FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2024
...a problem like Candidate Trump: Should David Muir have said what he said about the last election?
We refer to some of the things Muir said during last Tuesday's presidential debate. Along with a colleague from ABC News, Muir served as moderator of the debate between Candidates Harris and Trump.
It's likely to be the only debate the candidates have. Midway through the forum, Muir introduced a new topic:
MUIR (9/10/24): I do want to focus on this next issue to both of you. Because it really brings us, this into focus: Truth in these times that we're living in.
Truth in these times that we're living in—Muir hoped to focus on that! Across the nation, observers dreamed a little, and felt the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe, much as Stevens once said.
To wit:
"What is truth," Pontius Pilate is said to have said.
It's often said that Pilate's remark was made sarcastically, perhaps in jest. Now, Muir introduced the same topic.
The next day, the New York Post criticized Muir and Linsey Nelson for fact-checking Trump five times. This complaint about the five checks would quickly become mandated fare on the Fox News Channel.
According to the Post's report, one of the five fact-checks occurred in the ensuing discussion—in the discussion about "truth in our times." A hint of the problem appeared right away as Muir turned to Trump with his question:
MUIR (continuing directly): Mr. President, for 3 and a half years after you lost the 2020 election. you repeatedly falsely claimed that you won, many times saying you won in a landslide. In the past couple of weeks leading up to this debate, you have said, quote, you lost by a whisker, that you, quote, didn't quite make it, that you came up a little bit short.
TRUMP: I said that?
MUIR: Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?
There's nothing obviously wrong with Muir's eventual question. But along the way, the moderator said that the candidate had repeatedly made a false claim.
Should the moderator have said that?
For ourselves, we wouldn't have approached this important topic that way. At any rate, when the candidate gave his answer, left little doubt about his current stance.
His answer takes us to the heart of the question Muir raised: What the heck is truth in these times? Trump's answer went like this:
TRUMP (continuing directly): No, I don't acknowledge that at all.
MUIR: But you did say that.
TRUMP: I said that sarcastically. You know that. It was said, "Oh we lost by a whisker." That was said sarcastically.
Look, there's so much proof. All you have to do is look at it. And they should have sent it back to the legislatures for approval. I got almost 75 million votes. The most votes any sitting president has ever gotten. I was told if I got 63, which was what I got in 2016, you can't be beaten.
The election, people should never be thinking about an election as fraudulent. We need two things. We need walls. We need—and we have to have it. We have to have borders. And we have to have good elections.
Our elections are bad. And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They can't even speak English. They don't even know what country they're in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that's why they're allowing them to come into our country.
So many possible statements to fact-check! But also, so little time.
For ourselves, we don't doubt the claim that the statements in question had been made sarcastically. Now, though, the exchange continued, as did the moderator's challenges to the hopeful:
MUIR (continuing directly): I did watch all of these pieces of video. I didn't detect the sarcasm—"Lost by a whisker, we didn't quite make it."
And we should just point out, as clarification, and you know this, you and your allies—sixty cases in front of many judges. Many of them—
TRUMP: No judge looked at it.
MUIR: —and said there was no widespread fraud.
TRUMP: They said we didn't have standing. That's the other thing. They said we didn't have standing. A technicality. Can you imagine a system where a person in an election doesn't have standing, the president of the United States doesn't have standing? That's how we lost.
If you look at the facts, and I'd love to have you—you'll do a special on it. I'll show you Georgia and I'll show you Wisconsin and I'll show you Pennsylvania and I'll show you —we have so many facts and statistics.
But you know what? That doesn't matter. Because we have to solve the problem that we have right now. That's old news. And the problem that we have right now is we have a nation in decline and they have put it into decline. We have a nation that is dying, David.
MUIR: Mr. President, thank you. Vice President Harris, you heard the president there tonight.
He said he didn't say that he lost by a whisker. So he still believes he did not lose the election that was won by President Biden and yourself...
As he turned to Candidate Harris, Muir flatly contradicted Trump's claim once again. "The election was won by President Biden and yourself," the moderator flatly said.
Full disclosure! As far as we know, the 2020 election was won by President Biden. We've never seen any serious evidence suggesting anything different.
Also this:
Close to four full years have passed, and Candidate Trump, as far as we know, has never produced anything resembling a serious "white paper" which seeks to justify his endless claim that the election was stolen.
It's a highly inflammatory claim. As we've noted in recent weeks, the candidate has angrily been making this inflammatory claim at his rallies—in the state of Minnesota, in the state of Georgia. This angry claim is a basic part of the candidate's work on the stump.
Stating the obvious, this angry claim lies at the heart of the question of "truth in these times." For our money, our major news orgs have never found a journalistically serious way to address this inflammatory claim.
For our money, Muir didn't accomplish that task at last Tuesday's debate. In fairness to Muir, he had accepted a very challenging assignment when he agreed to moderate this TV debate.
The first of our presidential TV debates took place in 1960. The moderators had a relatively easy assignment at that particular time.
In 1960, the moderators threw their questions at Candidates Kennedy and Nixon. Neither candidate made the types of peculiar claims made by Candidate Trump all through last week's debate.
Politically and journalistically, this is a challenging time! Just consider the things the candidate said in that exchange with Muir about the last election.
For starters, the candidate continued to say that he won that election. (As Muir noted, the candidate has sometimes said that he won it "in a landslide.")
Did Candidate Trump win the last election? Eventually, he seemed to say that he had a profusion of facts and statistics which would establish the truth of his claim.
He said he had a profusion of facts and statistics! Sadly, though, this was the childish statistical argument the candidate presented:
I got almost 75 million votes. The most votes any sitting president has ever gotten. I was told if I got 63, which was what I got in 2016, you can't be beaten.
In fact, the candidate did get "almost 75 million votes" in the last election. Also, that was "the most votes any sitting president has ever gotten."
For example, when President Eisenhower sought election as the sitting president in 1956, he only got 35.6 million votes—and he did win a landslide! Sadly, though—and childishly—the obvious problem is this:
Today, the nation's population is more than double what it was back then. And Candidate Biden got 81.3 million votes in the 2020 election!
Trump did get a lot of votes. But, as every third grader knows, Biden got way, way more!
In the course of the 2020 election, did advisers ever tell President Trump that he couldn't lose if he got 63 million votes?
Everything is possible! But if someone did tell hm some such stupid thing, the person who told him was wrong.
Despite these obvious, bone simple facts, there the aging candidate stood, rattling off this kindergarten level nonsense to a fully intelligent journalist. Of course, he says these things, again and again, at the angry rallies he stages—at the rallies where he angrily says that the last election was stolen.
Dating back to 1960, no moderator has had to deal with embarrassing, childish claims of this type in a presidential debate. No candidate has ever made such claims. No moderator has ever had to decide how he or she should react.
No precedent for moderators like Muir and Nelson exists.
We suggest that you pity the poor moderators at last Tuesday's debate! In the matter of Trump's response to the specific question Muir posed, we also note that the candidate made such remarkable statements as these:
A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They can't even speak English. They don't even know what country they're in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that's why they're allowing them to come into our country.
According to the candidate, some unspecified "they" have been trying to get a lot of illegal immigrants to vote. That's why "they" have been allowing these illegal immigrants to come into our country.
That too is a remarkably serious charge—one which was made without any attempt at justification. What's a moderator supposed to do when such charges are flying around?
We offer this as a way of grasping the size of the challenge confronting Davis and Muir last week. No moderators in TV history have ever been forced to deal with claims like the ones this candidate made all through the course of the debate.
Dating back to 1960, no moderators ever had to decide what to do in the face of wild, unsubstantiated claims like the claims we discussed yesterday:
Do you know that crime in Venezuela and crime in countries all over the world is way down? You know why? Because they've taken their criminals off the street and they've given them to her to put into our country. And this will be one of the greatest mistakes in history for them to allow—and I think they probably did it because they think they're going to get votes. But it's not worth it. Because they're destroying the fabric of our country by what they've done.
There's never been anything done like this at all. They've destroyed the fabric of our country. Millions of people let in. And all over the world, crime is down. All over the world except here. 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.
All over the world, crime is down? All over the world, crime is down because they've taken their criminals off the street and they've given them to [Candidate Harris] to put into our country?
Has any moderator ever been faced with the task of responding to claims of that type? Similarly, has any moderator ever been faced with the task of responding to pre-debunked clownage like this?
What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country—and look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States! And a lot of towns don't want to talk—not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it.
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs! The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating—they're eating the pets of the people that live there! And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame.
...She's destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success. We'll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
The mention of Aurora went unexplained. But in Springfield, they're eating the cats and the dogs! In Springfield, they're eating the pets!
In Springfield, they're eating the pets, this untethered candidate said. Dating back to 1960, no moderator has ever been forced to adjust to such conduct as this. More on Aurora tomorrow!
The very next day, the New York Post swung into action. The journalism was C-minus work at the very best. But as we noted yesterday, the basic assertion was accurate:
Trump was fact-checked by ABC moderators 5 times during debate—while Harris was left alone
Former President Donald Trump was fact-checked at least five times by moderators during his Tuesday presidential debate showdown against Vice President Kamala Harris—while the Democratic nominee was noticeably left alone.
And so on, at length, from there. The overall journalism was poor, but the basic assertion was accurate. The moderators did fact-check the one candidate anywhere from three to five times. And, by way of contrast, they did pretty much leave the other hopeful alone.
Today, we're offering a basic framework—a basic framework which ought to operate in any discussion of these events or of this overall topic. We offer this basic claim:
No candidate has ever made so many wild claims in the course of a televised presidential debate. This constitutes a major part of the new suit of clothes which currently drapes "our democracy," making a joke of our public discourse—which currently challenges the basic workings of our floundering nation.
No previous candidate has ever made such claims. The blizzard of claims this candidate made, and persistently makes, has helped sew a new suit of clothes.
Other individuals and orgs are involved in this wider societal mess. In our opinion, the New York Times has had a very hard time coming to terms with the change in our world which we have described. In our view, the Times still hasn't been able or willing to acknowledge the embarrassing societal problem we've described as a new suit of clothes.
What is truth, Pontius Pilate once said. In what way should major news orgs be addressing our new suit of clothes?
Tomorrow: "Something we were withholding made us weak?"
That's what Robert Frost once said. He recited the poem in question in January 1961, at Candidate Kennedy's inauguration as Candidate Nixon looked on.
"Something we were withholding?" Have major orgs like the New York Times possibly been averting their gaze from the depth of the change in the culture? Has something perhaps been withheld? Has some such failure to function perhaps been making us weak?
