It took a comment on abortion for the moderators of the ABC News debate to drop any semblance of impartiality and join the discussion on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Former President Donald Trump, who referenced comments by former Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, noted that the Democratic Party’s line on abortion is extreme and allows for abortion up to and after birth.
His comment was factual, as a handful of states, including Minnesota, the home state of Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), do not require babies that are born after botched abortions to be given life-saving care.
That didn’t stop ABC News moderator Linsey Davis from butting in and declaring, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill the baby after it’s born.”
From there, it only got worse. Davis’s co-moderator, David Muir, got into an exchange with Trump over disputed anecdotal reports that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating local pets.
Beyond the out-of-place fact-checking, Muir and Davis used their platform to repeatedly ask Trump biased questions that may as well have been written by the Harris campaign. At the same time, the self-appointed fact-checkers refused to apply the same scrutiny to the vice president, effectively turning the debate into a three-on-one partisan hit job.
Whether it was questions about Trump’s comments on Harris’s race, Jan. 6 and the 2020 election, or climate change, Muir and Davis repeatedly sought to frame the debate through a partisan lens.
It was a far cry from the CNN debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, where moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash simply did their job and did not seek to inject themselves into it. Trump would be well within his rights to refuse another debate without a moderator that he is confident will be fair.
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