Former President Donald Trump got passionate during a speech delivered on Thursday evening as he took an opportunity to rip into ABC News and its anchor, David Muir, who moderated the first debate he had with Vice President Kamala Harris, for brazenly violating the rules of the agreement the network had reached with his campaign for the event, which was held on Sept. 10. If you watched the debate, you know that Muir inserted himself numerous times into the conversation and essentially debated Trump himself with “fact-checking.” This was not at all the way Harris was treated by the two moderators, the other being anchor Linsey Davis.
While delivering an address at Trump Tower, the former president leveled accusations against the network of working with the Democratic Party nominee and her campaign to create a three-on-one match that left him at a serious disadvantage. Trump claims that he was falsely fact-checked him about a number of statements he made during the debate. One of those being about how crime in our country is on the rise, to which Muir quickly spouted a controversial, but mainstream talking point about how crime is actually going down.
“And during the debate, I mentioned that and David Muir, a real lightweight,” Trump stated while making an appearance on Fox News. “I had one against three, but I think we did great. But David Muir of ABC, fake news, when I said that crime is way up in our country, he corrected me, he corrected me and so much and it was right what I said. He didn’t correct [Vice President Kamala Harris] one time, and what she said was wrong, absolutely wrong. So many different— Charlottesville, she was wrong, all of the different things, almost everything she said, and she was never corrected. But he corrected me on crime. He said, ‘No, no, crime has not gone up.’ I said crime has gone up massively. He said, ‘I’d like to state for the record that crime has not gone up.’”
Contrary to the oft-repeated mantra, other organizations like the National Crime Victimization Survey cite statistics showing urban crime is up. Conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and administered by the Census Bureau, the survey asked 230,000 Americans whether they had been the victim of recent violent crimes. Based on their responses, and excluding simple assault — the least likely violent crime to be charged as a felony — crime in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019. It was instances such as the tussle over crime stats, Trump said, that violated an agreement his campaign believed it had reached with ABC about letting the discussion remain free-flowing without interjections from the moderators. “Now you don’t know this, but we had a deal with ABC that there will be no corrections of any kind, and they violated the deal. Why? Because they’re bad people, and they’re fake news,” Trump said. “So he did it many times to me during the debate. He violated the deal. That’s the deal, because you can take anything and try and make up stories with it. We had a deal where that wouldn’t happen. You could do whatever you wanted as soon as the debate was over, but he did it in total violation of what our agreement was. And a lot of people standing right over there [as he looked toward his staff] will tell you exactly what it was, will show you what it was. David Muir has lost all credibility.”
Davis, as well, drew Trump’s ire. “I never heard of her. I never want to hear of her. She was terrible. I don’t know how she ever got her job in the first place,” Trump said. “But we have a country to save, and we can’t have fake news like that. And his ratings deserve to go down.”
“Fox News tracked that Muir and Davis fact-checked President Trump five times throughout the debate without correcting Harris once. Immediately afterward, Trump called into Fox’s late-night “Gutfield” program to air his grievances. ‘I think my only regret is that I wanted to be elegant, and I didn’t want to go after the anchors. I wish I did, in a way,”’Trump said. ‘I was very unfairly treated by the anchor. I’m not a fan of those guys anymore – and his hair was better five years ago. That happens with the clock,'” the report concluded.
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