How Fox News, CNN reacted to wild Trump-Harris debate: 'He took the bait'

The first — and, after this you'd have to believe only — presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was a wild free-for-all, with moderators melting into the background and agreed-upon rules tossed out the window, even as a few of the more egregious lies were called out.

This probably makes it sound more sane than it really was. Simply put, Harris went after Trump in all of the places that bug him the most and he lost it. "He took all the bait and none of the opportunities," Dana Perino said on Fox News afterward.

Jake Tapper echoed that assessment and took it further.

Who won the Harris-Trump debate?

"He took the bait almost every time, if not every time," Tapper said. "He cited Fox (News) hosts as fact-checkers, he invoked Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán as a character witness.

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"It was like a 4chan post come to life."

You may rightly despair of the politics. But this was jaw-dropping TV.

It was from the start, when moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News introduced the candidates. They walked out to take their places behind their lecterns and Trump looked as if he had no interest in shaking hands. Harris strolled over to his side of the room and shook his hand, introducing herself (the two famously had never met, since Trump skipped out on the 2021 inauguration).

She controlled the debate from that point forward.

Muir and Davis, not so much. It was a mixed bag for them. Davis finally called out Trump for the oft-repeated lie that some Democrats support abortion after birth. Good on her; it's about time someone did. And after Trump repeated the ugly, racist lie that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio, Muir pushed back.

Trouble was, Trump pushed back on him, citing things he said he'd seen on TV. The much-debated and agreed-upon rules included muting one candidate's microphone while the other spoke. But many, many times Trump in particular would start talking after Harris answered a question (you could hear his voice) and they turned his microphone back on. In effect, this gave him rebuttal after rebuttal and slowed down the debate.

On the other hand, almost every time this happened, Trump dug himself deeper into a hole of lies and misstatements. As Tapper put it, "Before the debate, Trump supporters expressed hope that the former president would stay focused on issues such as inflation and immigration. That did appear to be a struggle for Donald Trump."

You don't say. He simply could not help himself. The entire debate was an exercise in an inability to control oneself. Harris put Trump on the defensive early on and he proved unable to respond with anything beyond what at this point can fairly be called Trumpisms. For instance, given the opportunity to set the record straight, he doubled down on his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged.

When he talked about President Joe Biden leaving the race, he said, "They threw him out of the campaign like a dog." The way things were going, the only surprise was that he didn't then claim Haitian immigrants ate him.

Trump's answers were 'untethered from reality'

Daniel Dale, CNN's fact-checker, called many of Trump's lies "untethered from reality."

“I think a lot of Americans say, well, all politicians lie," Dale said. "No major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency. A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true."

Neither candidate gave much of an effort to answer the questions that were asked, a common tactic; Harris turned most of her answers into campaign slogans. Trump turned his into lies. And at every turn, Harris got further and further under his skin.

"In the end, we all knew what we knew before, that ABC's goal tonight was to help Kamala Harris, and ABC did help Kamala Harris," Laura Ingraham said on Fox News. That's one way of putting it. Van Jones on CNN found another.

"She whupped him," Jone said. "She just whupped him. ... Kamala Harris did something great for every parent in America. She put the bully in his place."

A certain super gigantic galactic pop star seemed to agree. Moments after the debate, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, signing her Instagram post "Childless Cat Lady," a reference to a comment made by Trump's running mate, JD Vance.

Somehow it seemed a fitting end to a wild night. What else could happen? We may not want to know.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. X: @goodyk. Subscribe to the weekly movies newsletter.