Tuning in to Fox News following Tuesday’s presidential debate, it was hard to describe the mood. Somber comes to mind—a little like you might find at a funeral, perhaps for a beloved cat consumed by a political boogeyman.
Donald Trump had just spent almost all of his 90-minute debate with Kamala Harris ranting into his microphone in a 180-degree contrast from his previous appearance, against Joe Biden. If he kept it together for the first little bit, Trump quickly fell into the traps Harris laid for him—about his crowd sizes, his reputation among military chiefs, his standing among world leaders—and the results were grim. To anyone watching who might have forgotten what the Trump years were like, it was an intense reminder.
When the ABC moderators finally wrapped things up and the lights came up on the Fox News panel, the anchors seemed just as rattled as viewers at home. You instantly knew that things were bleak when host Jesse Watters tried to insist that there had been no winners. “I don’t think the American people are watching and thinking any of these people won,” Watters stammered out. He then conceded, “This was rough. This was pretty intense at times.”
Brit Hume, the network’s chief political analyst, was starker. “Make no mistake about it: Trump had a bad night,” Hume told Fox viewers. “This was pretty much her night.” Sounding exasperated, Hume complained that Trump had been repeatedly baited by Harris, leading Trump to relitigate “so many of the old grievances that we had long thought Trump had learned were not winners politically.” Harris, meanwhile, was composed and prepared, Hume said: “She kept her cool.”
“You’re saying she had a good night?” host Bret Baier asked him.
“I’m saying she certainly did,” Hume said sternly.
On MSNBC, the difference could not have been more pronounced. Chris Hayes seemed unable to sit still from excitement. Lawrence O’Donnell was giddily proclaiming that Harris had turned in the best performance ever in a presidential debate. Rachel Maddow gleefully read out the breaking news of Taylor Swift’s endorsement of the Harris ticket live on air to Gov. Tim Walz as if it were a message from God.
But on Fox News, the strategy delivered after the initial shock passed seemed to be to attack the real villains: those pesky ABC journalists who had asked follow-up questions and fact-checked during the debate, such as when they told the American people there was, in fact, no evidence for Trump’s frankly racist claims that the good pets of Springfield, Ohio, were being gobbled up by Haitian migrants.
Soon, a string of Fox News friendly faces was called upon. Looking beaten down, host Sean Hannity insisted that the “biggest loser in the debate” was ABC, bashing the network’s journalists David Muir and Linsey Davis as “far-left moderators.” Speaking with the air of someone just grateful to be invited on television, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. complained about “the evident bias of the moderators who were fact-checking constantly trivialities by President Trump.” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida called the moderators “an embarrassment to journalism.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told viewers he much preferred the moderating style of CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash because “they asked questions” and “they got out of the way.”*
Eventually, Trump himself entered the debate spin room—a rare move for him—and began an impromptu press conference of sorts, prompting Hannity to shush Kennedy so the viewers could listen in live. But without a mic clearly in front of Trump, the audience at home had to strain to hear him, creating an even more shambolic appearance. Instead of the former president, the Fox mics picked up the sounds of others in the room full of journalists and media figures: “Why wouldn’t you look at her?” “Why not let your performance speak for itself?” Some just audibly snickered at the scene.
When Trump did eventually find his way over to Hannity’s set for the TV equivalent of a postgame massage, he complained it had been “three against one” but still insisted it had been his “best debate ever.” Visibly sweating and with his hair disheveled, however, he hardly sounded victorious.
And it was the reaction of the Fox hosts that was the most revealing about how the night had gone for Trump. Watters even demonstrated one or two flashes of honesty for his audience; in between defenses, he groaned that Trump “had some moments where you were like, Oh my God! Where is he going with this?” Indeed, for those Fox viewers wondering where Trump had led them on Tuesday night, there was one grim answer: “This race just got tighter,” Watters said.
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Correction, Sept. 11, 2024: This article originally misspelled the last name of journalist Dana Bash.