Did ABC News place the final nail in the coffin for traditional debates?

The Tuesday evening presidential debate saw former President Donald Trump trade barbs not just with Vice President Kamala Harris, but with moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, presenting a lop-sided spectacle that has some questioning the utility of further debates at all.

Between selective, and sometimes inaccurate, fact-checks that only seemed to target Trump, moderator insertions of personal opinions, and the nature of the questions themselves, the debate saw Trump on defense most of the night. Though frustrated with the moderators, he nonetheless expressed satisfaction with his own performance.

"I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!" he posted on Truth Social, appearing to reference Muir and Davis. Trump’s attitude was decidedly more critical the following day, when he told Fox News that ABC News ought to lose its license for its handling of the debate.

“I think ABC took a big hit last night. I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization,” he said. “They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.”

Tuesday night’s spectacle marked only the second time in recent memory that a news outlet organized and planned a presidential debate entirely without the oversight of the non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). The first such instance was the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden. The campaigns arranged for that debate independent of the CPD amid long standing frustrations from Trump with the panel.

Both debates followed similar formats, including no live audience and the muting of candidate microphones when their opponent was speaking. Ahead of the CNN debate in June, CPD co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf expressed skepticism over some of the format changes, including the lack of an audience.

“They’re saying there shouldn’t be an audience because people clap and cheer and scream, but that’s not true. That happens at primary debates, not presidential debates. That’s a phony thing the Biden people came up with,” he said at the time.

Pollster Rich Baris criticized Harris, saying she didn't properly explain to voters why she wanted to be president. 

"In this business you have to justify why you want to be president [and] why you're the person for this moment right now," Baris said on the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. "What are you going to do to make my life better? Why are you unique to this time? And she didn't do any of that."

The abandonment of the CPD and its oversight, however, was not necessarily the decisive factor in the unraveling of the traditional presidential debates. Indeed, Tuesday evening’s event on ABC News stood in stark contrast to the CNN debate, an event that even saw Trump compliment moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash on their handling of that contest. Muir and Davis, by contrast, drew scrutiny from both sides of the aisle for pressing their thumbs on the scale in favor of Harris.

Conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly presented a caricature of the debate format in which the moderators would present questions as follows:

“Mr. Trump, you said something incredibly controversial and terrible. Let me remind you of what it was. Do you have any regrets or thoughts on how terrible you were? Trump answers. Vice President Harris, how bad is Trump? And then she answers.”

“It happened over and over again. That was the format,” Kelly said. “Mr. Trump, you’re a piece of shit. Kamala Harris, isn’t he a shit? Thank you.”

On the left, even those who pronounced a Harris victory acknowledged that the win came with the moderators serving as a handicap.

“It’s pretty clear to me that on Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris won what may be the only debate between herself and former President Trump,” wrote Doug Schoen, a former advisor to left-leaning candidates such as President Bill Clinton and Mike Bloomberg. “The vice president had some help, too. She was aided and abetted by two ABC News moderators who seemingly felt the need to fact-check virtually everything the former president said.”

He further asserted that Harris gained confidence as she saw “Trump faltering under relentless questioning from herself and moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis.”

“The debate was hardly fair,” he concluded. “And absent a debate on Fox News, there’s little reason to believe he’ll get a fair shake from any other network.” 

Among the most widely-panned actions of the moderators were their fact-checks, almost all of which were directed at Trump. Muir and Davis consistently allowed Harris to falsely link Trump to Project 2025, a presidential transition project proposal from the Heritage Foundation that he has repeatedly disavowed. She further claimed that Trump would support a national abortion ban and repeated the debunked “very fine people” hoax in reference to Trump’s 2019 remarks on a demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. None of those remarks prompted any pushback at all from the moderators.

By contrast, Muir and Davis repeatedly "fact-checked" Trump, sometimes using subjective metrics, personal opinions, or even inaccurate information. Among the most notable was Davis’s attempt to claim that "[t]here is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born." Her remark came in response to Trump’s discussion of Democratic abortion policy. He specifically pointed to Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., saying he "says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth -- it's execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born is okay, and that's not okay with me."

But Davis’s “fact-check” was not entirely accurate and ignored that in Minnesota alone, at least eight babies since 2019 have survived botched abortions and been permitted to die after the procedure.

ABC News has not responded to Just the News' request for comment about the abortion fact-check.

One interjection from Muir, moreover, was largely his personal opinion. The moderator had pressed Trump to account for comments about the 2020 election in which he said he “lost by a whisker”, “didn’t quite make it”, “came up a little bit short.” Trump responded that he had made those remarks “sarcastically” and reiterated his claims that election fraud affected the outcome of the election.

“I did watch all of these pieces of video. I didn't detect the sarcasm. Lost by a whisker. We didn't quite make it,” Muir retorted. He subsequently pushed back on Trump’s claims, pointing to 60 cases involving the election fraud claims, though Trump highlighted that none of the cases had been decided on the merits and that the courts had rejected them due to lack of standing.

Other interjections from Muir saw him contest Trump’s claims of rising crime, citing FBI statistics, while he also pushed back on publicly made claims that Haitian illegal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had been abducting and eating local pets and wildlife. Muir insisted that the only truth of the matter was to be found in a statement from the city manager and blithely disregarded claims made by citizens of Springfield.

In the wake of the performance, few parties appear optimistic about the prospect of a second debate. Trump himself has expressed satisfaction with his performance and cast doubt on the need for him to return to the debate stage.

"In the World of Boxing or UFC, when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, 'I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!'" he posted on Wednesday. "Well, it’s no different with a Debate. She was beaten badly last night. Every Poll has us WINNING, in one case, 92-8, so why would I do a Rematch?"

Schoen offered a similar assessment, albeit through the lens of viewing Harris as the victor.

“For Harris, the calculus is simple: she will claim victory, her supporters will be emboldened, money will continue to flow into her coffers and there will be absolutely no reason for her to re-engage in any shape, matter or form with the former president,” he wrote. 

Schoen further opined that Trump’s campaign team was likely to conclude it would be better off sending Trump to campaign directly into the field with voters rather than to put him in another confrontation with Harris, especially absent assurances of a level playing field.

Megyn Kelly, meanwhile, called it a “mistake to trust ABC News with this debate.”

“The Republicans must learn from this mistake, the same way the Democrats never, never agree to do anything with moderators they don’t entirely trust,” she said Tuesday evening. “This should be the last time the Republicans ever do this, because those two moderators tried to sink Donald Trump tonight.”