The first time the moderators countered his obvious dog-whistle lies I was absolutely blown away. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Then I started laughing and didn’t stop.
The correction was really well done and completely natural by both moderators, I almost didn’t register what happened. Love to see it.
Donald’s whimpering rebuttal of “but but I saw it on TV” objectively did the most damage to his image of everything I have seen to date.
Especially from the guy who made the phrase “Fake news” famous.
He’s definitely sundowning.
It still blows me away that he managed to take over the term “fake news”.
It was introduced as a way to explain how social media was leading gullible people into MAGA, but he turned it into a term for persecution of MAGA by conventional media.
It was actually an incredible move. I can’t think of anything he’s spun that well since 2016.
My favorite moment from the whole thing was when Harris offhandedly mentioned that his rallies were bad, and he spent a full minute of his rebuttal time insisting that his rallies were awesome, then started arguing with the moderators when they fact checked him. You could see that that, above everything else that went on, rankled him. It really highlighted the narcissism.
The highlight for me for the whole debate was not Trump’s pet-eating outburst but the perfect setup and execution Harris did to bait him into that unhinged rant instead of talking about immigration.
She “invites” people to go to Trump rallies. She follows up the point about people leaving rallies early with a note along the lines of: you’re about to watch Trump not talk about you. Sure enough, he fell into the trap, and Trump talked about what he cared about most at that moment.
I was watching it through Dylan Burns stream on it and he said trump sounded like an angry five year old.
Edit: said not sayed, fucken Redneck accent fucken up my spelling.
Too bad they let him continue to lie about the thing they just fact checked, let him talk beyond his allotted time, reapond when it wasn’t his turn, and shut down Harris the one time she tried to respond out of turn.
The moderators crossed an extremely low bar on fact checking last night, but did everything else the same way they always have.
All his talking didn’t help him at all. I don’t think the Harris side cared about him self-destroying his image and giving lots for the talk shows later to make fun of.
It gives him a platform. End of story. Every single minute he talks it allows for normalization.
It’s complicated, since the Harris campaign wanted him to have more opportunities to ramble, interrupt and get mad. They were very much counting on him being himself and comparing that to someone who can speak in coherent sentences without getting mad.
A well executed Batman Gambit in real life.
My thoughts as well. Trump did himself no favours with undecideds and independents with his inane rambling rants. For the most part, Harris just seemed content to use her time to press him and let him make a fool out of himself, with only a couple of instances popping up when she seemed to want to interject but couldn’t.
He shut her down twice. The one time was really over the line. But I loved the moderator saying there is no place in the USA that executing babies is legal. Wtf, 9 month abortions? Lol
My mom fully believes this shit for some reason. She believes mothers carry to 9 months and just abort out of inconvenience, and that doctors don’t work to keep the fetus alive out of the womb if possible. She shares pictures with descriptions of the procedures with zero sources beyond Christian crisis pregnancy centers. Or just Christians.
And she wonders why I started exhibiting signs of PTSD before I was even six.
I support it. They have a job to let viewers know that the radical information is not true, and they should not take it as valid information to get worked up over.
It’s the difference between Trump sounding like a maniac vs exposing a controversy. They don’t need to stop him from sounding like a maniac. They just need to clarify that he is, in fact, a maniac.
That really showed what a shitbag outfit CNN has become under it’s new conservative ownership group. They are a wolf in sheep’s clothing now.
“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” he said. Then he suggested a model: “Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.”
Malone’s comments didn’t resonate much beyond a couple of places: At Fox News, which responded with glee, and inside CNN, where they sounded alarm bells.
—New board member and billionaire John Malone, a legend in the cable TV business and one who has deep and longstanding ties with David Zaslav
I would like to see any organization actually have journalists or actually do journalism. But my definition of journalism is different from this sociopath’s, like I take telling the truth as an assumption.
There are only a handful of journalists left. Two that come to mind are Pam and Russ Martens of WSOP (Wall Street On Parade) who have been speaking truth to power for decades but remain obfuscated like other journalists with integrity.
Obviously these are financial journalists and we need many like them and their courage in the political and world news spheres.
They are out there, but they are the very few.
They barely even fact checked him in the first place. They called him on a total of, what, three things? As opposed to the probably dozens of other complete untruths he uttered, not even just about policy and so forth but actual empirically verifiable elements of reality?
Here’s just what I spotted:
- Lied about not being involved with Project 2025 and not knowing what it is. We know he is acutely aware of what it is, and in fact some members of his staff were involved in its framing.
- Lied about the number of immigrants coming into the country.
- Further lied stating that other countries were “sending all their criminals and mental patients.”
- Claimed people were “aborting” babies after birth (called out by moderators).
- Claimed Harris said she would ban fracking in Pennsylvania (called out by Harris).
- Lied about crime rates going “through the roof” (called out by moderators).
- Responded to this by claiming FBI crime stats were falsified by “leaving out problem cities.”
- Lied about migrants eating people’s pets (called out by moderators).
- Lied about inflation numbers post-pandemic.
- Lied claiming that “Biden” built the Nordstream pipeline.
- Distorted the truth by claiming he won more votes than any sitting president in the last election, failing to mention that Biden still got more.
There were probably others.
He also essentially admitted that his plan for the war in Ukraine was to just let Russia win. That should be pretty damn worrisome for anyone.
I wish they had pushed him harder on the simple yes or no questions.
Also, Harris missed a perfect opportunity to point out that Trump has been the only president that has advocated a gun ban. “take the guns and figure out due process later”
The yes/no about “should Ukraine win the war” he wouldn’t answer anything except that he would end the war. He would just give up Ukraine to Russia to end it, though, and he didn’t want to say that on TV.
You can’t force him to change his answer. Y’all think you could fact check trump better live.
No, I meant when he was asked a yes or no question directly, multiple times, he never gave an actual answer.
I’m sure he was completely truthful when he said he didn’t read Project 2025. It would be very surprising if he read anything besides Mein Kampf.
The only way he actually read Mein Kampf is if it came in picture book format
“Everyone says it, you know Trump really is a genius, they say it. I’ve read all the best books: the Hungry Caterpillar, Green Eggs and Ham, Goodnight Moon. I’m the biggest read person in the country. They say this. The Giving Tree. I hated that book, communist propaganda! Kambala probably wrote it.”
That’s true on a technicality, but everyone knows what he meant. In the 2020 election, Biden got ~7 million more votes than Trump in addition to winning the electoral college. Trump’s intent was to be intentionally misleading and to twist the qualifications to imply that he should have won last time when, in fact, he didn’t.
It’s a sobering detail of our situation. In 2020, Trump really did receive more votes than any candidate in any previous election. That means a ton of people showed up to vote for him in 2020 that hadn’t in 2016.
He frames it weird (and it sounded weird when he said it) because otherwise it raises the obvious point that Biden also achieved that same record, plus an extra 7 million votes.
I learned that what he does actually has a special name. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.
If you don’t want to be fact checked, maybe don’t repeatedly insist that Florida’s abortion ballot measure will legalize killing newborns.
No mic should ever be placed near this man again.
Conservatives are mad that “they only fact checked Trump”, and yeah, there’s some truth to that…
But they let him tell so many little lies unchallenged. They only fact checked him on the egregious stuff like “Haitians eat pets” and “post-birth abortions”.
Harris may have said some half-truths or omitted context for a few things, but she never told a single non-truth comparable to the things Trump got fact checked for.
The worst actual post-debate criticism I’ve heard for Harris was that she continues to say that Trump will enact Project 2025 and a federal abortion ban as president, despite his statements denying support for these things. The thing is, Trump is a huge fucking liar, and a Republican, so yeah, she’s right to keep saying what he will absolutely do as president, despite his lies to the contrary.
Harris may have said some half-truths or omitted context for a few things, but she never told a single non-truth comparable to the things Trump got fact checked for.
The problem with Harris is that she’s a professional politician who knows how to skirt the line. So you can challenge her on a point and she can clarify it in her favor and then PoliticoFactCheck has to do a 500 word article getting to the nut of the issue (and they’ll get called liars for their biased interpretation too).
But “Black people in Ohio are eating all your dogs” is much more straightforward and easier to debunk. Same with “infanticide is legal in California”.
Trump is a huge fucking liar, and a Republican
He’s ForwardsFromGrandma tier racist. Even as lying goes, it comes across as weird and vulgar.
Didn’t he also get like an extra 5-7 minutes of talk time? He would “answer” a question, Kamala would giver her rebuttal, then he would be like “wait a minute I need to respond to that” and they would let him.
Yeah, definitely a double standard on mic control. Any time he opened his mouth they turned his mic on, she tried once and they did a hard pass. Hell, even while they refuted his dog eating claims his mic was on talking over the moderator.
And that’s because all of the media loves Trump. They have a bias, sure, but they know the crazy shit he says sells views/headlines and that’s their business, informing the public is a byproduct.
I did think it was weird that the one time Harris wanted extra time to rebut, they denied her. At the same time, I don’t think Trump really helped himself with all of his extra talking. Never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake, and all that
They did that on purpose. Harris originally suggested open mics but Trump pushed back. I’m guessing she told the moderators not to worry too much about letting him get in an unsanctioned response, knowing that if he’s at the point where he’s barging in and ignoring decorum, he’s likely going to self-immolate on camera.
She wasn’t wrong. She was concise enough to get almost every question answered, and baited Trump into humiliating himself. Some of the most damaging things he said were said during time he wasn’t supposed to be speaking.
It’s the perfect trap. Giving him extra time sabotages him, but he can’t complain that getting extra time to speak was a trap, because, as you suggest, at face value, it was unfair to Harris.
It also potentially saved the debate from an early conclusion. Trump has walked out of interviews and debates in the past when they forced him to stop talking or move on.
They really played him well.
a federal abortion ban as president, despite his statements denying support for these things
They straight up asked him the question, and he refused to answer it. So, she didn’t tell a “half truth” - he literally refused to say he would veto a national ban when directly given the opportunity to do so.
As for project 2025, it’s his playbook. Whether or not he will specifically call it that, doesn’t change the fact it’s how he wants to dismantle the federal government.
the guy fights dirty. fact checking prevents him from wasting his opponent’s time. if an opponent had to counter all of his wacko statements they would never make progress. it would be some one-sided steamroller garbage. I hope they normalize the fact checking thing.
I think evidence points to the fact that while project 2025 may not be authored by Trump, it is probably something that would influence a trump presidency. kamala harris’ statements about it were correct.
A bunch of the stuff he said cant entirely be disproven. Even the eating pets thing wasnt proof, it was the word of a local government official who republicans are likely not to trust.
I don’t know there was more they can besides appeals to authority.
You’re falling for their propaganda.
Republicans started this racist rumor about Haitians in Ohio.
The media talks to city officials and determines that these claims are unfounded.
Republicans claim that the city’s response wasn’t an outright denial, and suggest that this lends some amount of legitimacy that it might be happening.
But that’s bullshit. Government PR (and pretty much every journalist) knows to never make statements of negative fact, because you cannot logically prove a negative. It’s the same reason newspapers use “allegedly” to describe accused criminals: because future events could hypothetically change the truthfulness of the statement.
And that’s all these claims will ever be: hypothetical. When all you have is a hypothesis, it is irresponsible to run away with it as if it were evidence of anything.
“Can’t be disproven” is the default state of most social issues. That alone is equivalent to having zero evidence, and so repeating the completely baseless claims that Haitians might be eating pets, while technically true in a hypothetical sense, could be said about literally any group you want, because there will exist the same amount of evidence of it being true (none).
One can only conclude that anyone peddling this narrative solely wishes to spread racist ideas about Haitians.
I’m pointing out why its hard to disprove the stuff trump says, not defending them. You can’t say dogs and cats aren’t being eaten because you can’t prove that, you can say that a reputable source said its not happening.
The debate is about the candidates, if they want to lie and make fools out of themselves they can. I do like that they were able to fact check the Springfield stuff because it sounds like the rumors are causing racism and violence. Hopefully the fact check helped a bit.
I’m willing to change my opinion though. What were some other things they could have fact checked but didnt?
