The former president played media critic during a Wednesday morning interview on “Fox & Friends.”
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Donald J. Trump during his first presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
By Wednesday morning, former President Donald J. Trump had settled on a clear message about his defensive and scowling performance in the ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris:
I’m not the loser. ABC is the loser.
“I thought it was terrible from the standpoint of ABC,” Mr. Trump said in a live interview on “Fox & Friends,” during which he assailed the network’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for what he deemed a biased approach. “They are the most dishonest, in my opinion, the most dishonest news organization.”
Mr. Trump said that ABC “lost a lot of credibility,” “took a big hit” and “should be embarrassed” because Mr. Muir and Ms. Davis fact-checked several of his answers, while, in his view, giving Ms. Harris a pass. He mused that the network ought to lose its broadcasting license.
Most strikingly of all, perhaps, Mr. Trump yearned for happier days — with CNN.
“CNN was much more honorable,” he said, a surprising remark from a man who spent years painting that news organization as a poster child for media bias. “The debate we had with Biden was a much more honorable one,” referring to the debate in June that was calamitous for Mr. Biden.
For the “Fox & Friends” team, the moment seemed ripe to secure a commitment from Mr. Trump to participate in a debate on their own network, a goal that Fox News has pursued for months. The anchor Steve Doocy raised the notion of a Fox debate moderated by the network’s lead political anchors, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.
But it turned out Mr. Trump wasn’t thrilled about that idea, either.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to have Martha and Bret; I would love to have somebody else other than Martha and Bret,” Mr. Trump said, before ticking off his preferred alternatives, including the Fox pundits Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters. “Let’s give other people a shot,” he said.
It became apparent that Mr. Trump had taken time overnight to closely review Fox News’s post-debate coverage. “I didn’t think Martha and Bret were good last night,” he said. “I thought Jesse was fantastic.” He said that he found Harold Ford Jr., another Fox News analyst, “just as dishonest as ABC.”
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Source: nytimes.com
