JD Vance may have won the debate — but that doesn’t mean Republicans laid off working the refs.
Moderators fact-checked the Ohio senator on Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the 2020 election. And then, within moments, Republicans criticized them on social media — particularly because CBS said going into the debate the network wouldn’t be doing so.
Blaming the moderators — before, during and after debates — has become a familiar refrain for Republicans in the era of Donald Trump. It’s a way to mask a weak showing on stage. But even with Vance’s strong performance on Tuesday, Republicans couldn’t seem to resist racking up a few extra points by blaming the media.
When Vance reprised his unfounded claim that “illegal immigration” caused controversy in Springfield, Ohio — a reference to Vance and other Republicans, including Trump, pushing the conspiracy theory that Haitians were eating pets — moderator Margaret Brennan pushed back and said that many Haitian migrants “have legal status.”
Vance objected, arguing that “the rules were that you were not going to fact check me” — and then CBS, which hosted the debate, cut his mic.
Trump piled on using his Truth Social network to call out CBS’s other moderator, Norah O’Donnell, for having “a bad night” when she said that there was “no widespread fraud” in the 2020 election.
Other Republicans piled on. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a key Trump ally who was also on Trump’s vice presidential shortlist, complained of “gratuitous editorial statements” in his own social media post. And Fox News’ Brit Hume went so far as to say it felt like it was a “3-to-1” contest against Vance — a familiar line from Republicans after Trump’s poor debate performance last month.
The issue of fact-checking has loomed over the debates during the presidential season.
During last month’s presidential debate on ABC, Trump laid the groundwork for calling the contest unfair. So when moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir fact-checked him in real time during his faceoff with Kamala Harris — his allies knew exactly who to blame.
That led to CBS saying that it intended to make fact-checking an opt-in, “second screen” experience for users rather than pushing back on candidate statements live on stage. But the moderators violated this agreement, pushing back on a falsehood about Haitian migrants that Vance has been repeating for weeks. (Though he appears to have dropped the wildly false claims about them eating pets.)
That has left fact-checking in something of a strange place. Journalists feel obligated to tamp down on unfounded claims, even as that turns the Republican base against the media at large. Conservatives see fact-checking as a weapon against Trump and use it as a way to criticize the media as being liberal.
That way, when they do it, Trump and his allies know exactly which playbook to run.
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