?
We used to do this on Fox News all the time.
Go back and look at any debate Brett Baer, Chris Wallace, and I did as the three moderators of these.
And this shit never happened to us because we were prepared and we would anticipate what they would say and we'd have the hammer ready to drop if they walked into our trap.
It was fun.
And we did it to Republicans, even though we were at Fox News.
So you can, right, exactly.
You can set them up for difficult questions.
You just have to do it to both sides.
But on the fracking question, they should have known based on what she said to Dana Bash that she was going to both deny that she'd held this position, refer to her 2020 vice presidential debate and claim that as her own position,
even though it was only saying Joe Biden won't ban fracking, and that she would then go on to say exactly what she said to Dana Bash in that CNN interview, which was, I, in fact, cast the deciding vote as president of the Senate in my role as vice president to open up more leases as part of the Inflation Reduction Act for fracking on fracking.
That sounds so good on paper.
Yes, you, because she said it before, they clearly didn't do their homework because they don't give a shit.
All they want to do is go with that.
That sounds good.
We actually looked it up.
You know what?
It's true.
She did open those up those more leases by that vote, only to then a couple of months later, shut them all down, saying the environmental impact hadn't been fully studied.
So they put that in there so they could say they'd done it, only to then cut it all out at the knees.
A responsible debate moderator interested in fact checking might have raised something like that.
If you were going to bring back any question from that Bash interview, I didn't suspect it would be the one about the raise stuff.
I thought it might have been the one about Biden, his fitness for office, which was a moment when Dana, she asked the question.
She didn't ask it well because she covered it in euphemism to try to help Kamala to the right answer.
But it's the right question to ask.
And if the moderators aren't going to ask it, Donald Trump should have mentioned it.
At what point did you know that your boss was incapable of actually doing the job?
Because there's only two possibilities there.
You were either lying and you said that he could do it when you knew he couldn't, or you have incredibly poor judgment because every single American and everyone in the media, once they saw that debate performance, knew what we have known for a very long time, that Joe Biden simply isn't up to the task at this point.
And he certainly won't be up to the task next year or four years from now.
And she had one question about his mental fitness and why she didn't come forward about it.
Not one.
How much is that?
And it's not just mental fitness.
That is probably the biggest bit of malpractice because it extends the malpractice from Dana Bash.
She asked the question really, really badly.
As Camille said, gave three multiple choice answers in the question, which is not very helpful as a journalist.
The question is not just like, when did you notice, which is an important one, but it's also she said that the Robert Hurr investigation, which came out in February, said it was clearly politically motivated.
Yep.
Right.
Career prosecutor here in the DOJ.
Defaming him.
She was an attorney general, right?
So she was like arresting illegal aliens on the border.
That's a weird thing to do to one of your career processes.
Undocumented by that.
But she said that it was also objectively false.
His assessment of Biden's fitness, she said this in February.
She went further than anybody else in the administration.
She was the morning Joe of the administration in defending Biden's fitness and defaming a career prosecutor in his reasons for not prosecuting Joe Biden.
She has never had to answer this.
She's been running for president now for nearly two months.
She has not had to answer for that, and she didn't have to that defeat.
This is the thing.
And by the way, this is the thing to always emphasize.
I mean, she hasn't had to answer that.
I have a friend who watches this show, and I know I'm going to get an email from him after because, you know, I'm not a Trump fan.
He's more of not a Trump fan.
But the reason that the focus for me, and I think for us, is on Kamala Harris.
I can just, you know, blithely say that I thought Donald Trump was a disaster.
He was bullshitting a lot.
He did poorly.
But it's because of that thing.
It's because she, not that she hasn't answered, she hasn't had to answer.
We have two opportunities, Dana Bash and this.
So guess why I'm going to be pissed off?
Because I have this whole pastle of questions that I want answered because I'm a fucking voter.
I'm going to swear on this, right?
Seriously.
I should not explain Megan's.
Sorry, kids who are listening to Megan Kelly.
But these are things, like, again, not to be boring about this, but you are, you know, auditioning for the most important job in the world.
And this is what you're doing.
You're not answering questions.
You're not being asked good questions.
As an interviewer, as Megan is saying, I used to call this watching fight tape.
You know what people are going to say.
You anticipate what they're going to say.
You're ready to go this way and that way.
And the only explanation I have for them not doing that is that they don't want to.
And I think the reason for that, and I'm actually going to say something that you might disagree with, I don't think this comes from the top.
I don't think it has to come from the top.
I think these are people.
They are, you know, the thing was when Donald Trump was president, we saw this phrase always, and then it disappeared without evidence.
Donald Trump claimed, comma, without evidence, comma.
And then all of a sudden, politicians were always using evidence.
After Donald Trump got everybody had evidence.
But that instinct comes back.
When Donald Trump is there, you're like, sir, I really need to tell you right here.
It's like that voice, by the way, has driving me crazy.
It's like, I'm going to fact check you here.
It's like that is the Donald Trump instinct because you've had nine years of this where you're being pushed by everyone.
Fact check him in real time.
All he does is lie.
Okay, he lies a lot.
I totally agree.
But politicians lie a lot.
You have to do it to everybody else too, because there were rubbers in there.
And the one that pissed me off the most, sorry to go on a rant here, is the bloodbath one, which is so obvious.
And if you don't know that.
Let me play some of it.
Here's a montage of some of her unchecked lies.
Not a single fact check by ABC.
Watch.
Scott 6.
Let's remember Charlottesville, where there was a mob of people carrying tiki torches, spewing anti-Semitic hate.
And what did the president then at the time say?
There were fine people on each side.
When it came to the Proud Boys, a militia, the president said, the former president said, stand back and stand by.
Donald Trump, the candidate, has said in this election, there will be a bloodbath if this and the outcome of this election is not to his liking.
The president of the United States incited a violent mob to attack our nation's capital, to desecrate our nation's capital.
On that day, 140 law enforcement officers were injured and some die.
If Donald Trump were to be reelected, he will sign a national abortion ban.
Tim Walz and I are both gun owners.
We're not taking anybody's guns away.
She's literally on record supporting a mandatory buyback program.
She's left from that.
Tell the bloodbath story because not everybody knows.
Yeah, no, it was about tariffs and electric vehicles in Mexico.
And it would be an economic bloodbath if this stuff came through.
And, you know, by the way, Trump is not restrained in this debate at all, but was restrained in those moments.
I think he should have been more vocal.
Obviously, the mics were off, but you could hear her when the mics were off, objecting and baiting him.
But that one, I have to say, Megan, because we were 97 drinks in and yelling at the TV, which is what I do when I watch ALF.
It doesn't, I mean, this is no different than normal, but I'm doing this and I missed the Brian Sicknick reference, who was the officer who died.
And the autopsy showed that he died of natural causes.
And it wasn't because he was beaten over the head with a fire extinguisher and all these things.
And Trump tried to go back to that with the Ashley Babbitt stuff, but I think he made a hash of it as he did a lot of this stuff.
But that is really egregious.
She knows that that stuff's not true.
And what is the presumption that we have?
That they're going into this knowing that they don't have to really be precise about this stuff because they're not going to be fact-checked.
They know it.
And let's think about the both sides lie who has been debunked by Snopes.
Trump and his, I'll give you the floor in one second, Matt.
But Trump's response was, Laura Ingram has said it's not true.
Oh my God.
It's not something that's not.
Victor Walter.
I think Victor Warman said it wasn't true.
Jesse Wallace.
Which hates Republicans has said it's not true.
Go there, sir.
Go ahead, Matt.
The one that wasn't even in your montage, maybe because it's so built into the fabric of Democratic and media life right now, is just the incessant project 2025.
Yeah, yeah.
This is the Trump blueprint.
Everything in that is his government program.
He has distanced himself.
He has said, and he said it at the debate last night.
That's not my program.
It's a Heritage Foundation document from 2022 that was prepared in mind with maybe Ron DeSantis gets the thing as well.
And clearly, like it got too much press and he got mad and tried to push it away.
But there is a Republican Party platform, right?
That says what they're going to do.
Trump has a campaign website with issues.
Harris now has lots of issues on her website beginning on Monday, finally, two months into the whole thing.
But that has led, they've said that nonstop during the DNC.
I don't know how many references were Project 2025, probably more than 150, I would say.
That basically Jared Polis, who was otherwise pretty good, brought the prop book out, and that was very disappointing.
They can say that without any fear of being fact-checked, that this is the governing document.
It's not the governing document of what a Trump administration will do.
You could make the argument that, hey, there's some overlap there.
There's some personnel.
There's some aspirations and whatnot.
There's also some things in there that Trump would absolutely hate, like free trade things written by Veronique DeRugi or something.
That's not going to happen at all under a Trump administration.
But she can say it over and over again and without fear of ever being fact-checked to the same degree that Trump's hyperbole is going to be a fact-check.
No, look at this.
Look at her claim last night on what, again, she's John Wayne again.
She loves the guns.
Take a listen.
Then this business about taking everyone's guns away.
Tim Walz and I are both gun owners.
We're not taking anybody's guns away.
So stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.
The continuous lying.
Here she is in 2019.
Assault weapons that are already in circulation.
What do you do about those?
We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory buyback program.
Mandatory buyback.
Would have been ready with that fact.
That's not spin.
That's not a Trump argument.
That's not the RNC.
That's her on cam saying it.
But she got away with just stop with the continuous lies because she had either lazy moderators or biased ones.
My suspicion is both.
Shout out to Craig Melvin there from NBC, who's an actually very good moderator, in my opinion, and a pretty good journalist, Megan.
And sorry for saying that.
What do you think is she's going to be okay with that?
No.
Maybe she hates everybody.
Craig Melvin is one of the assholes who jumped all over me after my blackface Halloween.
I had been so nice to him.
He begged me to come on my show.
I put him on.
I helped him out repeatedly because he didn't really have much of a role other than his shitty no-watched MSNBC sheet.
I helped him.
And then when I make this comment with the knife like a psycho killer and Democrat Melvin and screw you, Matt, for saying that.
Yes.
Megan, I got a couple things here, but I want to know if in the next hour I can just name journalists and you can lose your mind about them and become a picture of the picture.
I'm in that kind of mood.
Can we get some New York Press headlines?
I know it's the best mood to ask these questions.
And by the way, the best debate moderator follow-up, because I had never heard, and maybe this is just me and I hadn't done my homework, that she's a gun owner.
It's just, what kind of gun do you have?
She's like eight.
That's right.
Does she?
Yeah.
And what kind of gun is it?
I would be interested.
I mean, there's two follow-ups to that.
It's like, no, you didn't say that.
Also, Craig Melvin is a fascist or whatever.
Just ask me.
That's me.
That's not Megan.
That's not Megan.
I'm just, I'm trying to get into character of what Megan and Hatha.
And then the third one is the man.
What is a mandatory gun buyback?
What is that?
It's a mandatory gun buyback.
Yeah.
She's going to pass an assault weapons ban and then she's going to go and collect everybody's guns.
That's what she's saying.
It's what people live in fear of because we're American and we have a Second Amendment.
The egregious fall downs on the job were everywhere.
And again, no follow-ups whatsoever.
Stop the Gun Buyback Rant 00:04:57
Like she kept saying we're going to get to that.
I can't wait to talk about all my flip-flops.
And she never did because she wasn't made to by the moderators, right?
It was just, they were perfectly happy to let her get away with the gun buyback, with the fracking, with the private health insurance.
They did ask.
She said, you supported Bernie Sanders' proposal to do away with private health insurance and put everybody on a government-run healthcare system.
Two years later, you proposed a plan that included a private insurance option.
What's your plan today?
All right.
That's just the softest way to ask these questions, right?
No, you're shaking your head.
No, that's not the right way.
And so first she says, I absolutely support a private healthcare option.
And I will get to that, Lindsay.
But first, I need to tell you, I've made very clear my position on fracking and the business about taking everyone's guns away.
And so stop with the continuous lying and all.
I mean, it's just, and what's, what does Lindsay Davis respond with?
Like anything about that earlier gun comment or the earlier tape of her saying she does want to take away private insurance, any of that?
No.
I want to move on to an issue that's important, right?
And then she goes on and eventually gets to climate change.
Climate change.
I got to start doing that.
You know, the girlfriend's like, I saw you texting this woman.
It's like, I know that's an important issue.
We'll get back to that.
First, I want to say that filibuster for three days.
I mean, it's an amazing thing that it's, by the way, it's not even an ideological thing.
As somebody who interviews people for a living, I know Megan can sympathize with this too.
When people do that, it is annoying as an interviewer and it gets my dander up.
And I'm usually like, hey, hey, stop, stop, stop.
Wait, ask this very specific question.
Let's get to that.
We can get to the other thing later.
And like the people, what abouting everything or changing the subject is the very, very base unit as an interviewer that you're just trained to intercept.
And I just, I mean, I do know why, but it was very frustrating to see that stuff.
And once, by the way, when you get away with it in the first question, you do it the whole time.
I'm curious.
Some of her like over over talk is like not strategic.
The ambition, the aspiration, the hope, I have, I imagine and actually have a plan.
You have said the same thing several different ways in one sentence.
I can't imagine that that isn't like actually designed to obfuscate the fact that she's not responding to questions.
Like it feels that way.
And one can imagine that with the moderators, and maybe this is giving them too much credit, that maybe if they realized, if they could see through that smokescreen, they might have followed up in a couple of instances.
Like I'm sorry.
What's the answer to the question?
But they never.
That's the thing, though.
They had no instinct for it, Camille, because they wanted to help her.
That's why.
That's why they didn't let Donald Trump get away with that at all.
When he tried to not answer the question, they had their follow-up.
The question was insert.
With her, it didn't happen one time.
And she dodged and weaved like OJ Simpson.
There, I made a sports reference.
It's more of a double murderer reference.
As an athlete, he did.
I don't know.
Who's an athlete that dodges and weaves?
I can't think of.
It's got to be someone.
You literally rail at OJ.
Remet Smith was also there.
Won some championships.
You know.
Unbelievable.
It's the OJ of debates.
Before we take a break, what do you guys make of the Taylor Swift endorsement?
Oh, man.
You guys have sent your daughters to see Taylor Swift in different states and countries.
Make this sound as if I'm sending her to like reformatory school or something.
She was wanted.
Her cousin wanted her to.
I'm sorry if I defend my daughter for a second.
I'm just saying it's a big deal.
Megan will be on my side on this and I know why, because when she was 11 years old, not knowing, she sent me something from Instagram that was a clip from the Megan Kelly show.
And I was like, wow, red-pilled it.
I swear to God.
I swear in my life.
I can screencap and send it to you.
But yeah, I don't look.
The thing, I don't care.
And it didn't surprise me.
You know, she intervened in the Tennessee thing in the past.
She's a liberal.
Her father, by the way, isn't.
Remember this little controversy because he's a bit conservative.
He had posted some things on Facebook.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, we have to disaggregate the number of people because we were talking about our daughter's liking and none of them are going to vote this time around because they can't.
And I don't know.
They're children.
I saw the pictures from the concert that my daughter went to.
Not a lot of voters among them.
But so I don't know what kind of effect this has, considering that I think people already knew this.
I know you're a bit exercised about this, Megan.
I have no opinion.
I'm irritated at her reasons.
Donors Trust Sponsorship Break 00:03:56
It was Tim Walt and his stance on LGBTQ, which she's either a know-nothing or she's an insane person.
Standby, quick break, more with the guys from the fifth column who are here for the whole show.
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OJ Simpson Video Proof 00:11:14
There it is.
Okay, that was OJ Simpson dodging and weaving people.
That's video proof.
My reference was spot on.
I'm just saying, Megan, that we could have gone with Tony Dorset, we could have gone with Gail Sayers.
There's a lot of running backs who didn't do all the murdering.
Yeah, the objection wasn't that he didn't dodge and weave, it was that he murdered two of them.
Separate the Athens from the crime.
Yeah, that's what you have to do.
Wasn't Gail Sayers part of the really sad story?
The Brian Piccolo, Brian song, you bet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Brian Piccolo story.
That was that's the only reason I know that.
Only if it crosses over into entertainment or news do I know the sports players, which is why I am limited to these weird references.
Audience just heard you say sports clothes and they know exactly what you're talking about.
The sports ball point is.
I was right.
Okay, that's a point.
It was fine, the reference was fine.
I've got to stay on Taylor Swift for one minute because Doug brunt, my husband, he doesn't react to that much in the news and so when it gets his attention I know that something's gone, either very right or very wrong.
And he did not like this clip from Tim Waltz reacting to the Taylor Swift news.
Watch Taylor Swift signed childless cat lady.
Um, I have to get your response to that, mr Governor.
All those things.
I am incredibly grateful, first of all to Taylor Swift.
I say that also as a cat owner, a fellow cat owner.
Uh look, because you heard it, we know that it's there.
That was eloquent and it was clear, and that's the type of courage we need in America to stand up courage, okay.
So for the listening audience, when he first reacted, his mouth was like this, yeah, and my husband said he looks like Elmer Fun.
That's what he looks like, Elmer Fun, like there's something off about this guy.
Um, and just one more for you, different but similar uh reaction from Lawrence O'donnell on Msnbc.
The Harris for president campaign now has the two most perfectly timed and most important endorsements of this campaign.
Joe Biden's 27 minute timed endorsement after he said i'm not the candidate perfect timing.
It just put a rocket on on her uh, to the nomination.
And it's so important, I think, to the people who are going to be consuming that Taylor Swift endorsement, including those fathers of eight-year-old girls.
And the timing on it is absolutely exquisite.
The wording of it is flawless and perfect, right down to the cat lady stuff.
There you go, the fathers that's you guys, the fathers of the young girls are going to be pushed.
I, I know, I mean, I don't really get it.
Instagram lines, first of all, I don't um.
Two comments, two very important comments that uh, everyone should pay attention to.
I I really cannot stand on cable news when people pretend that something's funny because someone important is on.
He said I got my cat owner too and everyone's like oh, my god, that was amazing.
Tim Waltz, the Richard Trier of Minnesota.
That's the first very important thing.
It makes me sick, uh.
The second thing is I don't like the Joe Biden.
That was the rocket.
First I was at the DNC.
I don't remember that rocket taking off and then the fathers of eight-year-old girls.
My daughter is 13 and, as you can imagine, she's perfect and hilarious and everything.
That said, I don't look to the people that she listens to on her spotify account and say who are they going to vote for?
That's what I really want to know because, you know, sometimes it's Freddie Mercury and he doesn't have a choice.
Right now my, my sister, I have, I have an 11-year-old son.
That's my youngest, and all the people he listens to sing about poop and farts.
That's really.
His mission is that.
There's a lot of songs on there.
You're in too.
That's fine, but there's a lot of songs.
This is.
These are not our political um, you know, opinion makers go ahead.
Matt Dj Scato yeah, I might want to have a talk with him, by the way, but that's just.
You know, i'm not.
Uh, my daughter is a 16 year old swifty.
Uh, my other daughter is becoming a swiftest.
She's nine uh, and uh, she's not going to be moved even a millimeter by this.
She is moved by, as all 16 year old girls are by uh, hilarious tick tock videos having to do with like skibbity, rizzlers and things like that.
Um, and Melania Trump uh, Melania Trump is an absolute hero to 16 year old girls.
I think she's fantastic true well, to a 16 year old, oh yeah, but I can see it.
She's my hero to me.
Yeah, me too.
That's pretty cool that she's our hottest first lady by a lot, by a lot.
It's kind of close and like, like Abigail Adams, nothing please, i'm on the record.
I think, don't.
I don't believe you put Jill Biden on the on the cover as our Joe Biden.
Remember Jill Biden?
Remember Joe Biden?
Um yeah, he's still president FYA.
I don't know if you're aware.
Here is another attempted um.
Well, it's Trump who's doing the fact check.
But I can't believe David Muir had the nerve to say this about the crime stats.
Watch this.
Sat nine.
Crime here is up and through the roof.
Despite their fraudulent statements that they made, crime in this country is through the roof.
And we have a new form of crime.
It's called migrant crime.
And it's happening at levels that nobody thought possible.
President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country.
But excuse me, the FBI defrauded.
They were defrauding statements.
They didn't include the worst cities.
They didn't include the cities with the worst crime.
It was a fraud.
That is totally correct.
What Trump said in response.
He was having to fact check the moderator, gents.
Fact check the moderator.
Not only is he right, they did remove the major cities, several of them from that crime study that was referenced.
But on top of that, the decrease in violent crimes is looking at all post-George Floyd.
If you want to compare present day year, present year to 2019, pre-George Floyd, there is not.
We are not down.
We are up considerably.
And Heather McDonald has been pointing this out and pointing out if you want to go back even further and look at the Ferguson effect after 2014 and compare where we were prior to Ferguson versus now.
Again, we've skyrocketed.
None of which would be offered by David Muir.
But what do you make of the fact that Trump had to fact check not only Kamala, but the moderators?
It didn't help that as Trump always does.
He then extends his own kind of apocalyptic hyperbole, right?
So he's in the same way that like Dana Bash gives Kamala Harris four different things to ways to answer a question to make it soft on her.
He gives moderators, especially ones who are keyed up through what I think is peer pressure, really, from their colleagues industrially to be sort of tough on Trump so he doesn't abuse his platform.
When he says, you know, our country is being destroyed, Israel is going to cease to exist in two years.
She said that Kamala is a communist.
His dad's a communist.
Joe Biden hates her.
A lot of these are like jokes.
Don't know he's alive.
Doesn't know that was fun.
So like he is giving, in addition to that fact check there, and I take your word for it, Megan, of his depiction of it, but he's also saying these other things.
And so it, I think, dulls the impact, right?
Donald Trump is never going to come across as the person who's going to be the biggest truth teller on any stage.
And especially towards the end, when he knew, I think, that he was kind of scrambling for keeping his head above water in this debate, he sped up and he kept getting more and more hyperbolic in his statements in a way that it just becomes hard to take him seriously.
And I think even in those things that he was saying about Kamala Harris, she was skillful in not taking the bait herself.
She could have said, oh, no, my dad's not communist.
She's like left.
She left that there.
She left a bunch of stuff there, which was very wise.
She was capable.
It was smart, but she's not capable of doing it.
She's like, that is not part of my rote memorization.
What card is that on?
I do not have it.
Yeah, there were two grades that we were talking about last night, the one on substance and on style.
And I think she did well on style.
She backed up and she did.
She didn't fall in her face like we thought we were going to do.
She was going to do.
But if you look at the David Muir question, there's actually the first four or five words are the key to it.
I mean, people kind of forget this.
She said, he said, Mr. President, as you know, which is a blatant accusation of lying.
I mean, the thing is, is that there's a number of ways.
And again, like Matt, I haven't looked at this enough and looked at it recently.
I'm trusting your take on it, Megan.
But there's a number of ways of looking at these statistics, right?
Going back to 1993 in New York when there are over 2,000 murders.
Like, oh, it's down.
It's like, yes, but down.
Where's your starting point?
So you can be generous in some sense and say, you know, you're interpreting this a different way.
But if you look at it this way, Mr. President, but you're just going out of the block and saying, as you know, Mr. President, that is incorrect.
I don't think you should do that as a moderator.
I'm sorry.
Let me give you some stats.
Let me give you some stats because we had Heather McDonald on the show who you can trust implicitly.
I mean, Heather does her homework on all things revolving around crime.
This is like one of her main beats.
And here are some of the stats that we pulled in connection with that interview.
According to the Council on Criminal Justice, comparing 2023 to 2019, the homicide rate 18% higher in 2023 versus 19.
Gun assault rate, 32% higher.
Carjacking, 93% higher.
Car theft, 105% higher.
Chicago, total crime up 55% in 2023.
Robbery, up 38%.
Car theft up 22%.
Memphis, homicides, up 87%.
And as for those, the one article that the left, Rachel Maddow and David Muir are basing their claims on, that crime has been falling, that it's at a 50-year low and all, and so on and so forth.
The guy admits that the major cities were not included in this report.
Some major cities like Chicago and Los Angeles did not report any data.
So Trump was right.
You don't have to believe Trump.
You can believe me.
You can believe Heather McDonald.
You can believe the guy who authored the study on which David Muir is basing that claim.
You can believe the city, the Council on Criminal Justice.
The point is, it's not the candidate's job to clean up the moderator's inaccurate questions.
This is such bullshit.
Again, he was in the foxhole.
Everyone was surrounding him, firing down at the guy.
And Trump was trying to put, you know, stop the gunfire at every turn.
The guy's human.
Empathy for a Human Target 00:15:33
There's only so much he can do.
And that's why I watched this thing and I felt empathy for him.
I felt like this is unfair.
This is not a fair test of what a president can do and what we should be putting our presidential candidates through in order to get to the office.
This is, it's almost cruel.
It's just, it's trying to humiliate him.
That's how I felt watching it.
Just I keep coming back to the fact that he, even he talked about his expectations of unfairness in the debate.
He did not expect them to be fair.
He said so in advance.
He said so before the CNN debate as well, and that they were fair.
And just if you know that that is the case, there's two things they probably should have done, the campaign.
Insist that there be another debate on Fox News or something like that, so that you at least have this other opportunity and it's already there.
Force Kamala to do it.
And the second thing is, again, you know what the defects of your candidate are.
You know that he has difficulty just being disciplined and staying on message.
You should laser focus on that.
Every question should come.
And for every Kamala response, you should go back to the fact that you're in office right now.
Why haven't you done it already?
Everyone.
You should have said it like twice.
You should have said it every single time and then apologize to get there.
I know you're at home and you're watching.
And I've said this eight times already, but I'll say it again because she is the sitting vice president.
They aren't doing the things she promises you that she's going to do that are going to make your life better.
What is she waiting for?
You can't trust her.
That would have worked.
But he didn't do it.
He never said that, that you can't trust her.
She changes her positions all the time.
She makes all these promises, but she doesn't do them while she's in office.
His best answer was his closing statement, where he did make these points over and over.
Here's a highlight.
Just started by saying she's going to do this.
She's going to do that.
She's going to do all these wonderful things.
Why hasn't she done it?
She's been there for three and a half years.
They've had three and a half years to fix the border.
They've had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about.
Why hasn't she done it?
She should leave right now, go down to that beautiful White House, go to the Capitol, get everyone together and do the things you want to do, but you haven't done it and you won't do it because you believe in things that the American people don't believe in.
We can't sacrifice our country for the sake of bad vision.
But I just ask one simple question.
Why didn't she do it?
Primacy and recency.
That's what viewers remember.
And here was the CBS focus group of, I believe it was Pennsylvania Undecided's reacting after the debate.
Listen to what came up.
She just basically repeated everything that Biden has said in the past.
What were your thoughts?
She made, Donald Trump made a strong closing statement by saying, why didn't they do all the things that she's proposing during the three and a half years that they've been in office?
And Biden did this entire moderate stance back in 2020.
And she's trying to do it again in 2024, but she didn't talk about her policy changes between 2020 and 2024.
Her whole centrist moderate stance is just a facade.
Those reminders.
It reminds me a little bit of the post-DNC glow when everybody in the building was just talking about all the joy.
Don't you feel the joy?
You're being joyed on all over your place.
And there was tangible joy or at least a euphoric sense of relief in the audience because they didn't have to pretend that Joe Biden was fit to be president or at least like a good candidate.
They had some nice speeches from the Obamas and Oprah Winfrey and stuff.
So people were in a good mood.
They had a really great DJ, legitimately, playing Alabama.
So there was joy in the building, but they tried to incept the joy as if all of America was feeling it.
And no, all of America isn't the people who can get through 75 security checkpoints and into the United Center for a few days.
Americans are people who haven't heard from this vice president, right?
We know who Trump is.
Americans know who Trump is.
There's not going to be a lot of new information unless he somehow changes in a certain way.
And there's an argument that maybe he's changed a little bit.
But they don't really know Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate and aspirant.
And as the guy said in the Pennsylvania focus room, we haven't got good explanations at all about how she's changed her mind and how this then impacts what she's going to be like.
So that, yes, is the job of a moderator, but it also gives us a sense that maybe there's a cap on, even right now, on a debate that it seems pretty clear that she won.
I think most people who watch it will say she won.
But the question is, how much of an impact is that going to have on people when you have, on one hand, a lot of those who don't have that natural sense of democratic joy are going to look at the way that this was moderated and presented and feel like this is just continuing the sneering that I'm reacting against.
This is the thing that attracts me to begin with.
Even if we don't like him and think City Color is too much outside the lines or don't like this policy or that, part of the Trump coalition and the modern day Republican coalition is a revulsion at kind of elite discourse of journalism, of whatever the elites think that they're trying to do.
You're going to put more people in that position.
So the DNC bumped, there really wasn't one.
And within a week or two, it kind of dissipated.
I think that she will get a measurable bump, but I think that there's a ceiling on that precisely because of that response and also just because it has been a 50-50 race all along.
It's not going to become 80-20.
That's what's interesting.
So she won, but what did she win?
Did she actually persuade anybody?
Or are there millions of people sitting at home like that guy saying, I did not hear her explain why she flipped on fracking and I know she flipped on fracking.
I did not hear her explain the private health insurance or the guns.
She just denied it, but I've seen the sound bites.
And here was another person.
This is a CNN focus group who got a similar message, who had a similar takeaway.
Like, okay, for all the dazzling, like rhetorical, oh, you know, you didn't do this and you're terrible and everyone hates you.
This was his takeaway.
I think it's a hymn.
Watch.
It's important to remember that we are voting for the leader of our country and not who we like the most or who we want in our wedding party, but who is actually going to make our country better.
And we're in an incredibly unique situation where we've had both of the candidates in office before and we've gotten to see what they do.
And when facts come to facts, my life was better when Trump was in office.
The economy was higher.
Inflation was lower.
Things were better overall.
And now with Kamala's administration, things haven't been so fantastic.
And she's saying she can fix the problems that her administration has caused, but I just don't know if I can afford to take that risk.
Were you leaning towards the former president coming in tonight?
Probably.
And did you reform in 2016 or 2020?
I did.
Interesting.
This is the thing that frustrates me.
As, you know, I heard some people talking about this last night, Republicans.
I think Ben Shapiro was talking about it.
I think he's a pretty good weather van for Republicans in some senses.
Is that you hear the anger from people?
And I know, Megan, you said you had some sympathy for him.
You hear the anger at Donald Trump for not seizing on these opportunities.
Those were two articulate answers from two different panels on CNN, and I guess the other one was false.
But these people who make good points, and I've heard it before when I'm out in the field talking to people too.
And if you're a Republican, you have to say, you know, on the immigration issue, why are you talking about cats?
Why are you not talking about the border in a more substantial way?
You get to it at some point.
Right?
Well, yeah, you get to it at some point.
You get to the end.
And people did remember that, but they're there at CNN tasked with watching the whole debate.
Is everybody getting through?
I was getting exhausted by minute 85.
And then he leaves the good stuff for the end.
And I'm thinking of that if I'm in this situation and the moderators are being this way, you could have so many of those people in those focus groups talking about the good line, not a canned line, but a natural line in the way of like Reagan's, which I think was probably a canned line.
There you go again, you know, going after the moderators, like, you know, look at, look at what these people are doing.
These are, this is your media.
These are the people that are telling you things about me, right?
Do you trust these people?
Something like that.
But when you talk about the crime stats, all you have to do is beseech the audience to listen to and say, what's the nearest city to you?
Do you feel that that city's safe?
Do you feel like things are better?
Do you feel like your groceries are less expensive than they were under my administration?
Just make it into a CVS lately.
What was your experience?
Everything's locked up.
You can't, I mean, I literally, this is actually true.
The other night I was in the city, I was trying to get painkillers and I was like, fuck it.
I'll screw it.
I'll deal with it because I had to find someone to unlock it.
And it's like, no, this is an annoyance in my life that actually kind of matters to me because writ large, it's a big thing.
But Donald Trump has absolutely zero discipline.
He's so obsessed with personal grievances.
As I said, the people say, oh, it's genius that he mentioned the crowd size.
No, it's not genius.
I know that.
Everybody knows that.
If you put that.
But I will say, Moynihan, if you look back at like I did at the transcript, he brings up the economy a lot to his credit and he did bring up immigration a lot.
He did manage to weave both of those things into his messaging throughout.
It was just so much shit being thrown at him.
It got lost.
Here is another.
This is David Challion over on CNN talking about a focus group on the economy.
And watch this.
Who better understands problems facing people like you?
Before the debate, 39% said that about Harris, 43% Trump.
And look at how that flips for Harris.
After the debate, 43% of the debate watchers say that she understands problems facing people like them.
40% say that about Trump.
Look at the economy here.
Who would better handle the economy is what we asked.
Going into the debate before the debate, 37% said Harris, 53% Trump.
After the debate, again, margin of error stuff here, but numerically, she lost a little ground.
35% said so after the debate that she would better handle the economy.
55% said Trump.
That's the risk in not in just dodging and weaving if you're her on these answers.
Like she threw out the same nonsense about how she's going to, I don't know, give people $25,000 loans and she's going to help small businesses.
People don't buy it.
They don't trust her to handle the economy.
They know Trump can do it.
And I think his last message about were you better off four years ago?
Why hasn't she done anything in these past three and a half, you know, may have resonated with some people notwithstanding all the stuff we're talking about.
All right.
I want to pick up on something else.
Moynihan, you said 20 minutes ago you thought she won on style.
I know why you said that.
I know why you said that because she was disciplined.
She was, she did not run after the litter snaps like Strudwick and Trump.
But I want to ask your opinion as three guys, because my impression was men are not going to respond well to this.
Left-wing men, yes, but like normies, you know, who are not that you're not normal if you're left-wing.
I mean, leftist.
I'm neither left-wing nor normal.
I'm a special guest.
That's true.
I might need a different focus group.
But I do love champion after women, so continue.
You tell me whether this is going to fly, this kind of behavior with men, male voters, because that's she's doing poorly with them.
Trump's got like a 13 to 15 point margin over her with male voters.
She's got like a 10 point margin over him with female voters.
You can do the math.
She needs to get those numbers up and he needs to keep those numbers high on his side.
And they tend to vote in equal proportions in these elections.
So it's right now you'd say he's got a bit of an edge.
And that may be reflected in some of the polls.
In any event, I'm watching her behavior last night.
I'm thinking, we haven't had a female president in 250 in 250 years.
And sadly, there's all sorts of reasons for that.
But are American men going to make this woman the first one with her harumphing and her facial expressions and her tisk tisking?
And here are some examples of some of that.
Let's play a little bit of this video.
Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people.
So let's be clear about that.
And clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.
During the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter.
And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.
World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.
I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you're a disgrace.
It is very well known that Donald Trump is weak and wrong on national security and foreign policy over the course of his career.
Attempted to use race to divide the American people.
These dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they're so clear.
They can manipulate you with flattery and favors.
All right.
So that was her nasty personal insults.
Here are the faces on top of that.
Okay, well, there goes the chin on the chin.
What?
What?
Oh, it's a cackle.
Oh, I'm confused.
You confuse me, orange man.
Oh, there he goes again, head shaking.
It's not true.
It's not true.
By the way, I think that was on the accusation she bailed out BLM rioters, which she did.
Oh, no, no.
What?
Look at her.
Furrowed brow.
He confuses me.
Oh, why am I having to stand up here?
Haughty, chin up.
Why have they subjected?
My feeling is American men are not going to respond well to any of that.
Does anyone want to take that one?
Who's going to be the representative of the American man here?
I don't know, but I text you guys because my wife was watching.
She's on the West Coast, so it was a little earlier.
She was watching with my two and a half-year-old son, and he caught a little bit of the footage to side by side.
And he said, I don't like him.
He's rude.
I like him.
So congratulations.
I'm having a communist half-year-old.
Little James.
Yeah.
That's what it is.
He can't vote either.
So it doesn't matter.
Well, if we're doing that, I'll tell you that my 13-year-old said, why do the moderators only fact-check her or him, him?
Why do the moderators only fact-check him?
Yep, you got it.
My Half-Year-Old Is Communist 00:10:45
All right.
So what's happening here?
Are you guys having too much soy?
Do you not understand how I see it?
What did you say?
What was that?
She said, you are drinking too much soy.
I'm having too much soy.
Yeah, yeah.
I was going to take this opportunity to come out on this broadcast, but apparently not too.
A big audience, but everyone should know.
No, I don't see it.
Look, there are the ones with the hand on the chin I noticed at the time and I said, this is a bad look.
And I saw that Frank Luntz, who I've done a couple of focus groups with, actually, was all over that.
And then people were all over him.
He said, you know, men are not going to respond to this.
And I don't know because I, you know, the split-screen stuff, I don't think she performed well.
I just think that's kind of naturally.
It didn't affect me in any way.
But again, I don't think that anything is moving anybody in this debate is that what you typically have after these debates is about a one or two point shift.
And then one of those points usually contracts, sometimes both of them.
And I just don't think anyone's being moved by this at all.
And especially.
Yes, you may be right on the end of the sites, but some people felt very moved by her performance, like Michael Steele, former head of the RNC.
Listen to SOT 36.
Yes.
She spanked that ass.
She prosecuted.
Oh, she needs to prosecute.
And all other times she was presidential.
And he looked small.
He looked withered.
He looked beaten.
But most importantly, he looked pissed.
And there's nothing worse than a pissed bigot on the stage with a woman he can't control.
Did you hear how it started?
Did you hear the top of that soundbite?
Can we replay it just so that you sneak up and watch?
She spanked that ass.
She prosecuted.
Yeah, that was it.
When she prosecuted.
I didn't make that to a race.
That's enough.
Spanked that ass.
He practiced that.
He had that one planned.
Good lord.
I don't like Camille's.
I don't know why.
Yeah, the bad.
Did she spank his ass?
I don't know if she spanked his ass, but the old saw from Michael's Taylor, there's nothing worse than a pissed bigot on stage who hates a lady.
I'm like, does that an old saying where he comes from or something?
I would agree with the assessment that she won.
I think yesterday I ended up with like maybe a C minus D situation in terms of her grade.
Maybe I ended at a C.
But it's by default.
I think the actual issue here is that Donald Trump really lost the debate given the circumstances.
And ABC News, I think, as we've said already, shamed themselves in the debate and Kamala survived.
She wasn't a total disaster.
Did she answer the questions straightforwardly?
No, she didn't.
She did the strategery you would expect her to do here.
There was one piece in that sequence of socks that I wanted to call out, though, the thing about race, that Donald Trump is constantly trying to divide us with respect to race.
This is the equity administration we're talking about.
The very first thing for office was pass all of these pieces of all these executive orders were instituted.
And she's still focused on trying to do minority set-asides.
They never stop talking about race.
Absolutely never.
Was it smart for Donald Trump to talk about whether or not she identifies as black or Indian?
Probably not.
Does she try to capitalize on race all of the time?
Yes, absolutely.
She is the vice president of the United States in large part because of the shape and shade of her genitalia.
That is who Democrats have been for the last couple of years, and they've shown no signs of stopping.
But it is interesting that the only question about race yesterday was not about white supremacy.
It wasn't about systemic racism or any of the problems we need to fix in this country.
It was about a completely stupid, rather innocuous, in my estimation, question that we've blown out of proportion that Donald Trump asked at this weird journalist of color event that he participated in.
I think that is an interesting indication of just like how crazy we went in 2020 and just how unserious people are about these issues, like the reparations bill that failed in California.
These people were never serious about those issues.
They're not serious about them now, but we know who the people are who are actually engaged in this kind of dividing people with respect to race.
And it's never been obvious to me that Donald Trump is that person.
It's absurd.
Is anyone else still stuck on shape and shade of her genitalia?
Every time he says it, I have to go for a walk because I have a very imaginative brain.
And then I'm like, oh my God, why am I thinking about this?
Disgusting.
I want it to be visceral.
Yes.
Yeah, they were visceral.
It is a gross way to do business.
We can't assess candidate quality that way.
That's what Joe Biden did.
But that's not the same thing.
The overall point is a good one.
Here's what she is.
She's the shape.
I don't know if we're obsessed.
Some of these things I won't say on the show right now.
I don't know.
I don't think that's exactly what we're obsessed with.
Okay.
But here is what she said.
To your point, she said, this was on the subject of his when did she become black thing.
It's a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people.
The gall, Camille.
You know, I do believe that the vast majority of us know we have so much more in common than what separates us.
And we don't want this kind of approach that is just constantly trying to divide us, especially by race.
It's incredible that she had the nerve to say that, given what, I mean, we have like segregated dorms and graduations and in some instances, lunchrooms in schools and academic exercises where the blacks are on the one side now and the whites are on the other side.
In some instances, calling each other names as some sort of thought exercise, all because of these bizarre DEI practices that she loves of being woke, which she says we should get more of.
And this was one of those frustrating situations where you want Trump to then respond and shove it down her throat, but he doesn't exactly.
All he does is try to rehabilitate himself on this Central Park 5 and saying she had to go back 50 years and they're destroying our economy.
But it's like, come on.
He knows the answers to these questions.
I wanted to touch on your montage of her allegedly sort of male alienating facial expressions, which I didn't feel.
So I guess I'm drinking the soy milkshake as well.
You are true.
With the exception of the hand one, that was a bit much.
But let's remember what we expected going into this debate, or at least what was a big topic, was like, oh, the mics are not going to be on.
And there's big negotiation over that because everyone assumed that she wanted to do the I'm talking to her thing.
Well, she did.
Yeah, she did.
Right.
But who said it at this debate?
It was Trump.
And then we had a big, big argument about this last night.
Camille thought that.
Wait, let me play it and then you tell me about the argument.
Let me show him.
Here it is, SAC 29.
She was big on defund the police.
In Minnesota, she went out.
Wait a minute.
I'm talking now.
If you don't mind, please.
Does that sound familiar?
So every time that she has done this or other people have done that in that place, I think Hillary Clinton might have done that before.
I forget now.
I've wiped my brain clear of Hillary Clinton, thank God.
But it was terrible.
It was terrible when she did that before, right?
And that she was planning to do this.
Or if she was going to do that this time, it would have been terrible now.
She didn't do it.
Maybe she wanted to, probably wanted to, but he did.
And it was terrible when he did it too.
And not even as a callback or a joke.
It's just a bitchy little thing to do.
No, it worked for me.
It worked for me.
I laughed.
I thought it was funny.
And he was doing it for effect.
He wasn't doing it because he was seriously concerned about being able to get a word in Edge.
The way she did it, it was severe.
I'm speaking.
She did it five or six times in one night.
Totally true.
He did it once.
He made it explicitly a callback.
And then he did it again later.
But in that way, he did it in a slightly more subtle way.
I thought it was, it worked.
It was one of his better moments.
It was part of what I think one of his mistakes was that yesterday he was the chief debater of online, of two online gals.
That's like he's just going to debate everything that people have been memeing about.
And this is when her facial expressions are actually the correct one, which is the kind of, what are you doing?
Right.
Like it's the right.
And I think that that speaks to something that is attractive for her.
It's a selling point, probably the selling point for her, which is that aren't we tired of this?
And aren't we tired of this guy being weird talking about that they're going to come after your dogs and cats?
What the hell is he talking about?
Seriously.
I think that Megan makes the point that I agree too about the transcript and reading the transcript.
And that's a failure on his part, you know, because I mean, we talk about grading on style is that so much of this stuff, particularly in debates, is style.
It's not style when you're writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times.
It's very specific.
The stylistic thing here in, you know, whether it's the dogs or the Central Park V is that Megan says, you know, I read this and I got a lot out of it.
It's like, well, what was masking that during the debate was all the other bluster and all the other, like, you know, debating these weird things and pulling you off into these little, even a debate needs a narrative.
It needs a beginning, it needs a middle and an end, a callback at the end to the beginning, right?
There's no narrative here.
It seems scattershot.
And that's why I say on her, stylistically, not, you know, on substance, I have literally probably know less about what she believes now than I went in, but she kind of tried to stick to that.
And at the end, when you have that moment that Donald Trump looks at the camera, it does not surprise me that people in a focus group reference it because it was a strong ending.
It was a very straightforward thing.
The are you better off type language and why didn't you do it?
Those two things can twin and they can make a good argument.
But, you know, falling into these traps is the easiest thing.
And it just shows that he might have good political instincts written large, but he has them horribly on the debates today.
Kamala Harris Abortion Defense 00:03:12
Could you imagine if he had just turned to either of the moderators last night and said, Am I debating you or am I debating her?
Exactly.
Like, what is going on?
I know Trump attacking the media works.
It's gold, but no.
I wanted to raise this moment.
It was kind of interesting.
Kamala got very high marks for her answer on abortion and playing up like the horrible dangers of women who are now in states where there are new very restrictive abortion laws and the horror of them having to get on a plane next to strangers to go get that so-called care out of state.
And she had a line in there, which got a big reaction from a nurse who was on two-way with Mark Halperin this morning.
Here's what Kamala said first.
Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the healthcare providers are afraid they might go to jail and she's bleeding out in a car in the parking lot.
She didn't want that.
Her husband didn't want that.
Watch this, the reaction.
I'm an emergency room nurse, and there is no circumstance where we would ever let a woman sit in her car and bleed out, regardless of the abortion law.
Like we would bring her in if abortion was like illegal, right?
No circumstances.
We would bring her in and give her emergency relief blood.
We would give her fluids.
And the fact that she so blatantly gave such disgusting medical misinformation, like just turned me off to her.
I really think that's interesting because she did this a lot, these sweeping draconian claims about Trump and especially on abortion, the rhetoric that she had.
Meanwhile, his suggestion that there are states in the union where they would let a baby born alive die, he said, he made the point, used the term, you could say kill.
He was making the point it's not an act of murder, but that they would let a baby attempted to be aborted that nonetheless lived and was delivered die on the table.
That's true.
That gets fact checked.
That's extreme.
He's where, but these claims of hers, right?
Like medical personnel all over America, now they're just letting women bleed out in the parking lots.
Good for this woman for getting on there and saying that's just bullshit and a total turnoff.
She's an undecided voter.
What do you make of that?
And it's also, Camille, you were looking at her policy claims about Trump, too.
Like there's going to be a minder.
Can you rehearse those since you had those in the middle?
Yeah, well, she was referring to Project 2025.
And the first thing she insisted is that if Donald Trump is elected, he is going to pass federal ban on abortion, which he's not said he would do, and that there would be a minder who is monitoring whether or not you've had miscarriages or something like that.
And again, this is a recommendation from Project 2025.
There's been no indication that Donald Trump would do any of this.
And at the end of her saying all of this, the moderator says, thank you, Vice President Harris.
And that's when Donald Trump has to interject and he says, none of that is true.
She's doing it again.
Those are false statements.
Project 2025 False Claims 00:05:54
And again, it is unfair when you're in a circumstance where the moderators are not willing to fact check your opponent.
They're not willing to push back.
They're requiring you to do all of this work.
And then when you have things to say, they're pushing back on you.
It is unfair.
And then back to that cherry on top of the Sunday, Daniel Dale, the fact-checker at CNN saying Trump lied 33 times and Kamala Harris lied once.
Yeah.
Maybe.
At least.
Maybe.
At least.
That's the nerve.
You can't figure out a second.
I mean, we have to laugh, but like the state of media is dire.
That's what ABC did, how CNN reacted.
I don't know what the future looks like.
I do know it's end times and for very good reason.
I think the future is rosy in one sense, is the fact that if you look at the way the campaign has dealt with race issues and the DEI type stuff and all the stuff that overwhelmed them in 2020, they've walked away from it.
Why?
Because they have to win an election and they've understood something in the aftermath of 2020.
People don't like it.
And guess what?
It's not just whiteys that don't like it.
Hispanic people don't like it.
Black men have been migrating towards Trump, not in enormous numbers, but enough that they're significant.
You can say, wow, some polls, 20%, et cetera.
That stuff does not work.
The media is very behind on this and they're very behind on their own power too.
We're, you know, you talk about Mark Halperin's show this morning on Tuay, which you can see over Matt's shoulder.
We're going to be on Mark Halperin's Tu-Way show at 4 o'clock.
And Mark Halperin is doing an end run around the media like all of us are.
And after a while, people really, really are alienated by this stuff.
I think that watching the debate moderation last night would have been a different instinct maybe 20 years ago, maybe 15 years ago.
People are really fed up with it.
And I don't say that just because of what I think about things or our show or whatever it is.
I see it and we see it in the numbers.
We see it in the numbers of people who are coming to our show and coming to other people's shows, coming to Megan Kelly.
Megan Kelly doesn't need to be on Fox News.
Glenn Beck doesn't need to be on Fox News.
Tucker Carlson doesn't need to be on Fox News.
That is an interesting shift for everyone, right?
And for them to say we can keep doing this forever is a delusion.
It's a huge mistake on their part.
I mean, we've seen for years now, decades actually, that trust in media has been plummeting, plummeting across the board.
There's very good reason why platforms like this are successful and are able to thrive.
And ABC, CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, to the extent it spells doom, to the extent the apocalypse is on the horizon, it is definitely, it's with respect to them and their prospects for the future and their viability.
And also that thing we forget about is that that also means that their power, their influence to their ability to fund the scale, even last night, is diminished.
I think a lot of people who are critical of the media make the mistake of thinking that the media is as powerful as it was 10, 15, 20 years ago.
It just really is not.
It is not.
There isn't a single media institution, legacy media institution in my quick snap knowledge that has more power than they did 20 years ago.
And that is fascinating and interesting.
It creates its problems.
It creates mostly great opportunities.
And I think for consumers, it's mostly terrific.
I mean, I just, I love and agree with everything you guys just said, but I still think they play an important role.
Like a night like that, where they had the probably the only presidential debate in hand, and they were so biased.
They're influencing a presidential election.
It feels almost like cheating to me.
It just felt, I realize we've gotten away from the presidential debate commissions and I get why.
And those were not perfect.
We've gone over Chris Wallace's bias in handling that.
And there have been plenty of fall downs in those moments too, Candy Crowley.
But this system isn't working because it's too important to allow a network like that with an agenda to have the sole control over the sole debate.
And I realize, you know, now we should say Trump shouldn't have agreed to it.
I realize why he did agree to it.
He thought he was agreeing to a pair of them and the CNN one worked out and he wanted to say, okay, I'm putting myself out there.
Even last night, Trump went into the spin room.
Did she?
No, she's hiding from the media.
We don't get to interview her.
We have no access to her.
She doesn't hold press conferences.
She gave one interview to a fawning Dana Bash who fell down on the job.
And now this is the one debate and they tanked it.
They tanked it for her.
She's probably not going to do another one and she might not do another interview at all, you guys.
This is like really serious.
Right now, while they're failing and they're falling, they're still in control of a lot of forums that matter.
And it's just very disheartening to watch how low they've gone.
I just can't believe that back in the day, the ruinarlages of the world would have allowed something like this.
And yet there it is.
Well, let's not forget also that there was a pretty good debate last time and also consequential.
Jake Tapper in particular, and I think Dana Bash was the other one.
They did a good job of that.
Jake Tapper must be the magic sauce because when put on her own, Dana Bash fell down in that interview.
She needs a half a thing of Jake Tapper.
I hope that Kamala Harris flush in victory as she did last night, which said, okay, we want another one.
Jake Tapper Debate Review 00:01:17
Let's do that.
Let's have some.
Because it looks like increasingly, to your point, Megan, that after this, especially if they think that they have a lead and a bump coming out of this, is she going to do more interviews?
No, but I would imagine that she's going to do fewer.
So let's get somebody scheduled.
I think it would be wise for Trump to either pick actual independent people or an adversarial process or even go into Fox News.
Maybe she's feeling cocky.
We need more because we are not seeing enough actual examination of her as a candidate right now.
If he agrees to go on CBS or NBC, he deserves what he gets.
And sadly, he'll bring the rest of us down with him.
All right.
In the last 20 seconds, why is it when you come on the MK show, you don't put my logo in the background, but when you go on Tua, you put their logo.
MTF.
Yeah.
They were going to put like Nicorette commercials.
We said no to that.
But we're getting a little money for this.
So come on.
I want to see you guys as a great home.
I'll take you.
Yeah, right.
Get you.
Back tomorrow.
See you all then.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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