JD Vance may have won the debate, but that doesn’t mean Republicans fired the referees.
Moderators fact-checked the Ohio senator about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the 2020 election. And within moments, Republicans criticized them on social media — especially since CBS said the network wouldn’t do that in the debate.
Blaming the moderators – before, during and after debates – has become a common refrain for Republicans in the age of Donald Trump. It’s a way to mask a weak performance on stage. But even with Vance’s strong performance Tuesday, Republicans couldn’t resist picking up a few extra points by blaming the media.
When Vance repeated his baseless claim that “illegal immigration” sparked controversy in Springfield, Ohio — a reference to Vance and other Republicans, including Trump, pushing the conspiracy theory that Haitians ate pets — moderator Margaret Brennan pushed back, saying that many Haitian migrants ” have legal status.”
Vance objected, arguing that “the rules were you wouldn’t fact-check me” — and then CBS, which hosted the debate, turned off its microphone.
Trump used his Truth Social network to blast CBS’ other moderator, Norah O’Donnell, for having “a bad night” when she said there was “no widespread fraud” in the 2020 election.
Other Republicans piled in. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a key Trump ally who was also on Trump’s vice presidential shortlist, complained about “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-on-1” match against Vance — a well-known line from Republicans after Trump’s poor debate performance last month.
The issue of fact-checking loomed large in the presidential season debates.
During the presidential debate on ABC last month, 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 showdown with Kamala Harris, his allies knew exactly who to blame.
That led CBS to say it planned to make fact-checking an opt-in, “second screen” experience for users, rather than pushing back on candidates’ statements live on stage. But the moderators violated this agreement and pushed back on a falsehood about Haitian migrants that Vance has been repeating for weeks. (Although he seems to have dropped the wildly false claims about eating pets.)
That has put fact checking in a strange place. Journalists feel obliged to suppress baseless claims, even if it 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 liberal.
That way, when Trump and his allies do that, they know exactly which playbook to use.
