Joe Scarborough Complains About ABC Debate Moderators Allowing Trump To Break Their Rules

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough accused ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis on Thursday of allowing Republican nominee Donald Trump to break the rules during Tuesday night’s debate.

ABC established a rule to mute the microphones until it is the candidate’s turn to speak, though that did not stop both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris from blurting out remarks while their opponent spoke. Scarborough alleged on “Morning Joe” that Trump continued blurting out comments and receiving more time than he had been planned to have due to the moderators’ alleged failure to enforce the rules.

“And again, anybody who thinks that’s why [Trump] lost the debate, that he was corrected three times. But, you know, he got about 7 minutes more because the debate moderators allowed him to keep breaking the rules,” Scarborough said. “Every answer [Harris] had, they would try to move onto something else, he would blurt something out, something crazy for about a minute of 2 minutes, breaking the rules. And, I was actually sitting there going ‘are you going to enforce your rules or not?’ I mean, I don’t know if you remember but when [Trump] came on our show, he didn’t talk over us, or we hung up.”

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough accused ABC's debate moderators of allowing Trump to break the rules pic.twitter.com/bKuKVEG69R

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Trump alleged the moderators showed evident bias against him and even called for ABC to lose their license. They fact-checked the former president more times than Harris, though she made several false claims throughout the debate.

Muir and Davis did not correct Harris when falsely said that Trump called Neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people” in the aftermath of the 2017 riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. Snopes rated this claim false in June, noting that the former president said those groups of people should be “condemned totally.”

Harris further said made the false claims that Trump wants to ban in vitro fertilization (IVF) and impose a national abortion ban. The moderators issued a fact-check to the former president when he said some Democratic states allow for late-term abortions and for babies to be killed in the case that they survive a botched abortion attempt.

Davis, who fact-checked Trump on abortion, ignored that Harris’ running mate Tim Walz signed an ominous bill in 2023 that allowed for physicians to refuse life-saving medical care for infants born alive in a botched abortion. Twenty-four abortion procedures between 2015 and 2022 led to live births, in which seven babies were provided with “comfort care” to ensure their deaths were more comfortable, according to the National Catholic Register.

Muir and David also fact-checked Trump when he asserted that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Republished with permission from The Daily Caller News Foundation.