According to former President Donald Trump, his testy, at times bizarre debate performance was anyone's fault but the man who performed. Trump phoned into Fox & Friends early Wednesday morning to first cast blame on ABC News, which hosted the debate, for a "rigged deal" that favored Vice President Kamala Harris. He then suggested that a potential second debate could be hosted by some of his favored anchors, though he said he might not participate anyway because he claims to have won the first round.
Poll respondents and a slew of political commentators disagree with Trump. A post-debate CNN poll of registered voters showed that most watchers thought Harris won by a decisive margin, 63% to 37%. The same pool of voters was evenly split on who they expected to win before the debate. But Trump continued to insist that he did great, telling Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade that he saw web polls that showed him winning by overwhelming margins and that because moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis sided with Harris, in his view, he was actually debating against three people "when you look at the fact that they were correcting everything, and not correcting with her."
"We knew it, when it was 100% good coverage for her over the last month or last year, I looked at it and only bad coverage of me, no matter what. The press is so dishonest in this country it’s amazing," he complained. He went on to argue that CNN, which did not fact-check Trump during his debate against President Joe Biden, was "honorable" and that ABC was "the most dishonest news organization, and that's saying a lot because they are all essentially really dishonest." Trump even suggested that ABC should no longer be allowed to broadcast after the debate, saying regulators "ought to take away their license for the way they did that."
When co-host Steve Doocy suggested another debate hosted by Fox News anchors Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, Trump interjected that he "wouldn't want to have Martha and Bret, I'd love to have somebody else other than Martha and Bret," saying that Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters or Laura Ingraham would be far better choices. Though all three Fox anchors are enthusiastic Trump supporters, the former president singled out Watters as giving a "fantastic" commentary on the debate. "Jesse really got it. Jesse said to Trump once that debate was done, that we won that debate by a lot," he said.
MacCallum and Baier are less subservient to the former president than their colleagues at the network, at times trying to correct him in interviews and at one point cutting off his phone connection mid-ramble so they could move to the next segment.
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But Trump appeared unenthusiastic about debating Harris again regardless of the circumstances, claiming he won the debate and doesn't want to indulge Harris with another swing at him.
"When two fighters fight and one loses, the first thing they do is ask for a debate or they ask for a fight," he said. "So in this case, a debate. So we had two people. They lost very badly. The first thing they did is ask for a debate, because that’s what when a fighter loses, he says, 'I want a rematch. I want a rematch.' They always the losing person, the fighter, the debater, they always ask for a rematch."
"So you don't know if you want to do another debate? It sounds like you're a no," Doocy asked.
"I'd be less inclined to, because we had a great night," Trump responded, doubling down on his claim that ABC was a "terrible network" that kept correcting him when "what I said was largely right or I hope it was right." He took particular issue with Muir and Davis declining to intervene when Harris tied him to Project 2025, a right-wing policy blueprint for his presidency developed by a team that included many current and former Trump aides.
At the end of the segment, Kilmeade stepped in to defend MacCallum and Baier, who he said Trump would find "extremely fair."
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