OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Since early voting has already begun, former President Donald Trump has declined to participate in a second debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, which CNN would have moderated again.
“I will gladly accept a second presidential debate on October 23,” Harris wrote on the X platform, adding: “I hope @realDonaldTrump will join me.”
“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement, according to Axios. “It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules, and ratings.”
But at a rally in North Carolina over the weekend and in some interviews late last week, Trump said that he had already engaged in two debates this cycle—one against Harris and the first against President Joe Biden on CNN in late June. And he said since early voting has already begun, he saw no point in doing a third debate.
Trump debated Harris on ABC, and moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis were roundly criticized for attempting to fact-check Trump several times during the event while not doing the same to Harris. But Muir and Davis weren’t always correct in their ‘corrections.
At one point during the debate, for example, Trump asserted that crime rates, particularly those involving illegal immigrants, have surged under the Biden-Harris administration. In response, Muir fired back, “As you know, the FBI reports that overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
But that’s false.
The Trump campaign highlighted data from the Justice Department’s “National Crime Victimization Survey,” which was released earlier this month but after the Sept. 10 debate. The survey revealed a 37% increase in violent crime from 2020 to 2023, with rape rising by 42%, robbery by 63%, and stranger violence by 61%, Just the News reported.
“If Kamala is given another four years and the chance to implement her weak-on-crime, defund the police, no cash bail policies, America will continue to turn into a crime-ridden hellhole for illegal immigrants, Venezuelan gangsters, and drug dealers,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
“Only President Trump will restore law and order, protect our police, secure the border, deport illegal immigrants, and prosecute criminals to the fullest extent of the law. If you want to be safe, VOTE TRUMP,” she noted further.
Following the ABC debate, Commission on Presidential Debates Co-Founder and Co-Chair Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., who also was Chair of the Republican National Committee, said it was “the worst performance that I’ve seen.”
During an interview on Newsmax TV’s “The Record,” Fahrenkopf Jr. said the moderators were “clearly were oversized, I think, on the way they treated” Trump and “bent backwards to help” Harris.
“I thought one of the things that really shocked me last night was the way the moderators handled it. We always explain to our moderators, and we’ve done 33 of those, Greta, starting back in 1988, that their job is to be facilitators,” Fahrenkopf Jr. said.
“They’re not to get involved themselves. It’s different than if you had someone on your show and you asked them a question and they answered it in a different way than they said a month before, you would correct them. But moderators are not supposed to do that. A debate is between the candidates, not a debate between the candidate and the moderators,” he added.
Fahrenkopf Jr. continued, “And these moderators, so far as I was concerned, it was the worst performance that I’ve seen. And I’ve — as I said, I’ve done 33 of these things over the years. I don’t know what their thoughts were, but they clearly were oversized, I think, on the way they treated the former President and the way they treated the present Vice President, I think they bent backwards to help her.”
