National Review
If you’re obsessing over how bad, how in the tank for Kamala Harris, the two ABC news moderators were, it’s because you don’t want to come to grips with the brute fact that Donald Trump was a disaster last night. He was unhinged, often incoherent, incapable of completing thoughts and sentences when he had points to make, and led into self-absorbed rabbit-holes — claims that he won the 2020 election, the size of his rallies, whether ‘migrants’ are eating stolen pets — that diverted him from opportunity after opportunity to expose Harris as a radical leftist now pretending to be a pragmatic centrist who suddenly loves her some guns.”
“Trump had one job: stay on message about Harris’s dizzying renunciations of her positions — so inexplicable that Harris has dribbled them out through nameless campaign sources rather than addressed them in her own voice…”
“Trump couldn’t do it. And yes, that’s largely because he is an undisciplined solipsist so effortlessly drawn into railing about rally attendance when the subject at hand is Harris’s indefensible border record — and if you think last night’s target audience cares whether the interlocutor steering Trump off course was Harris or the moderators, then you’re missing the point.”
“But there’s more to it than that.
Trump also couldn’t stick to deconstructing Harris’s ‘values’ bunk
because his own values are always negotiable.”
The media are always biased against the Republican, as Trump knew when he agreed to an ABC-moderated debate. That wasn’t the main problem last night.
www.nationalreview.com
WSJ
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) called the debate a “missed opportunity. He had a chance to lay it all out.”
Of Harris, he said: “I think she handled herself well, she had a good disposition. Her biggest failure was to convince people things are going to change if she’s president. It was all happy talk.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R., N.D.) said Trump would have been well served to bring up more details on mortgage rates, inflation data and border crossings during his term compared with the Biden administration.
“I think that was unfortunate last night because I think the details of his broader message are really important,” Cramer said. “He treated it like a mini-rally in a lot of respects. You’ve got to be talking to those swing voters in swing states. He could do that better with details.”
Cramer said Harris “helped herself,” adding, “I don’t think she knocked him off.”
Republicans accused the moderators of bias but privately grimaced as Trump again claimed that the 2020 election was rigged—something his advisers have long hoped he would move past—and played down the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
Fox News
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. 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.
The former president was clearly frustrated and became more strident and divisive as the nearly two-hour debate continued. And the vice president appeared to gain renewed confidence as she saw Trump faltering under relentless questioning from herself and moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis.
Although Harris clearly won the debate in my estimation, it isn’t at all clear that this debate, just 56 days before the election, will fundamentally impact the outcome on Nov. 5.
Vice President Kamala Harris walked onto the debate stage with a mission to articulate a clear vision for how the next four years would be better than under President Biden. And former President Trump had a big job, too.
www.foxnews.com
Just some of the right-wing commentary on the debacle that was Trump. It's about time the right accepted that Trump is not up to the job. He was fired once from the position, so it's unclear why the Republicans would think he would fare any better the second time around.