After a presidential debate in which Vice President Kamala Harris baited former President Trump and put him on the defensive, Trump insisted Wednesday morning he did a “great job,” slammed the debate as “a rigged deal” and called for ABC to be shut down.
The GOP nominee, who was widely criticized even by Republicans for his weak performance in his first face-to-face meeting with Harris, accused ABC’s debate moderators of bias during an early-morning appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”
“It was three on one,” Trump said, accusing the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, of heavily fact-checking his statements but not doing the same for Harris. “I thought I did a great job.”
Fox’s chief political analyst disagreed.
“Make no mistake about it: Trump had a bad night,” Brit Hume told viewers moments after the debate wrapped up. “This was pretty much her night.”
Soon, a stream of Fox News commentators were brought on to complain about ABC’s hosting. Fox News’ Sean Hannity echoed Trump’s complaint, slamming the “far-left moderators.” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called them “an embarrassment to journalism.”
But many other conservative pundits dismissed that line of argument.
Erick Erickson, the conservative American radio talk show host and blogger, wrote on Substack that the moderators were “100% biased,” but Trump ultimately delivered a poor performance.
“The Harris campaign has said for a week that it was going to try to get under Trump’s skin by poking fun at his rallies,” Erickson wrote on X Wednesday mornings. “It worked. Changed Trump’s demeanor for the rest of the debate. He fell for it.”
“Donald Trump was a disaster last night,” Andrew McCarthy wrote in a National Review article headlined ‘’Trump’s Trainwreck.” “He was unhinged, often incoherent, incapable of completing thoughts and sentences when he had points to make, and led into self-absorbed rabbit-holes.”
“Look, you can complain about the refs,” John Podhoretz, editor of conservative Commentary magazine, wrote on X. “But if the pass is incomplete, the play is dead.”
During the debate, Harris repeatedly riled Trump and distracted him from making his case to undecided voters by poking at issues such as the size of crowds at his rallies and what she said is his lack of standing among military generals and world leaders.
Moderators corrected Trump when he made false claims that Democrats including her running mate Tim Walz, support “execution” of babies “after birth.” They also pushed back on his claim that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, are eating residents’ cats and dogs, noting that the city manager said there were no credible reports of pets being harmed.
On Wednesday morning, Trump criticized moderators for not correcting Harris when she linked him with Project 2025, a lengthy plan for a second Trump administration put out by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. He has disavowed the plan, though it was drawn up by many of his former staffers.
Trump also said Harris misled viewers when she presented a comment he made predicting an economic “bloodbath” if his tariffs on foreign-made cars weren’t enacted as him threatening an uprising if he lost the election.
Asked why he believed moderators hadn’t corrected Harris, Trump answered: “Because they’re dishonest.”
“I think ABC took a big hit last night,” he continued. “To be honest, they’re a news organization — they have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.”
Shortly after the debate, the Harris campaign said the vice president was ready for a rematch in October.
In a statement, Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said that Harris commanded the stage and Trump was “totally incoherent.”
“Under the bright lights, the American people got to see the choice they will face this fall at the ballot box: between moving forward with Kamala Harris, or going backwards with Trump,” O’Malley Dillon said. “That’s what they saw tonight and what they should see at a second debate in October. Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?”
Trump said Wednesday he was not sure.
“When two fighters fight and one loses, the first thing they do is ask for a debate or they ask for a fight,” he told “Fox & Friends.” “The losing person, the fighter, the debater, they always ask for a rematch. … I am not inclined to do it because I won the debate by a lot. But I think we let it settle in and let’s see what happens.”
Fox News announced Tuesday night that the network had sent letters to the Harris and Trump campaigns offering to host an October debate “while early in-person voting gets underway in multiple battleground states.” It suggested three possible dates and locations: Oct. 9 in Arizona, Oct. 15 in Georgia and Oct. 16 in North Carolina.
Minutes after the debate ended, Harris won a powerful endorsement: Pop megastar Taylor Swift, identifying herself as a “childless cat lady,” announced on Instagram she plans to vote for Harris.
Swift, who has 283 million followers on Instagram, praised Harris as a “steady-handed, gifted leader” who “fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”
Trump said he was unfazed. “I was not a Taylor Swift fan,” Trump said. “It was just a question of time. She couldn’t possibly endorse Biden. … But she’s a very liberal person. She seems to always endorse a Democrat.”
For all the Democratic enthusiasm over Harris’ performance, there were signs that the debate did not mark a sea change in American voters’ thinking.
Flash polling conducted by CNN found that about 6 in 10 debate watchers said Harris outperformed Trump and 4 in 10 said Trump did a better job. About 96% of debate watchers polled — who did not reflect the full spectrum of views of the American voting public — said it didn’t change their minds about whom to vote for.
In an opinion piece for Fox, Douglas Schoen, a political consultant and former advisor to President Clinton and the presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg, argued Harris was the clear winner of the debate but it would be a “profound mistake” to count Trump out.
“To be sure, Harris had better answers on abortion, health care, climate change and leadership for the future. That much is clear,” Schoen wrote. “But what is also clear is that what Trump said in his closing statement remains the case.”
“Voters remain angry about the direction the country is headed,” he continued, “about the performance of both President Biden and Harris, as well as which candidate they trust more on the top two or three issues facing the country: the economy, immigration and law and order.”
Harris had yet to win over some key constituencies.
Sunrise, the youth movement to stop climate change, critiqued Harris as missing “a critical opportunity to lay out a stark contrast with Trump and show young voters that she will stand up to Big Oil and stop the climate crisis.”
“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” Sunrise communications director Stevie O’Hanlon said in a statement.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council said “Harris doubled down on the Biden administration’s policy of shipping weapons to a regime killing Palestinian families every day.”
It also criticized both candidates for failing to mention the name of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old Turkish American citizen who was killed last week by Israel Defense Forces during a protest in the occupied West Bank.
On Wednesday morning, Harris put out a statement on Eygi.
“The killing of Aysenur Eygi is a horrific tragedy that never should have happened,” Harris wrote. “The shooting that led to her death is unacceptable and raises legitimate questions about the conduct of IDF personnel in the West Bank. Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”
